Dearest Sister Wendy: Robert Ellsberg

Our guest, Robert Ellsberg, publisher of Orbis Books, joins us to discuss his friendship with Sister Wendy Beckett -- a friendship based on several hundred letters, exchanged on an almost daily basis, during the last three years of Sister Wendy's life. Initially they dealt with lives of saints, the meaning of holiness, and the spiritual life, but they soon expanded into a deep and intimate exchange that encompassed our whole lives, the subject of love, suffering, joy, and the presence of grace in everyday life. The correspondence if collected in the recent book, Dearest Sister Wendy.

Sister Wendy, who died in Dec 2018, was a consecrated hermit who lived on the grounds of a Carmelite monastery in England. For some years she achieved highly unlikely fame when she was discovered by the BBC and given her own TV series to common on art. From this there followed many books on art and spirituality. But eventually she reverted to her solitary life. Many had urged Sister Wendy to write more about her interior life--but she always refused. That is what changed in the course of our correspondence, to the point that she observed that the book I had been seeking was to be found in our correspondence.

Robert Ellsberg is the publisher and editor-in-chief Orbis Books. He is the author of many books about saints and holiness, including All Saints, Blessed Among All Women, The Saints Guide to Happiness, and A Living Gospel: Reading God's Story in Holy Lives. Strongly influenced in his youth by his work with Dorothy Day, he has edited five volumes of her writings, including Selected Writings, The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, All the Way to Heaven: Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, and most recently, On Pilgrimage: The Seventies.