Fairacres Publication 82 In five essays originally given as addresses to the Benedictine monks at the Monastery of Chevetogne in Belgium, the author gives us the essentials of his teaching on prayer. They are the fruit not only of personal experience and long familiarity with the hesychast writings of Orthodox monasticism, but also of the spiritual tradition of his native Romania. We are given the outline of an icon of restored humanity through texts which we can appropriate for ourselves to allow the love of God to live and work in us.

SLG Press Contemplative Poetry 12 This collection speaks about the experience of nature, religion, thought, ideas and people; sometimes with the anxiety that those relationships can bring, but also with plenty of celebration. There are thoughtful ponderings, gazing into the beauty and rawness of nature, from wide sweeping beaches or forests, to tiny stones and fleeting birds. Fractured meaning is celebrated, even in its incompleteness, alongside the pleasure of wholeness, inner certainty and realization.

SLG Press Contemplative Poetry 8 In 1945 Gabriela Mistral became the first Latin American author to be awarded a Nobel Prize. She was a passionate advocate for many disadvantaged groups in her native Chile, but particularly women and children living in poverty and unable to access education that might help them to improve their lives. She spent much of her life as a teacher, but her poetry reflects the people she met and the situations she encountered through her life. It speaks of a deep empathy with those around her, and of great strength of faith. Her legacy is continued by the many foundations and schools set up in her name. Gallas’s translations bring Mistral’s words to English-speaking audiences, creating new and beautiful works in the canon of literature by Christian poets.

SLG Press Contemplative Poetry 9 This book contains poems by Henry Vaughan, all of them selected from the 1655 edition of Silex Scintillans. Almost all are followed by a related poem from George Herbert’s 1633 collection, The Temple. For Vaughan, Herbert was that ‘blessed man, whose holy life and verse gained many pious Converts’: poets who wisely exchanged ‘vain and vicious subjects’ for ‘divine Themes and Celestial praise’. Vaughan thought of himself as ‘the least’ of those converts, but the poetry in Silex Scintillans shows him matching and even sometimes surpassing his master’s work.

SLG Press Contemplative Poetry 6 Like private prayers, the sacred sonnets of Gabrielle de Coignard (c. 1550–1586) and Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547) have long been soft utterances in a quiet corner of devotional literature. Bright expressions of faith amongst the problems and businesses of writing as women in sixteenth-century France and Italy, of illnesses, long widowhoods, personal grief and politics, these sonnets speak both passionately and practically about the trials and triumphs of living, and of living with faith.

Fairacres Publications 90 The short though profoundly mystical work, The Five Feasts of the Child Jesus, which is presented here in a new translation, came from the pen of St Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor of the Church, and one of the most renowned followers of St Francis of Assisi. We are given five meditations on scenes in the life of Christ. Contrary to what one might expect from the title, however, the theme of these meditations is spiritual motherhood, namely the doctrine concerning the mystical birth of God’s Word in the soul and the vocation of every Christian to become a mother of Christ. Men and women alike are invited to fashion their spiritual lives on Mary, the Mother of the Lord and the image of the Church, and to develop the maternal element in their nature. St Bonaventure brought the skills of a poet and a theologian to his task; his work belongs to the rich heritage of Franciscan spirituality, it is also a minor classic of the spiritual tradition of western Christianity and has a message pertinent to our times.

Fairacres Publications 85 Eight Chapters on Perfection is Hilton’s translation of a Latin text by the Aragonese Friar Dom Lluis de Font, and is the only surviving record of that manuscript. It is a text of great humanity and wisdom about the possibilities of friendship and love between those drawn to prayer. In Angels’ Song Hilton’s own spirituality is revealed as he considers how, in the spiritual life, the action of grace can be distinguished from pious illusion.

SLG Press Contemplative Poetry 14 St Frideswide, or Frithuswith, was an important saint during the medieval period and is patron of the City of Oxford. Her shrine was a place of pilgrimage but was destroyed during the Reformation and since then she has largely disappeared from view. Embertide is not a simple retelling of her biography, but engages with all the different versions of her life and seeks to understand her importance in the past and her significance today. It is liminal, elusive and delicately balanced; a kind of spiritual pilgrimage towards understanding elements of faith. Spiritual pilgrimage is a lifetime journey of rethinking and revisiting our perceptions and understanding, just as saints’ written lives have been refashioned to appeal to different audiences at different points in time. This poem is the outcome of one such spiritual pilgrimage, and each reader will encounter it differently, on their own terms. Our saints, in their afterlives, are still travelling, and we follow in their wake.

Fairacres Publications 55 For centuries theology and spirituality have been divorced, as if mysticism were for the saintly and theological study for the practical but unsaintly (to paraphrase Thomas Merton). So Archpriest Louth writes: ‘The theologian is one who prays, and one who thinks about the object of his loving prayer. So, part of the formation of a theologian is the study of spirituality, not just as another branch of the history of doctrine, or whatever, but as a deepening of their own life of prayer.’ This book seeks to show that theology—even the rigorous ‘academic’ theology—and spirituality belong together and, isolated, suffer disintegration and atrophy. It does this by suggesting that contemplation lies at the heart of both theology and spirituality, and includes an examination of the place of the contemplative in the thought of Diadochus of Photicé.

Fairacres Publications 128 In recent decades there has been a notable renewal of interest in St Isaac the Syrian, a seventh-century master of the ascetic life. This selection of short sayings is part of Dr Brock’s work on a fuller, long-neglected manuscript which he is making available to English readers. Each sentence holds the mind steadily in the light of a truth about the spiritual life. St Isaac’s vivid images drawn directly from nature, husbandry and general human experience speak for themselves and draw us to penitence and prayer.