From Grace to Grace

 I have just finished reading From Grace to Grace:  Memoirs of Jean Leclercq.    You can read a bit about the book here:  

When Jean Leclerq entered the Abbey of Clervaux at age 17 in 1928, he wanted only to be a monk. In the years that followed he found "grace upon grace" as his desire for God and love of learning found rich expression in the life of a warm, joyful priest and internationally renowned monastic scholar.

A summary of his life and work is here.

 Basically, the book came about, as he writes in his preface, because friends encouraged him to write it.  He resisted initially;  Henri de Lubac, one of his many friends, told him it was a duty, and added:  "Do it, before you lose your memory."     Still, even as the book went to print, he had qualms, not liking to talk about himself in print.  

This shows in his book, but in a rather charming way.   He was a world traveller, sent by his Abbey to Asia, Africa, North and South American, even Australia and the Philippines, to give talks and consultation about monasticism to various audiences.    He met many well known people and saw many different circumstances, but maintained a consistent geniality and tranquillity through everything.   He seemed to me an epitome of the Benedictine vows:  stability, conversion, and obedience; he went where he was sent, he seemed to have an internal cloister, so to speak, which kept him on an even keel through a bewildering diversity of travels, both before and after Vatican II.   He also seemed to have a kind of openness which expressed itself in friendships with many different people, notably Thomas Merton with whom he exchanged many letters.   He had a keen interest in "enculturation", a post-conciliar word which was developed to deal with evangelization in countries where cultures had developed without previous exposure to Christianity.   But his criteria was essentially monastic, Christocentric.  

His memoirs were called a "florilegium" by his Italian translator and that seems like a good description.   I read somewhere that they were put together from his notes on his journeys and that is how they read --- as if your great-uncle were showing you slides of his journeys, interspersed with humor and bits of insight, and references to people he had known and books he had read or sometimes written.

I read his memoirs right after I read Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain.    It has taken me six decades to get to Merton's classic work -- I think because it was so big and I had the impression it was some sort of mystical manual.   In fact, as everybody else probably already knows, it is an autobiography, and I read it because I knew Merton and Leclercq were friends.  

Merton's book is rather a page-turner -- at least it was to me.    He was far more introspective than Leclercq, and of course had quite a dramatic conversion, whereas Leclercq grew up Catholic, knew from a young age he wanted to enter the monastery, and in fact entered at age 17, and never looked back.    Merton seems very postmodern to me, though he was born before WW1 like Leclercq.    He is interested in personalities, in nature, in moods and turning points.   Leclercq's life seems like a mosaic with bits and pieces all integrated:   from grace, to grace, indeed.     Merton longed to live as a hermit, while Leclercq seemed to carry his hermitage with him, so wherever he went he was at peace and free to be involved in whatever came his way.     

Next I will read Survival or Prophecy, which is a collection of the letters exchanged between the two monks.   And I'm still rereading Love of Learning and the Desire for God which was what started me on this book trail in the first place.