Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life [Hardcover]

Dennis Patrick Slattery (Author), Thomas Moore (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 5, 2004

In this powerful book, travel along with Dennis Patrick Slattery as he sets off on a three-month pilgrimage, during which he struggles with his identity; his role as a father and husband, teacher and believer; as well as the life and death of his father. Throughout his stays at twelve monasteries and retreat centers, Slattery seeks the refuge of the monastic life where silence and solitude open an extraordinary window on the human soul. Against the backdrop of Slattery’s personal story, Grace in the Desert offers vivid descriptions of monastic life and practice at Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and Buddhist monasteries and retreat centers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1998, Slattery, a faculty member of Pacifica Graduate Institute, turned a professional sabbatical into a personal pilgrimage, traveling to 11 monasteries and retreat houses throughout the western United States. He dedicates one chapter to each of his destinations, which are diverse in tradition and style and include a Russian Orthodox monastery, an urban prayer center run by Benedictine sisters and a Zen center. Slattery describes the flavor of each retreat center, but spends the bulk of each chapter recounting the spiritual musings prompted by each place he visited. At times, his account is pointed and compelling, as when he shares his unfolding comprehension that his own life is re-manifesting the patterns, if not the specifics, of his alcoholic father's excessive behavior, or when he observes this personal transformation after weeks of pilgrimage: "I no longer believed in God.... Instead, I felt his presence in every corner of my life." At other times, however, his ruminations tend toward the generalized and hypothetical. Moreover, Slattery's style undermines his effectiveness: he has a fondness for stretching metaphors paper-thin, and his prose is frequently self-conscious, even affected, as when he describes monks arriving in chapel as "silent, sacred specters in white robes that whooshed." Slattery's sensitivity to spiritual matters is clear, but ultimately the book leaves the reader wanting a more satisfying, focused account of what was obviously a powerful pilgrimage journey.
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From Booklist

In his midfifties, Slattery was in the throes of a serious midlife crisis. Yet if Sunday sermons at the local Catholic church left him cold, the works of Thomas Merton, John of the Cross, and Meister Eckhart, Flannery O'Connor's darkly grotesque fiction, and the uncertain world of Dostoyevsky still touched him. Then he realized he had to go to and stay at various monasteries and spiritual retreat centers, away from the distractions of everyday life. A Carmelite House of Prayer, a Zen retreat center, and a Russian monastery in California; a Trappist abbey and a Franciscan renewal center in Oregon; a Trappist monastery in Utah; a hermitage in Colorado; a Dominican retreat house in New Mexico--each was different, and each bestowed its own individual lessons and rewards. Slattery confronted doubt, fear, and loneliness but gained better understanding of his deceased, alcoholic father and his troubled relations with his wife and children. And through the wounds of Christ he found, as he movingly recounts, a new way of seeing and understanding the suffering of others. June Sawyers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1 edition (April 5, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0787971049
• ISBN-13: 978-0787971045
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,416,701 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In the Wake of Pilgrimage, November 18, 2004

By 

Mary Watkins (Santa Barbara, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life (Hardcover)

As a mother and a psychologist my pilgrimages are not accomplished on extended retreats or treks, but in the folds and unexpected flows of a busy day. Like many, I turn to spiritual literature of many ilk to aid me in interrupting my preoccupations and orienting me to meditation and prayer. What joy this summer when I found myself riding the wake of Dennis Slattery's Grace in the Desert:Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life, a lyrical story of his months spent at different spiritual retreat places. Far from any monastery myself, his intimate prose and sustained narrative reflections allowed me to slow down. They oriented me to the soulful pilgrimage that is available to all of us at any moment if we are ready to forego numbing routine, habitual rapidity, empty diversion, and consumeristic addictions. By placing his feet on the path of the pilgrim and his pen to paper, Slattery shares his gift of pilgrimage: a solo journey becomes food for the community. Leading the way, he invites us in his wake to the realms of spirit and soul for which we thirst.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grace in the Desert, November 29, 2004

By 

Edith Barrett (Santa Barbara, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life (Hardcover)

Before I go to sleep at night I read Grace in the Desert. I travel to the monasteries between the lines on the pages. Through the palpable silence, I feel the sacred space creep into my own bones. I too, am healed by the journey.

I am deeply grateful to Dennis Slattery for his profound psychological insights, for his nomadic spirit, and for the poet who so eloquently lives in his soul.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Hope of Monasticism, January 30, 2006

By 

Neil A. Balkcom (Champaign, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life (Hardcover)

I read this book about a pilgrimage while I was on one of my own. I went to Spain and walked a sizeable part of the Via de la Plata - a route of the Camino de Santiago. I had previously walked another route nine months before.

This book chronicles a journey, via a beat up truck, to different retreat centers, monasteries and convents by the author. His feelings and emotions are erudite, he wears them on his sleeve, and this is one of the first rules of memoir writing: be willing to bare all. And Slattery does this as he confronts his deceased father, his fears, his past and present.

At times he longs to give up and return to the comfortable minutia of everyday life, a test common to pilgrims. One can see as the pages turn the metamorphosis that he goes through. This is a book, above all, about contemplation, retrospection, determination and hope. He has been living his life partly dead, but through grace finds ressurection. He is not dogmatic, though he is a devout Catholic. He is not preachy, but humble. He is many times poetic, many times candid.

I would be surprised if, no matter your religion or spiritual views, you do not find yourself at the end of this book with almost as many bookmarks as there are pages.