The Spirit Whispering

Brother Gerard begins his remarkable Whispering Spirit: A Monk's Journey Through the Bonsai Forest by allowing us the rare opportunity to observe the daily life of a monk at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Georgia. And just as he invites us to walk beside him during an average day of reflection, in the greenhouse and in the woods surrounding the Monastery. Gerard also shows us how to care for bonsai through detailed, ages-old gardening instruction geared both to the novice as well as the experienced gardener. In Whispering Spirit, the two passions of Gerard's life--his quest for the sublime knowledge of God and the simple naturalism and hypnotic beauty of bonsai--converge that his narrative blossoms. Gerard draws analogies between every person's spiritual quest and the life of a bonsai, analogies stunning in their simplicity, directness, and relevance beyond the monastery walls. The novice monk is compared to the sapling tree and the stages in the lives of both the spiritual quester and the bonsai-in-progress are traced from immaturity, to carefully training, to gnarled old-age beauty. Along the way, Gerard likens the Eucharist of his faith to the deep feeding of the bonsai and, at his most playful, the hospitality and friendship of the monastery to the display of a valued tree. He argues that the naturalism of the bonsai master's art prefers the jin, the knot or healed-over scar that gives a mature tree an air of naturalism. In Gerard's most profound analogy the spiritual jin--the battle scars we carry from our fights with addiction, divorce, disability, and loss--shows our real spiritual health, depth, and complexity, and it is in these scars that Gerard finds most beautiful. Any gardener knows that working the soil is a soulful experience from which personal strength and great pleasure is drawn. Although most readers of Brother Gerard's Whispering Spirit will never live his monastic, all can learn from the time he spends in the bonsai forest, the contemplative landscape of the soul.