Beyond The Walls: Monastic Wisdom For Everyday Life - Hardcover

Wilkes, Paul

3.72

18 ratings by Goodreads

9780385494359: Beyond The Walls: Monastic Wisdom For Everyday Life

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385494351 ISBN 13: 9780385494359

Publisher: Doubleday Religion, 1999

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With earnest resolve and the vague hope of a deeper spiritual life, Paul Wilkes began his monthly visits to a Trappist monastery. His plan was to spend time each month with the monks and take back into his hectic world of family and profession what he had garnered from the cloistered life. But Wilkes naively misjudged how difficult it would be to achieve his seemingly simple good intentions. Monasticism turned out to be far more complx and demanding that he had imagined, calling upon him to look deeply into himself and requiring a bravery he was not sure, at first, that he possessed. A year later, he had not only discovered the simple path of monastic spirituality, but had journeyed to the depths of his soul and realized that the influences on his daily life were truly immense. With the ever-increasing call for access to authentic spiritual traditions, Beyond The Walls breaks new ground. This is a book that points a way for "new monks" to live a rich, challenging life filled with grace and faith.

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Review:

Beyond the Walls: Monastic Wisdom for Everyday Life is, like Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk, a memoir of monastophilia. Paul Wilkes, a writer whose articles on spirituality have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines, has long been interested in the monastic way of life. When he reached middle age, however, he made a serious commitment to spend a portion of each month with the brothers of Mepkin Abbey, a Roman Catholic community in South Carolina. He left his wife and two teenage sons during his visits to the Abbey, in hopes of bringing the peace of cloistered life back to his home and work. "Monasticism is spirituality laid bare," Wilkes writes. "[I]t is the human yearning to open one's self to the divine spirit within"--a yearning that, he points out, insinuates itself into most aspects of everyday life. Wilkes's attempts to practice poverty, chastity, detachment, and other monastic virtues in his secular life are related with humor and thoughtfulness. Beyond the Walls is one to put on your bookshelf right next to Norris's explorations of the same territory. --Michael Joseph Gross

About the Author:

Paul Wilke's writing on religious belief and spirituality has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines both in the United States and abroad. He wrote and directed the acclaimed PBS documentary on Thomas Merton, "Merton: A Film Biography," and is the author of many books, most recently The Good Enough Catholic. He lives with his wife and family in Wilmington, North Carolina.

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