Paperback: To this last sentence, 'Be my joy in the heart of the Church', the writer of these conferences for Carthusian monks adds a note: 'That is a definition of Carthusian life which is as good as any other, it seems to me.'
And from the heart of that life he speaks to the whole Church, in publishing these conferences on the great seasons of the Christian year.
'The Liturgy is a sea. We are plunged into it and transformed by it. Year after year the liturgical seasons come back like the tides over stones...always the same cycle, but shaping us slowly but surely, into living stones (1 Peter 2:5)'.
The author writes with warmth, with learning, with passion and with humour. The reader can enter into something of the accumulated wisdom of an Order whose members 'have carried out the same little series of exercises since the eleventh century'.
Each season has its special appeal for Carthusians - as the Conferences on Mary and on John the Baptist in the Advent and Christmas seasons show. The great Sunday Gospels of Lent - the Transfiguration, the Samaritan woman at the well, the raising of Lazarus - are expounded; the Passion of Christ is the subject of meditations that are profoundly and sometimes startlingly direct in their candour.
But perhaps the most remarkable part of this unusual book is the author's capacity to speak at length and to the point about the Resurrection and the coming of the Spirit. Here, where Christian teachers and preachers have so often been either hesitant or dogmatically remote, we have someone who clearly participates in the mysteries of which he speaks.
It is a priceless gift to us all.
From Advent To Pentecost (1999) offers an illuminating, even dazzling, insight into Carthusian ways that are little known, indeed traditionally hidden. Here are men who for all their silence need to be heard. From Advent To Pentecost is translated from the French by Carmel Brett, done with great love of Carthusian liturgy.
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