“A Letter Is a Joy of Earth”: Selected Correspondence from Judith Valente and Brother Paul Quenon’s “How to Be”

I met Judith Valente last summer when we were invited to participate in the Contemplative Residency Program at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church and Retreat House in Inverness, California. I had been aware of her work for several years—as, I am sure, are many others who follow religious news or read in the contemplative Christian tradition. An award-winning author, print and broadcast journalist, poet, and essayist, Judith has been a former staff writer for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, and was for many years an on-air correspondent covering faith and values for Religion & Ethics Newsweekly on national PBS-TV.

Judith is a sought-after speaker and retreat leader on such subjects as living a more contemplative life, discovering inner wisdom through poetry, and finding meaning in one’s work. She is a lay associate of the Benedictine monastery Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas, which is the subject of her 2013 memoir, Atchison Blue: A Search for Silence, a Spiritual Home and a Living Faith, chosen by Religion Newswriters Association as one of the three best spirituality books of that year. In 2023 she began her tenure as the president of the International Thomas Merton Society.

Two recent books continue her exploration of monastic practice: How to Live: What the Rule of St. Benedict Teaches Us About Happiness, Meaning, and Community, appeared in 2018, and in 2021 she collaborated with Brother Paul Quenon, OSCO, on How to Be: A Monk and a Journalist Reflect on Living & Dying, Purpose & Prayer, Forgiveness & Friendship. This book takes the form of a sustained “conversation in letters” between Judith and Brother Paul as they dialogue on faith, mortality, prayer, silence, and the balance of life and work. Brother Paul entered the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in 1958 and was a novice under Thomas Merton. His depth of monastic experience coupled with his creative calling as a poet, photographer, and author of such books as In Praise of the Useless Life lend a sense of close, quiet, insightful observance to his correspondence.

We are pleased to share a series of excerpts from How to Be below. In a time when so much of our communication is fractured and frenzied, the intentional effort of letter-writing can be a form of spiritual practice. As Judith says in her introduction: “Letters are the remnants we leave to mark important episodes in our lives. We hold on to letters like heirlooms. We introduce ourselves in letters, confide our hopes, confess our fears, offer our thanks, ask for forgiveness and say goodbye in letters. Letters are like mini private diaries that we share.”

Our special thanks to Judith Valente for her assistance in preparing this feature and for providing additional photos—Ed.

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How to Be opens with an exchange on the beauty and joy of writing letters. Here are some of Brother Paul’s reflections.

Dear Judith,

I am glad we agreed on a written correspondence as a suitable means of exchanging ideas. When Emily Dickinson wrote “a Letter is a joy of Earth,” I think she was talking mostly of the joy of receiving a letter. But there is joy also in bringing pleasure to another with the surprise visit of a letter.

I write and receive many emails, and they can be a delight, but they are mainly messages. When I first entered the monastery at the age of seventeen, I learned to write real letters—the kind you sit and mull over . . . You could only write two letters a year. And you could only receive letters four times a year: on Christmas, Easter, the Feast of the Assumption and All Saints Day . . . Because of the restrictions on our correspondence, any letter I received was cherished—even a boring one.

Given those circumstances, I took any letter I wrote pretty seriously, or tried to. At one point, I got permission to write more than the prescribed two letters because my siblings were scattered across several states. My brother Bob started calling my letters “The Epistles of St. Paul.” That’s when I slacked off on trying so hard to come off as pious or holy.

Yours on the journey,

Brother Paul

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Some of the sections in How to Be deal with a decision Judith was trying to make on whether to leave a position in daily journalism at an NPR station in Illinois to work full time on giving retreats and writing books. She worried about what her purpose in life would be she if left the work in journalism that had defined her career for so many years.

Dear Brother Paul,

One of the issues I’ve struggled with since leaving journalism is figuring out what my purpose is now. I don’t think I can be satisfied if the purpose of my life is simply to be. I like to take action, to be the heroine of whatever situation I’m in. You probably would agree that in the final analysis, your Trappist life has involved a purpose. I suspect you wouldn’t have persevered in the monastery for more than 60 years if it didn’t. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Suspended between being and doing,

Judith

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Dear Judith,

I draw a distinction between having a purpose and following a vocation. A vocation is beyond what you might call a purpose in life. I did not find a purpose. My purpose found me. I basically live with a sense of a call—and beyond that, a sense of someone calling. The purpose I serve is not so much a purpose as a radical freedom in God . . .

Life’s purposes can be multiple, and change as time goes on. They vary as the will of God makes them . . . Life is the art of keeping a harmony in these purposes, maintaining a balance, a serenity that comprises a living symphony of prayer.

Yours in the symphony,

Brother Paul

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For anyone interested in contemporary monastic life, as well as the contemplative life, Brother Paul’s letters often contain insightful observations about living in a more reflective and intentional way in today’s fast-changing world. In this letter, he writes about how monastic life is both changeless and ever-changing, timeless yet ever new.

Dear Judith,

I have always loved living the monastic life. Part of that is doing what you are told. Once committed to that basic acceptance, I tend to like whatever I am doing, whether cleaning the johns, singing in the choir, or writing poetry . . . I once aspired to live like a certain monk in a monastery in Georgia who, when he reached the age of 105, was still working and coming to community prayers. Then I started wondering what an awful state the world might be in by the time I get that old! No need to expound on that!

Still, a basic issue is change. I hope I don’t get to be the kind of old man who lives in nostalgia for the past. At my age, I have a lot of past to mull over, but my focus is on the present. It is basic to my prayer life and essential to contemplation. My daily meditation practice orients me to focus on the now where God is present, whether I feel that presence or not. In any case, eternity is totally present to the now. It is an all-inclusive now. As Emily Dickinson says: “Forever is composed of nows.”

Stability of place is one of the three vows monks take . . . I am inclined to qualify this and say that monks should also take a vow of commitment to change—a vow of un-stability. Almost everything has changed on every level since I entered Gethsemani in 1958. We have gone from a partly agricultural endeavor to a mail-order business of fruitcake and fudge. If you live in a monastery and are unwilling to change, you will become dissatisfied, fixated, and isolated from the rest of the community . . . In this late afternoon of my life, I find myself in a changed state from what came before. I had been living a hidden life—unknown, unheralded and unsung, as my first abbot often described a monk’s life. Now I am published in this country and abroad, and a few people have actually read what I have written, somewhat to my dismay.

I resist getting too attached to anything, even my own monastery. That kind of attachment can be just as much an obstacle on the way to God as any attachment to the pleasures of the world . . . How would I describe the tone of my life in the monastery? It is one of being “homeless at home.”

Yours in the struggle,

Brother Paul

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Another theme that comes through in the letters is the struggle to find balance. Brother Paul tries to convince Judith, a chronic workaholic, to sit still and simply be. 

Dear Brother Paul,     

We live in a world drenched in mystery and wonder, as you have often reminded me. I feel it viscerally, yet easily forget. I fill my days with whirls of activity—some of it necessary, much of it not. Sometimes dusk arrives and I’ve engaged in so many distractions that I can’t remember exactly how I spent my time. My precious day disintegrates into a blur and I find myself flailing around, wasting time, unable to find a proper rhythm. A hundred tiny allures add up at the end of the day to essentially nothing. . . .

In her poem “Long Life,” Mary Oliver asks what it means that the earth is so beautiful, and what we should do about it. What is the gift we should bring to the world? What is the life that we should live? These are the questions I am asking myself as I enter this next chapter of my writing life, jettisoned from the secure way station of my long career in journalism into a new universe, feeling somewhat as though I’m walking in space without a tether.

Warmly (despite our current frigid temps),

Judith

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Dear Judith,

Indeed, a good way of getting over the feeling that you are wasting your time is to go out and waste more of it. Waste it intentionally. Take a walk in the neighborhood and see the trees; notice how people keep their yards. Smell the air. Get free of what seems urgent and necessary; get away from the feeling that the world will crumble without you . . .

Yesterday brought me a free gift: a long gentle rain. I perched on my broad, deep windowsill, propped up my feet, leaned on the lintel, and watched the rain drop freely. I could have ignored the rain but took it as a gift of the moment.

Last night, a uniform mother-of-pearl white illuminated the fields, the sky, and the gauzy atmosphere under a full moon hidden by clouds. To see a sight like this is rare. You must be there . . .

Like you, I too go through fallow periods in my writing and feel no anxiety about it, like the farm fields that need time in which nothing seems to happen. But below ground, the microbes, insects, and millions of bacteria that make good soil are at work. Out of sight, out of mind, the heart works and the imagination ferments.

“By your patience you will win your soul” (the gospel of Luke 21:19),

Brother Paul

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Over the course of their correspondence, Brother Paul’s oldest brother Leonard died as did Trappist Brother Patrick Hart, one of the best-known monks of the Abbey of Gethsemani and the man who edited many collections of Thomas Merton’s writings. Judith attended Brother Patrick’s funeral, and it was the first time she witnessed the unusual rituals surrounding a Trappist burial.

Dear Brother Paul,

Brother Patrick Hart’s funeral was my first experience of a Trappist burial and I haven’t stopped thinking about it for days. You had told me that the monks are laid directly into the ground without a coffin, wrapped only in a cloth. One can imagine this, but it is quite something else to witness it. When the body was lowered in the ground, all I could see were Brother Patrick’s black rubber-soled shoes protruding from his funeral shroud. The sight of those shoes filled me with tenderness for the man. I thought of the decades those feet had trod the stone floor of the abbey church and sank into the soft soil of the surrounding hills.

I’ve kept thinking too of the monk who climbs down a ladder into the grave before the body is lowered, to “accept” the body. Then he lumbers back up the ladder and out of the grave, like Lazarus resurrected from the dead.

I wonder what it is like to be confined, even briefly, in that six-foot hole with the lifeless body of a brother monk. What does it feel like to ascend again into the land of the living? I can’t help but think it is a powerful reminder of the brevity and preciousness of life.

Yours in the mystery,

Judith

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Dear Judith,

Thank you for your honest reflections. In a big monastery like Gethsemani, there can be as many as three deaths a year. Relationships here are not terribly intimate. They are only enduring and mostly non-verbal, so it is not too hard to face a loss. These deaths are a healthy exercise in realism—a spiritual practice that is not thought of as practice, but as a de facto training for death through the experience of sitting next to your brother’s open bier.

Our formal rite is to have two monks, in thirty-minute shifts, recite Psalms by the body day and night until the time of the burial Mass. I still adhere to an older practice of reciting all 150 Psalms after a monk who has died. In the process of doing that, a change occurs. The recitation interiorizes the relationship I have my brother monk. I go from praying for him to praying with him. It is as if the Psalter’s words of joy, conflict, and praise become his words in me. A closeness and an immediacy is established that is greater than may have been possible when the monk was alive.

I especially felt this after the death of our Father Louis, known to the rest of the world as Thomas Merton. Instead of his being set at a remove, he began to feel more immediate and closer to me. A new kind of contact became possible—something greater than before. Not verbal contact, but rather a kind of communion. Silence was the place where this could happen.

Remembering with gratitude the life of this excellent monk,

Brother Paul

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A book about the letter-writing between two friends would be incomplete without an exploration of the thoughts of St. Aelred of Riveaulx, who wrote a treatise entitled “On Friendship.” St. Aelred believed that true spiritual friendships are based on mutual caring and love. True friendships, he said, never end but are the means by which we experience intimations of eternity in this life.

Dear Brother Paul,

I’d like to think that you and I fit St. Aelred’s definition of true friends as two hearts speaking to one another. In these letters, we have entrusted to one another, as he would say, “the contents of our hearts.”

In an old issue of the magazine Parabola, I found an essay of yours adapted from your memoir, In Praise of the Useless Life. You wrote it after spending a week on retreat at the Merton hermitage . . . Your first evening there, you put a piece by Bruckner on the CD player and stepped outside to gaze at the half moon. Soon you were swaying to the music in a half circle, tossing your white shirt in the air “as if it were a cloud.” And then as you describe it, you started to dance, “lifting and pulling, tossing and dropping, working hands, stretching arms,” dancing with abandon. That’s when it hit me: This is it. This is what you have been trying to tell me all along. This is how to be.

Perhaps the anxiety and restlessness I often experience doesn’t come from a dearth of achievements, but from a paucity of “cutting free.”

Next time we see each other, let’s dance. I mean, really, actually, physically dance. Outside Merton’s hermitage, preferably. Barefoot if possible. I will bring an extra shirt to toss in the air.

Yours in anticipation,

Judith

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Silence is an integral part of the Trappist life, and the contemplative life in general. In his letters, Brother Paul tries to explain why silence is the well we all can draw from to nourish our interior life.

Dear Judith,

One of the topics I’ve wanted to write to you about is my love of silence. It is something that deserves watchfulness and care if you want to have it . . . When I entered the monastery in the late Fifties, our observance was so strict that you could almost have called it a cult of silence. In the writings of Thomas Merton, however, you find something much deeper than that. He sought a culture of silence that surrounds prayer and contemplation and is derived from it. This interior appreciation seems to be what characterizes silence as it is practiced at the abbey today. We are no longer so preoccupied with silence that we complain about its being broken. Now our silence has a more natural quality.

Underneath this physical silence lies the inner silence we each must cultivate. A silent mind brings about a silent presence.

May such moments be yours,

Brother Paul

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Dear Brother Paul,

Whenever I visit your abbey, I have the sense of entering a deeper reality, one where my soul—and not my head, for a change—is leading my steps. Monasteries and Quaker meeting houses might be among the last places on earth to practice what St. Benedict in his Rule calls “esteem for silence.” 

Like you, I believe that silence isn’t something we seek only in a physical setting. It is a habit of the heart, an interior peace we cultivate. That is likely what Abba Moses, one of the early monks of the Egyptian desert, meant when he told a young monk seeking advice on the contemplative life, “Sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.”

My favorite part of the day is the time just before dawn when the neighbors’ houses are quiet and dark and the streets are empty. As Merton once observed, “The most wonderful moment of the day is when creation in its innocence asks permission to be.” I step out on the front lawn. There are just the flickering stars, waking birds, thrumming insects—and me. Not really silence but sounds that feed my interior silence. I can at least feel, if not really hear, my own heartbeat.

Yours in the quiet home of the heart,

Judith

Banner image: Brother Paul Quenon and Judith Valente under their favorite gingko tree at the Abbey of Gethsemani. All photos courtesy of Judith Valente.