Love: A Glimpse of Eternity

by Ernesto Cardenal, Dinah Livingston (Translator), Thomas Merton (Contributor)

A spiritual writer of rare intensity, Latin America&;s award-winning poet Ernesto Cardenal has written one of the great prose meditations of our time. This short, seemingly simple book has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in the author&;s native Spanish ( Vida en el Amor ).
Originally written in a time of conflict, anxiety, war, cruelty, and confusion, A Glimpse of Eternity invites us to see love as the only reality &; love as life itself.
 
&;[A] compelling religious vision that would see us all laboring with greater awareness of Who moves us, moves in us, attends our every act.&;
            --Scott Cairns, poet, and author of Compass of Affection and Philokalia

145 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2006

About the author

Reverend Father Ernesto Cardenal Martínez was a Nicaraguan Catholic priest, poet, and politician. He was a liberation theologian and the founder of the primitivist art community in the Solentiname Islands, where he lived for more than ten years (1965–1977). A former member of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas (he left the party in the early 1990s), he was Nicaragua's minister of culture from 1979 to 1987.

His earlier poems focused on life and love. However, some works, such as "Zero Hour," had a direct correlation to his Marxist political ideas, being tied to the assassination of guerrilla leader Augusto César Sandino. Cardenal's poetry also was heavily influenced by his unique Catholic ideology, mainly liberation theology. Some of his later works were heavily influenced by his understanding of science and evolution, though still in dialogue with his earlier Marxist and Catholic material.--excerpted from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Harry Allagree · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally a book in Spanish, Vida en el amor, the late (he died on March 1, 2020) Ernesto Cardenal's work opens with a preface by the well-known Trappist writer, Thomas Merton (1915-1968). Merton summarizes beautifully a book which looks simple, but on closer examination is a profound compendium on the meaning of love, the cosmos, religion, etc.

Merton writes: "...what Ernesto Cardenal has seen and written down...is an ever-repeated discovery, an ever-new poetic intuition of the central reality of life. It is a hymn to life, and this is why it is so eminently truthful. With the depth of conviction Cardenal speaks again and again of that which simply is. Love is. All else is not, because in the same measure in which things partake of being, they partake of love. All that is not love, is not. All that which is, has its being and its action in love..."

In 43 short reflections Cardenal shares his view of the universe, the relationship between humankind & non-rational creatures, all centered in the reality of love. It occurs to me that his work very much resonates with that of a number of contemporary "deep Incarnation" theologians: e.g., the late Denis Edwards (Australia); Niels Henrik Gregersen (Denmark); Elizabeth A. Johnson (New York); Celia Deanne-Drummond (Indiana); Christopher Southgate (England); and Richard Bauckham (England).