Renew The Church! – website and Blog

The first book I knew I must write was a description of the Truth that changed my life: there is a path, a process, away from the darkness and deceits of this world to something God had “in mind” from the beginning. Humanity, and the whole creation, were intended for beatitude in God Himself. That book I entitled, “The Ordinary Path to Holiness.” In researching and writing that book, I discovered another Truth more surprising and unexpected than the first: Jesus condensed His perfectly designed path, created for us, into that beatitude in His perfect prayer, the “Our Father.”

I briefly presented that discovery in the “Ordinary Path” – in Chapter 5 – which shows a parallel of sorts, of my next book, “The Interior Liturgy of the Our Father,” with the journey St. Teresa of Avila found in her “Interior Castle.” The “Ordinary Path” and its three stages of the Interior Life provide the background understanding helpful if not necessary to understand the “Interior Liturgy,” and hence also the perfection of the prayer, the Our Father.

The prayer given us by Jesus is the perfect and complete prayer, and more. It is the standard and norm for all our prayers and our life of prayer, and still more. The prayer, the Our Father, prayed and lived in the Holy Spirit, guides us step by step in the journey to Life. The Our Father leads us from our very beginning, first awakened as Christians, to the summit of the maturity of Christian discipleship – blessed communion in God the Holy Trinity.

We need such a prayer, because we need to truly meet with God.This prayer is simple enough for a child and yet deep, intense and profound enough for a saint. It is easily kept in memory! Yet it cannot be exhausted of its meaning and significance to us in a million lifetimes.

The Our Father deserves a lifetime of meditation and it bears fruit for those willing to be open to its wisdom. The Our Father reveals, in its brief form, correspondence with the holy wisdom of traditional Catholic spirituality. This traditional spirituality has been followed for centuries in the Church by her saints, and is known as the “Three Ways” – the Purgative, the Illuminative and the Unitive stages of the interior life. The spiritual insights of Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Bernard of Clairvaux, and many other saints are found enclosed in this simple prayer. The structure of the Our Father is seen to correspond with the structure of our Holy Mass – the very “source and summit of the Christian life.” The Our Father reveals the will and the work of God in us – and as His divine work, inviting us to a saving participation and cooperation with Him, it is rightly called “a liturgy” – an Interior Liturgy at work in the soul.

EWTN accepted me to share this book on “Bookmark” with Doug Keck; below is the link to that interview.

Some links to other relevant pages on this website:

The blog article on the book, The Interior Liturgy of the Our Father

Links to the book at the Booksellers Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

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