I think this is why I am so profoundly grateful for the following books. Over the years I’ve found that when I walk toward prayer in the company of these wise and patient guides, I am far more able to grow in the silence and focus for which I so long. The prayerful, tender words of these writers have often acted upon me like the hand of a friend who catches you when you’re about to fall, speaking a bit of encouragement just at the moment you might give up. The love of God, the life of prayer—these are practices we often need to be taught. The following books, like Merton’s words on my hushed Sunday morning, have been my mentors and teachers in the holy way.
The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence
“We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.” So wrote the humble Brother Lawrence, a medieval monk who worked in the kitchen and the garden and who saw the whole of his life as prayer, lived in conversation with God. “He is nearer to us than we think,” Brother Lawrence writes, challenging the believer to simply remember God amid the work of the ordinary—the cooking and cleaning, the quiet so intricately part of the everyday. This book helped me to form a theology of the ordinary as its words livened idealistic me to the possibility of remembering and reveling in God’s presence, not merely in a soaring quiet time, but amid dishes and deadlines, the rush of work and the hush of exhaustion.
The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath by Mark Buchanan
This contemplative, creative, and very scriptural explanation of the role of rest as a spiritual discipline in the life of faith has shaped my convictions about taking a Sabbath day as a day of actual rest, a cessation of work. By helping his readers to understand that rest is not so much about not doing things as it is about trusting in God to be our ultimate source and provider, he offers a mode of discipleship very different from the hurry-up culture in which we live.
Love’s Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life by Scott Cairns
A gentle, luminous collection of the writings of the church’s most beloved mystics, set in lyrical verse by Cairns, a contemporary poet. I found a daily dose of these poems to be an influence of quiet on my heart, their words ringing in my imagination throughout the day.
My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers
One of the greatest and most enduring devotionals, composed of Chambers’s heartfelt sermons to soldiers and students on the devout life of the believer, this inspirational book is divided into a year’s worth of daily readings. It’s questions like these that have made it a spiritual classic for generations:
Sanctification is not a question of whether God is willing to sanctify me—is it my will? Am I willing to let God do in me everything that has been made possible through the atonement of the Cross of Christ? Am I willing to let Jesus become sanctification to me, and to let His life be exhibited in my human flesh?
Celtic Daily Prayer by Northumbria Community
This book has been a daily resource to me for over a decade. Compiled by the Northumbria Community, a fellowship working in the stream of “new monasticism” by living in community on the ancient and holy island of Lindisfarne, this book was my introduction to a more liturgical mode of prayer. With morning, midday, and evening liturgies composed mostly of Scripture, and with daily meditations and readings drawn from a plethora of excellent Christian authors who focus on Celtic themes of pilgrimage, reconciliation, beauty, and contemplation, this book has become the basic devotional resource I use to continue my daily quiet times even amid a hectic schedule. To pray the canticle daily is a gift:
Christ, as a light illumine and guide me.
Christ, as a shield overshadow me.
Christ under me, Christ over me,
Christ beside me on my left and my right.
A Book of Comfort: An Anthology by Elizabeth Goudge
You’ve already met Goudge as one of my most-beloved novelists, but I deeply prize her devotional work as well in this collection of excerpted poetry, theology, stories, essays, and devotions. As the daughter of a cathedral dean, raised in the great churches of Oxford, Wells, and Ely, she offers great breadth in this selection. Her attention to both beauty and theological profundity makes this a perennial spiritual resource, something I turn to in order to quiet my mind and deepen my prayer life.
Also by Goudge:
A Book of Peace
A Book of Faith
No Man Is an Island, New Seeds of Contemplation, and Bread in the Wilderness by Thomas Merton
I have such trouble choosing a single Merton title, so here you have three. The first two are the contemplative classics for which Merton is best known, books that confront the restless discontent of the contemporary world with an invitation to find rest and satisfaction in the heart of God. In No Man Is an Island, Merton summons his readers both to detachment—from self-interest, from worry—and to a refreshed recognition that “we may be the object of God’s love precisely because of [our] shortcomings.” Only in this standing can we be confident, not in illusions of our goodness, “but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God.” In New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton writes a guide to the contemplative life in response to the countless letters he received from those in the wider world hungry for silence, for a sense of God’s reality, for peace. “Hurry ruins saints as well as artists,” he writes. Finally, Bread in the Wilderness is Merton’s exploration of the Psalms as the central liturgy of the monastery, the bread that feeds the souls of those who pray them day in and day out, leading them into the presence of Christ.
The Singer Trilogy by Calvin Miller
The story of the Gospels retold in a lyrical poem recounting the life of a Singer whose Song could not be silenced and whose love would not be stopped. A gentle, allegorical reading that speaks the gospel afresh into a weary heart.
The Interior Castle by Saint Teresa of Avila
“This Beloved of ours is merciful and good. Besides, he so deeply longs for our love that he keeps calling us to come closer.” When my eye fell upon those words in the small golden book I’d picked up to browse in a bookstore, I felt the tug of yearning. How could I come closer to that Beloved? The Interior Castle is in large part an answer to that question, the humble and spunky Saint Teresa’s medieval exploration of prayer as the way by which we journey to the inner room of our hearts, where Christ dwells, ever present, our own Beloved. It’s the plainspoken, almost humorous realism of this book that makes it approachable: “The devil frequently fills our thoughts with great schemes, so that instead of putting our hands to what work we can do to serve our Lord, we may rest satisfied with wishing to perform impossibilities.” (Take that, idealistic Sarah!) But it’s the tenderness, the real belief in the love of God always beckoning to us, inviting us to prayer, that makes this book such a companion to devotion. I’m still not sorry I spilled my coffee on it and was forced to shell out twenty dollars. It’s been worth every penny and more.
The Letters of Evelyn Underhill by Evelyn Underhill
If Mysticism (see review on page 118) is too much to tackle, consider Underhill’s chatty, practical letters, written to seekers around the world who flocked to the advice of this clear-eyed, realistic spiritual mother. Underhill’s mission is obvious in this book: to help others deepen their life of prayer and their experience of Christ’s real, present love.
The Celtic Way of Prayer: The Recovery of the Religious Imagination by Esther De Waal
I’ve been entranced by Irish music and Celtic tales since childhood, so when I discovered the remarkable collection of ancient Celtic prayers collected in the nineteenth century and published as the Carmina Gadelica, I was caught. The beautiful blessings and songs of worship, with their powerful imagery (“Behold the lightener of the stars / On the crests of the clouds, / And the choralists of the sky / Lauding Him”), express an awareness of God’s power and beauty in creation that I yearned to better understand. De Waal’s book was my answer,
one that introduced me to the world of early Celtic monasticism on whose rhythms of prayer and praise the earliest Celtic blessings were composed. What I love here is De Waal’s exploration of what makes Celtic prayer so potent; she deeply examines the joy the Celts took in the natural world, the oral and lyric traditions in which they operated, and their rich sense of praying in the company of all the angels and saints, the kin and kingfolk of heaven.
The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God by Dallas Willard
What difference does salvation make to life in the here and now? How do we draw the life and grace of Jesus into every day of our lives? These are some of the questions Willard seeks to answer, and he does so with such eloquence and compassion that his book is now a modern classic. His hope is to “gain a fresh hearing for Jesus, especially among those who believe they already understand him. Very few people today find Jesus interesting as a person or of vital relevance to the course of their actual lives.”
Silence and Honey Cakes by Rowan Williams
I hadn’t heard much about the desert fathers until I moved to Oxford, when I was assigned an essay on Athanasius and his biography of the first desert hermit, Saint Antony. Suddenly I was plunged into the vivid desert world of early Christianity in which some Christians left the temptations of the world to dwell in the wilderness, combating sin and Satan, pursuing purity for Christ. Their “sayings” are pithy stories or statements of wisdom and spiritual instruction for which pilgrims would journey long. (If you’re interested in finding out more, Benedicta Ward’s The Sayings of the Desert Fathers is a good place to start.) This brief contemplation on those sayings by Rowan Williams, an Anglican theologian, considers the psychological and spiritual relevance that those words have for us today as we examine ourselves, as we strive to live in community, as we wrestle with prejudice or fear, and as we confront the demons whose source is so often our own sin.
[1] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Books, 1961), 39.
The Gift of Sacred Time: Books for the Church Year
(OR, FINDING A SPIRITUAL RHYTHM)
I LIVE TO THE CADENCE of church bells now. Elizabeth Goudge called Wells the “city of bells,” but that description could easily describe Oxford; you can hear a chorus of them striking at the oddest times. Sometimes a single dramatic toll to mark the hour; sometimes great, waterfalling crescendos ringing through the streets. Now, though, with my front-room window facing the golden brick of a church tower and the bells humming out on the quarter hours from 6:45 in the morning to 11:00 at night, the bells are personal to me, deep old voices warbling a call to prayer, singing my every day into a kind of structured music.
In a way, those bells and the cadence with which they frame my hours are part of the larger rhythm I’ve learned during my time in Oxford as I’ve increasingly (if erratically) adopted the practice of morning and evening prayer and the marking of the year by the seasons of earth and church. There is a clear sense in British culture and in my church here of both time and space as realities you mark and claim, made sacred by the way you see them, the words with which you frame them, the actions with which you fill them.
I encountered communal evening prayer my first month in Oxford, and as I began to attend regularly, hearing Scripture and prayer at a set time each day, I found the liturgies forming my thoughts, comforting me in stressed moments, giving me a cadence of worship in which to live the crazy rounds of my days. Then I found the glory of the church year, with its high days centered on the core events of Christ’s life: not just Christmas and Easter, birth and death, but Ascension and Pentecost, feasts that remind me of Christ’s return to the Father to prepare a place for all who love him, and of the Holy Spirit coming among us. What these prayers and feasts, these liturgies offer me is not only a mind formed by reverence but a deepened sense of identity, a fuller knowledge of who Christ is and the hope and glory to which he is drawing me.
What the church year and its liturgies have allowed me is the sense of my life, my one story of faith, my ordinary moments as caught up in the great narrative, the ceaseless coming of God. In an age where time and season are increasingly lost to the unsleeping pace of the internet era, the church year has helped me to draw my own days back into a rhythm of prayer, thanksgiving, wonder, and hush: a rhythm of grace by which I am learning to recognize God’s reality in every aspect of my life.
Even if you (like me) did not grow up experiencing the practice and beauty of liturgy or thinking much about time itself as sacred, I encourage you to peruse the following books. Several of them have been helpful to me as introductions to the whole topic of liturgy; others are companions to certain seasons (Advent or Lent); others are imaginative and poetic in their interaction with the church year. What is common to all is the way they have enriched and deepened my worship.
The Rhythm of God’s Grace: Uncovering Morning and Evening Hours of Prayer by Arthur Paul Boers
This was one of the first books I read that introduced me to the idea of daily, fixed-hour prayer. The simple explanation and persuasion of this book was immensely helpful to me as a beginner in the realm of liturgy as it explains the ancient rhythms of the church and how common prayer is a way of joining my voice with Christians all over the world.
Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry by Hans Boersma
A contemporary theologian who works in the evangelical tradition and draws deeply on the writings of the early church, Boersma has made it one of his main goals to revive an understanding of “sacramental ontology,” what he considers to be the profoundly Christian way of perceiving the created world and our embodied selves as participating in the life of God. His book Heavenly Participation has been crucial in helping me to understand the significance of beauty, liturgy, and tradition.
The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year by Kimberlee Conway Ireton
A book by a writer I count as a friend, this is an introduction to the world of the church year. Winsome and personal, woven through with stories, explanations, and ideas that illuminate the theology driving each season, this is an excellent introduction if you are new to the liturgical arena.
Every Moment Holy: New Liturgies for Daily Life by Douglas Kaine McKelvey
Years ago, I was delighted to discover that the early Celtic Christians had liturgies for everything from the coming of spring to the laying of a hearth fire. I loved the way their shared prayers reveal God’s grace amid the ordinary, the way the prayers join us, in the glory and grit of our ordinary days, with the movement of heaven itself. This book is crafted in that lively tradition and pointed toward the modern reader, offering prayers such as “A Liturgy for the Morning of a Medical Procedure” and “A Liturgy for Feasting with Friends” and even, happy thought, “A Liturgy for the Ritual of Morning Coffee.” Accompanied by marvelous woodcut illustrations, this is a book to treasure and savor.
You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K. A. Smith
An insightful book arguing for a definition of humans as “desiring creatures” rather than “thinking things.” Using examples such as the liturgical structure of a shopping mall (read it and be amazed), Smith demonstrates our need to consider the way in which our moral character and our beliefs are shaped, not just by thought or doctrine, but by what we love and learn to love through habit, ritual, and liturgy.
The Divine Hours Series by Phyllis Tickle
Tickle’s collections of prayers and Scripture passages draw novice disciples into the rhythm of fixed-hour prayer so integral to medieval monastic rhythm. Creating a book of hours for the modern reader, Tickle draws on the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, as well as the writings of the early church fathers, to help modern believers enter the ancient rhythm of daily prayer.
Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas and Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter by Plough Publishing
This is one of my favorite resources, a collection of
daily readings designed to accompany a reader through the two great seasons of the church year, Advent and Lent. With entries by many of my most-loved writers, ranging from early church fathers and medieval poets to contemporary theologians, these books invite readers into a soulful journey, into that excavation of the heart that is one of the gifts of the Advent and Lenten seasons.
God with Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas and God for Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Lent and Easter by Greg Pennoyer and Gregory Wolfe (Editors)
Another set of favorites whose beauty I have savored for years, these books provide daily readings along with daily works of art for the four weeks of Advent and the season of Lent. With reflections written by recognized theologians and Christian authors, they offer a rich, thoughtful, often challenging immersion into the yearning and beauty of these seasons.
Chapter 10Books Can Impart HOPE
The Final Word Belongs to Love
“Hope” is the thing with feathers— / That perches in the soul— / And sings the tune without the words— / And never stops at all.
EMILY DICKINSON, “‘HOPE’ IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS”
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