Letters From The Desert (Anniversary Edition) by Carlo Carretto

Paperback: Why? Why is the All-Powerful silent? Why doesn't he kill Herod? But this is the point: it is necessary to live by faith. Flee into Egypt, become exiles and refugees, let cruelty and injustice triumph. And so it will be until the end of time. - Carlo Carretto

In December 1954, at the age of 44, after a prominent career as a schoolteacher and Catholic activist working at national level in his native Italy, Carlo Carretto was summoned by a voice that said: "Leave everything, come with me into the desert. I don't want your action any longer, I want your prayer, your love."

Carretto responded by leaving for the deserts of North Africa, where he joined the Little Brothers of Jesus (founded in the 1930s) and embraced the example of Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916). He spent the next ten years as a desert hermit. 

Among the fruits of Brother Carlo's response was Letters from the Desert (1964), the first and most popular of his many books. Its affirmative message has inspired countless readers in a dozen languages. Simply, it reminds us that in the evening of our lives, we will be judged by love.

Letters from the Desert was first translated and published in English in 1972. This new edition, thirty years after their original English publication, is testimony to the staying power of this profoundly powerful spiritual master who has known both national fame and religious obscurity.

About the author: Born and raised in northern Italy, as a youth, Carretto joined the lay movement Catholic Action.  For twenty years he worked to spread the religious and social justice message of the Gospels in and around Fascist Italy.

In 1954, he felt the desert call and set out for the Sahara.  In El Abiodh, a remote Algerian outpost, he entered the novitiate of the Little Brothers of Jesus, a community of desert contemplatives based on the spirituality of Saint Francis of Assisi that had been founded by de Foucauld in the 1930s. Monastic austerity and silent adoration were to be combined with a life of humble labor, friendship, and solidarity with one's immediate neighbours.

A decisive moment - a "cut" - occurred when Carretto burned the address book containing the contact information for thousands of his friends back in Italy. He stayed for ten years as a hermit: translating the Bible into Bedouin, sitting for hours before the Blessed Sacrament in prayer.

At last he left the Sahara, returned to his hometown, and went to visit his beloved mother, who, for more than thirty years, had been living an active life, crowded with family, social, and parish responsibilities. Perhaps the surest sign of Carretto's sanctity is this: he recognized that, for all his time in the desert, his mother was at least the contemplative that he was.

The letters he had sent back were published as Letters from the Desert, his first book, in 1964 in Italy. A bestseller, the book was translated and published in English in 1972. In it, he observed, "Jesus is the 'Holy One of God.' But the Holy One of God realized his sanctity not in extraordinary life, but one impregnated with ordinary things: work, family and social life, obscure human activities, simple things shared by all men. The perfection of God is cast in a material which men almost despise, which they don't consider worth searching for because of its simplicity, its lack of interest, because it is common to all men."

Soon after returning to Italy, Carretto was asked to oversee a group of hermitages the Little Brothers had established near Assisi.  He stayed for the rest of his life, welcoming the flocks of pilgrims who came to learn about prayer and reflection, and writing a dozen or so more books. It was there, in 1988, after a long illness, that he died at the age of 78.