Way of the Heart

Charles Wright is a French writer, journalist, and a former Jesuit novice. His earlier book, Le Chemin des Estives, narrates his journey through the Massif Central, in south-central France. That book won the fourth annual Prix de la liberté intérieure in 2021.Brian Kerns, OCSO, is a monk at the Abbey of the Genesee in upper New York state. He spent five years at Genesee’s foundation of Novo Mundo in Parana, Brazil. For many years he worked in the libraries of Genesee and Novo Mundo. He has translated two previous works with Cistercian Publications: Dom Gabriel Sortais, an Amazing Abbot in Turbulent Times (2006), and the six volumes of Gregory the Great’s Moral Reflections on the Book of Job (2014–2017).

"This eminently readable portrait presents Dom André Louf (1929—2010), a loving spiritual director, distinguished scholar, author, and translator, head of Collectanea Cisterciensia, and for thirty-five years the abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Mont des Cats. The winds of change were blowing through the Church during this period and Louf was a leader in the approach to the Eastern Orthodox and in the modernization of the Trappist order following Vatican II. Yet all his life Dom André longed for a life of solitude and prayer, and he spent the last twelve years his life in a tiny hermitage attached to the monastery of Sainte-Lioba in Simiane. Thanks to the author’s abundant use of extracts from Louf’s personal journal, the reader walks this path with Dom André in a small way, to his own eternal benefit."Jean Truax, Independent scholar

• ContentsTranslator’s Preface   xiIntroduction   xiiiChapter 1  Infancy of a Contemplative   1Chapter 2  “All Is done, and All Begins”   21Chapter 3  The Roman Escape   37Chapter 4  Discovering the Internal Man   47Chapter 5  The Grace of Collectanea   57Chapter 6  A Solitary Soul   67Chapter 7  Habemus Abbatem   85Chapter 8  A Flemish Staretz   99Chapter 9  The Exegete of Aggiornamento   107Chapter 10  The Book of Experience   125Chapter 11  Spiritual Accompaniment   143Chapter 12  A Carthusian Heart   169Chapter 13  A Hesychast Abbot   187Chapter 14  Toward the One Undivided Church   205Chapter 15  Oracle of the Trappist Order   225 Chapter 16  Renunciation   247Chapter 17  The Hermit of Saint-Lioba   261Epilogue   285Sources   295General Bibliography   309Notes of Gratitude   315