Alleluia Is The Song Of The Desert

“This is no simple ‘how-to’ book, but rather a profound challenge to consider a totally different kind of life. Lawrence Hart approaches these life changes from several different angles—each leading to the deep kind of knowing that is God’s gift to the true seeker.” —from the Foreword by Jean Dalby Clift For thousands of years, deserts have been geographical centers of spiritual formation and direct encounter with God. In Christian spirituality, men and women seeking the kind of purification that leads to wisdom of the heart have sought out the desert places. But the desert is also a state of mind or consciousness, a spiritual practice, an inner place where we come to have a first-hand experience of God. Designed for use by small groups or individuals, the Lenten meditations in this book lead us to this interior desert. The forty days of Lent are a time of metanoia (repentance), of emptying our hearts so that they can be filled with that love and presence of Christ we celebrate at Easter. Entering Lent, then, can be imagined as entering the silence of a vast and empty desert that leads to an experience of “alleluia.” What is essential in the spiritual life is, of course, not that we find a dry and sand-blown country far from any geographical city, but rather a desert place of the heart where spiritual transformation can occur. Lent, with its emphasis on taking spiritual inventory, repentance, renunciation, and preparation for Easter, is just such a desert. In fact, we can appropriately think of the forty days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday as a Lenten desert.

Entering Lent can be imagined as entering the silence of a vast and empty desert that leads to an experience of alleluia. The Lenten meditations in this book lead us to our own interior desert.

“A lively memoir mixed with short biographies of appealing religious outcasts.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY With untested ideals and a thirst for adventure, Christiana Peterson and her family moved to an intentional Christian farming community in the rural Midwest. It sounded like a simple and faithful way to follow Jesus, not to mention a great place to raise kids. In Mystics and Misfits, Peterson discovers that community life is never really simple and that she needs resources beyond her own to weather the anxiety and exhaustion of trying to save a dying farm and a floundering congregation. She turns to Christian mystics like Francis of Assisi, Simone Weil, and Dorothy Day to find sustenance for the everyday struggles and unique hardships of community life. With a contemplative’s spirit and poet’s eye, Peterson leads readers into an encounter with the God of the wild mystics and the weird misfits.

Thomas Merton is one of the most influential spiritual figures of the twentieth century. A Trappist monk, he was also a bestselling writer whose works are regarded as spiritual classics. Originally published under the title The Climate of Monastic Prayer, Where Prayer Flourishes is his final work. It is full of accessible and practical teaching for anyone that wants to explore prayer to its full dimensions. Merton argues that prayer flourishes best in the desert. Here, he shows how to find the desert in the midst of the busy world. Where Prayer Flourishes will open a treasury of teaching about prayer to a wider audience.

In this classic text, Thomas Merton offers valuable guidance for prayer. He brings together a wealth of meditative and mystical influences–from John of the Cross to Eastern desert monasticism–to create a spiritual path for today. Most important, he shows how the peace contacted through meditation should not be sought in order to evade the problems of contemporary life, but can instead be directed back out into the world to affect positive change. Contemplative Prayer is one of the most well-known works of spirituality of the last one hundred years, and it is a must-read for all seeking to live a life of purpose in today’s world. In a moving and profound introduction, Thich Nhat Hanh offers his personal recollections of Merton and compares the contemplative traditions of East and West.

This guide to monastic prayer, written in 1968 and thus turning out to be Thomas Merton’s final testament to us, is now available in a new edition commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of his death. While he wrote it for other monastics, all seekers drawn to explore the full dimensions of prayer will be enriched by his words, especially as they take on added meaning in today’s dizzying world. The climate in which monastic prayer flowers is that of the desert, where human comfort is absent, where the secure routines of the “earthly city” offer no support, and where prayer must be sustained by God in the purity of faith.

A Grammar of Holy Mystery is about Christian spirituality. It is about mysticism as a firsthand encounter with the presence of God—unfathomable, unnamable, mysterious, fulfilling. It is about classical Christianity, the way of transforming truth found in Christ, taught in Scripture, lived by saints, sages, and mystics, and passed on as a sacred trust through the centuries. Being neither liberal nor conservative, but simply Christian, it is ecumenical in spirit. For those traumatized by harsh or shallow churches, A Grammar of Holy Mystery points the way out and shows the way to a faith that renews the mind, restores the spirit, and gladdens the heart.