Description
"The prayer of the heart is not a goal to be reached. It is a manner of being, a manner of listening and moving forward."
"Lord, teach us to pray!" is a cry that stirs in the heart of every believer. Yet for those of us who wish to practise a deepening of prayer responsibly, we need an experienced guide, someone who has already passed through the landscape we are preparing to enter and knows its paths and pitfalls. Such guides are hard to find, however, which is why reliable books are such a blessing.
Bishop Erik Varden, himself a renowned spiritual writer, found this beautiful book in a Parisian bookshop. What was then a poorly bound edition has long since come apart. Yet no single text, he says, had helped him to pray more. Now translated into English by Bishop Varden, this brief treatise by a Carthusian monk offers an excellent guide to the "prayer of the heart", a prayer that breaks open our hearts and transforms our being as we dare to aspire to "become participants of the divine nature".
"I rejoice, simply, to recommend with all my heart this little book. It opened my eyes to ‘the boundless riches of Christ’; it pierced my heart with the light of a trust I had previously only known notionally … because its author speaks with authority, of things he knows." (Bishop Varden)
About the Authors
Dom André Poisson was born Étienne Poisson at Douce, in Maine-et-Loire, on 28 February 1923. He made his first profession at La Grande Chartreuse on 2 February 1948 and his solemn profession on 6 October 1953. He was ordained a priest on 13 March 1954. In 1967 he was elected Prior and General of the Order, dedicating himself to the aggiornamento of the Order following the indications of the Second Vatican Council. He resigned in 1997 and was sent to be Prior at the Charterhouse of the Transfiguration (in the USA). In 1999 he went to Vedana, Italy as Chaplain to Carthusian nuns. He returned to La Grande Chartreuse in May 2001, and died there on 20 April 2005.
Bishop Erik Varden OCSO is a monk and bishop, born in Norway in 1974. In 2002, after ten years at the University of Cambridge, he joined Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Charnwood Forest. Pope Francis named him bishop of Trondheim in 2019.
