Reclaiming The Art of Letterwriting
A friend of mine told me a heartwarming story this past week about the letters she has been exchanging during the pandemic with her mother. She said it reminds her of the letters they wrote when she was at college. Only one thing is missing. Back then, her mother would often tuck a new pair of underwear into the package along with her letter.
With restrictions on travel and social gatherings, many of us are rediscovering the (nearly) lost art of letter-writing. Letter-writing has always been an important part of my life. It’s the way I keep in touch with friends across the globe. For many years now, I have been exchanging letters with Brother Paul Quenon, a Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani outside of Louisville.
Brother Paul is a most delightful correspondent. He was a novice under the great spirituality writer Thomas Merton and has written nine collections of poetry as well as an elegant memoir, In Praise of the Useless Life. In 2013, he and I co-authored a book of meditations for busy people called The Art of Pausing.
Brother Paul and I write to each other about practical matters, such as deciding when to leave a job, coping with loss and confronting disappointment.
We write about current events, our love of nature, poetry, liturgy and the Eucharist, and our sometimes halting efforts at improving our meditation and prayer practice.
This past week, I handed into my publisher, Hampton Roads/Red Wheel Weiser of Boston, the manuscript for a new book based on our letters.
Tentatively titled How To Be, the book will be out next year.
In some ways, my correspondence with Brother Paul imitates the practice of 3rd and 4th century pilgrims who would seek out monks living in the Egyptian desert, hoping to gain from them “a word” about deepening the interior life.
Letters represent an interesting literary hybrid. They are like private diaries we make public. Letters not only help us to get to know another person, they help us to better understand ourselves. As the poet Willie Perdomo once observed, it is hard to filter our lives in letters. You “attempt to tell the truth and wait.”
We introduce ourselves, confide our hopes, confess our errors, offer our thanks, and say goodbye in letters. Letters are the remnants we leave behind to mark important episodes in our lives.
There are some letters I’ve carried with me, like heirlooms, through many changes of address. Among them are the ones my mother wrote me when I was an exchange student in France. After she died, I found all of the letters I wrote to her from that time, collected into a bundle and wrapped with a red rubber band.
I have all the letters the mother of the family I lived with in France sent to me over the decades. Maman Bracque, as I call her, is now 88 years old. She still writes me, always in long hand, on sheets of grid paper. I have a special drawer at home for the safekeeping of her letters.
I’ve kept the letter I received when I was 21 from Katherine Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post, after I had finished my summer internship at The Post, an opportunity that led to working for the paper for another seven years.
For Brother Paul, letter writing became a serious pursuit in his early years at the abbey. In the 1950s, monks were allowed to receive letters only on certain days of the year: Christmas, Easter, the Feast of the Assumption (Aug. 15) and All Saints Day (Nov 1). Mail was saved up until those days and then handed over in a bundle.
Each monk was allowed to write only two letters in return.
“Given those circumstances, I took pretty seriously any letter I wrote, or tried to,” Brother Paul recalls. At one point, he adds, “My brother Bob started calling my letters ‘The Epistles of Paul.’ That’s when I slacked off on trying so hard to come off as pious.”
Today the monks at Gethsemani have computers, email, and cell phones. “Oddly, I find I communicate with my family less than ever,” Brother Paul told me. “Maybe the difficulty of writing provided an incentive that is no longer there.”
Still, he says he enjoys “sitting outside with a pad on the arm of a lawn chair, filling out ledger lines while the Spirit leads me where it will. There is a special kind of word knowledge that flows through the hand as I write.”
Emily Dickinson once called letters “a joy of the earth/ denied the Gods.”
“Resistance against loneliness” is how Willie Perdomo describes letters.
What are some of the memorable letters you have received or written?
This week, perhaps we can write to someone who might be feeling isolated. Not an email, or a text, but an honest-to-goodness, ink-to-paper letter. (Okay, typing it and printing it out on the computer would be fine too).
My friend who’s been exchanging letters with her mother suggests including a few stamps too so that whoever receives your letter can mail you back, or even send a letter to someone else.
She says it’s okay to leave out the underwear.
