| Author Quoted | Jean Leclercq o.s.b. |
| Title Quoted | Chances de la spiritualite occidentale |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1966/11/18 |
| Imprint | Paris : Cerf. 1966 |
| Quotation | Yesterday your Chances de la Spiritualite Occidentale arrived and I want to thank you very much for it. Though I have seen most of the articles, in fact all of them, in one form or other, it will be a pleasure to go through them all together. But of course I must above all thank you for pages 28"”31, clearer to me in French than they were in the German version. Thanks for having the courage to defend someone that most people apparently don't know what to make of. That is an element of my solitude, but I do not grudge you bringing me this kind of welcome company. The desert is never absolute, or should not be! Seriously, it is a consolation to find oneself after all part of the Catholic Church and not excommunicated without appeal as Dom Calati and others would apparently want me to be. Many thanks for your charity and, I think, your objectivity too. It helps me to evaluate my own life and my own position in the Church. I am also very grateful to P. Von Balthasar for his generous introduction, or rather postface, to the little selection of my poems. The selection was good, the translations seem to me to be very well done, and I am happy with the whole book. With you and him behind me I can feel a little more confidenc"”not that I have yet made myself notable for a lack of it. Perhaps I have always had too much. |
| Journal | The School of Charity: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Renewal and Spiritual Direction.; Selected and edited by Brother Patrick Hart. / New York : Farrar Straus Giroux. 1990, p. 321 |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
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