Encountering the Depths

Book excerpt: Fairacres Publications 218 This is a book about the nature and practice of prayer for the serious Christian, lay and clerical, in which the problems of the spiritual life in the modern world are presented as a challenge. Mother Mary Clare, who was one of the Anglican Church’s leading spiritual directors, takes the major contemplative themes and brings to them her unique blend of spiritual realism, vision and authority. Prayer begins and ends in the inescapable necessity of a relationship with God; the dimension of silence reveals that praying is not only an action but a still contemplation; the path of spiritual progress is to discern in the union of action and contemplation a deeper listening which leads to an apostolate of prayer renewing the action of contemplation. It is all God’s Work. In his foreword, Bishop Michael Ramsey writes: ‘I hope this little book will have many readers, as I am sure it will help them as it has helped me … Christian lives which know contemplation will be lives nearer the love of God…’