Father Stonor's Love: Letters and Sermons of Dom Julian Stonor, O.S.B.

Father Stonor’s Love is a luminous compilation of letters and sermons written by Benedictine monk Dom Julian Stonor, who sees the details of our world in all its variety as sacramental. The special value of these writings is the intimate and honest perspective they offer of the spiritual drama inherent in the author’s vow of obedience. In truth, few writings even come close to so riveting a description of the hidden drama lived out by the conscientious religious monk or nun of the Catholic Church. Upon being entrusted with these materials by the estate of Father Julian’s beloved cousin and Newport society doyenne, Noreen Stonor Drexel, Father Julian Stead of Portsmouth Abbey (who had been Father Julian Stonor’s pupil) wrote: “I was astounded. I saw they would be an important addition to English spiritual literature. The author seems to have seen God and Heaven with his own eyes, which affected how he saw his fellow man and the rest of creation. The good is what he saw.”“What I found here is one of the rarest things in the world, in both senses of the word ‘rare’: intrinsically precious and very hard to find. There is a sanctity and humanity here that I can only call hobbit-like: humble, ordinary, totally human, earthy, unspectacular, and obviously the fruit of many years of cultivation. It is what I found remarkable in my brief meetings with the two people we know are saints, Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa of Calcutta. I call it ‘extraordinary ordinariness.’ I am one of thousands of readers who will be thanking God for inspiring these gems.”—PETER KREEFT (from the Preface)“These radiant letters from a Benedictine monk to his cousin living in America offer us a glimpse into a profound friendship that spanned decades of joy and hardship in the lives of both. Dom Julian feels that Noreen is his ‘twin sister,’ but he also speaks to her as a father to his daughter, as a son to his mother, and even, in a delicate spiritual way, as lover to beloved. The homilies allow us to peer into the immense depths of prayer and biblical insight that nourished this and so many other friendships in the self-sacrificing life of Dom Julian Stonor.”—PETER KWASNIEWSKI Read more