Review: Letters From the Desert

I’ve read many great books in the past year, and have not kept up with reviewing them, but this one is worth the time.  

As the back cover notes: “At age 44, … Carlo Carretto was summoned by a voice that said: ‘Leave everything, come with me into the desert.  I don’t want your action any longer; I want your prayer, your love.”  And he left behind his charismatic leadership of the Italian youth movement, and joined the Little Brothers of Jesus, as a hermit in the deserts of Africa.  As the book’s preface notes, “be prepared to listen to the voice behind the text.”  

In the very first chapter, Carlo writes how he saw a villager shivering in the night cold of the desert, and looked back at his two blankets, one he used to lay head upon, and one as a cover.  He thought he too might shiver that night, and so moved on.  That very night in a dream, as he lay in the shade of a large rock, he again saw that villager, and now he went to give him a blanket, but couldn’t move in the slightest.  The rock was upon him, solidly.  And then “I understood what Purgatory was, and that the suffering of the soul (there) was no longer to have the possibility of doing what before he could and should have done.”  And then he thought: “If I were capable of passing by a brother who was shivering with cold, how should I be capable of dying for him in imitation of Jesus, who died for us all?”

And those thoughts were just part of the first chapter of this book.  In the second, he quotes John 13:34 … “just as I have loved you, you must also love one another.” … “Love transforms me slowly into God.”  Later Carlo quotes Angela of Foligno, an Italian mystic: “All things that are said in the Scripture and by the saints from the beginning of the world until now seem to me to express hardly anything of the love of God; their words are like a speck of dust compared to the universe.”

“We feel the knowledge of God becoming greater in us, little by little, as our love for Him becomes greater.”

Slowly reading this book in the quiet of the Adoration Chapel brings a knowledge of God into your being.  No wonder this book is called a classic.  I will read it many more times, to let the words really soak into me.  And feel His Presence, and Love.