Finding the Treasure: Letters from a Global Monk

by Augustine Roberts OCSO

Augustine Roberts is a New England Yankee, transplanted by circumstance first to Argentina and then to Rome, from where frequent travel took him to nearly every part of the globe. The historical era into which he was born, so fraught with personal and communal soul-searching, also made him wrestle with all the tensions of the contemporary church and world. Finding the Treasure tells of Dom Augustine's conversion to the Catholic Church while attending Yale and of his remarkably varied monastic experience during the turbulent years of church renewal following Vatican II. These letters from a global monk will not disappoint anyone fascinated by the paradox of a monk who, rooted by vow to his monastery, becomes a globe-trotter precisely out of deep obedience. Augustine Roberts, OCSO, has been a Trappist monk since the early 1950s. After serving as abbot of St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, he became Procurator General of the Trappist Order. In the 1960s he was one of the founders of the first abbey of his Order in South America, later serving as its abbot. Today he is a much sought-after guide, called to help many communities in the delicate task of adapting the perennial monastic way of life to the needs of the twenty-first century.

273 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 13, 2011

Reviews

[Mary Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fr. Roberts is certainly a citizen of the world: born in China, educated in the US, a monk in both Massachusetts and Argentina and, for a while, truly a globe-trotter while working under the Abbot General of the Cistercian Order.

However, this is not so much a reflection on his engagement with various cultures as it is a spiritual autobiography. Simply written, it reveals that this is a man of deep interiority (no surprise, I guess, as he has been a Cistercian monk for decades!) whose chief concern is the life of the spirit.

I was a little disappointed to not learn much of anything about the various ways the monastic life intersects with the various cultures where Cistercian monasteries are located. But I did enjoy the book, which certainly affirms the maxim that, the closer one grows to God, the more truly one becomes one's self.