Monastery without Walls

The complete spiritual letters of John Main, edited by Laurence Freeman and published by Canterbury Press in Norwich in 2006 (reissued in hardback in 2014). Up to the end of his life in 1982 Main wrote a series of letters of spiritual direction to the growing community of people who meditated with the Benedictine Priory of Montreal; the publisher notes that two earlier collections had gone out of print and that this single volume gathers the letters complete. The book's title is Main's own phrase for his vision of a community living by the Rule of St Benedict in the secular world, from which the World Community for Christian Meditation grew. An article in The Merton Seasonal (2020) calls this compilation of quarterly letters his only written work, the rest being transcripts of talks.