Bernard Bonowitz
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Truly Seeking God
$24.95Add to cartTruly seeking God is the one requirement Saint Benedict establishes for the admission of a candidate to the monastery. Once inside, that is exactly what he or she will be doing. In the first part of the book, “From the Rising of the Sun to its Setting,” Bernard Bonowitz recounts the ways in which the monk actively seeks God in all the practices and places of the monastic life-in silence and liturgical prayer, work and leisure, solitude and community, spiritual direction and fraternal friendship, the encounter with nature and the encounter with the unsuspected recesses of his or her own heart. Grace is ever at work through the ongoing fidelity of a monk or nun to the monastic vocation. In the second half of the book, “The Making of a Monk,” Bonowitz describes the gradual transformation that grace effects, transforming the innocently self-centered novice into the young solemnly professed, content to carry the weight of responsibility within the community, and finally into the beautiful elder, joyfully focused on God and neighbor and filled with desire for eternal life.
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Saint Bernards Three Course Banquet
$24.95Add to cartSaint Bernard s famous work, The Steps of Humility and Pride (in Latin, De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae), is a short book consisting of a mere fifty-seven paragraphs. In it, the Abbot of Clairvaux unpacks the doctrine of the very crucial chapter 7 of Saint Benedict s sixth-century Rule for Monks, which explores the dynamic steps or degrees of both humility and pride. This chapter by Benedict could well be considered the spiritual basis of all Benedictine existence.
In Saint Bernard s Three-Course Banquet, Dom Bernard Bonowitz makes the teaching of both Bernard and Benedict accessible to modern readers in a set of conferences originally conceived for and delivered to a group of Cistercian juniors, that is, monks and nuns who had completed their novitiate but had not yet made their solemn vows. With Dom Bernard as a guide, many more readers can be sure of drinking at the purest sources of the monastic tradition, which at that depth becomes one with the Gospel itself.