Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, this book will help you realize the Ignatian goal of “finding God in all things.” Filled with relatable  examples, humorous stories, and anecdotes from the heroic and inspiring lives of Jesuit saints and average priests and brothers, The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything will enrich your everyday life with spiritual guidance and history.

    This meditation on the spiritual life has inspired readers from Thomas More and St. Ignatius Loyola to Thomas Merton and Pope John Paul I. Written by the Augustinian monk Thomas à Kempis between 1420 and 1427, it contains clear instructions for renouncing wordly vanities and locating eternal truths. No book has more explicitly and movingly described the Christian ideal:

    Barry, S.J., shares his unique understanding of the Spiritual Exercises and demonstrates how they can benefit the ordinary persons relationship with God. "Finding God in All Things" gives new life to the spirituality of St. Ignatius and illuminates the transforming power of the Exercises. With over 50,000 copies sold of the first edition, this timely new edition offers todays readers a clear presentation of the themes and contemporary practice of this classic spiritual retreat.

    Ignatius of Loyola is the core work of religious formation for members of the Society of Jesus, the single largest religious order within the Roman Catholic Church. For four and a half centuries  in many thousands of editions in all languages, The Exercises have embodied fundamental spiritual principles essential to authentic Christian living. The mystical insight informing Ignatius's own relationship with God--which he distilled in The Exercises--is that the divine love of God is providentially present in all the details of our existence. Here Ignatius shows how the faithful can be joined to God in all things, according to the Jesuit motto, Ad majorem Dei gloriam, "For the greater glory of God."

    For de Caussade, living in the moment meant having a complete trust and faith in God, for God's will defined and guided all things. The practical advice contained in his guidebook for the faithful was originally a series of letters written for the Nuns of the Visitation of Nancy, meant to help them navigate the confusing and difficult work of spiritual enlightenment, and comes together here in two distinct parts, one for the theoretical foundations of abandoning oneself to the present moment and one with practical advice on how to live such a life. Though a departure from the standard Christian perspective, Abandonment to Divine Providence remains a deeply spiritual work with a message that many Christians may find freeing and inspiring.

    It is full of profound lessons and words of wisdom on sanctifying the present moment, the effect of conduct on belief, how to pray and meditate, and making up for the past.Paperback

    

    Using everyday language to explain difficult theological concepts, Teresa of Avila compares the contemplative life to a castle with seven chambers. Tracing the passage of the soul through each successive chamber, she draws a powerful picture of the path toward spiritual perfection. It is the most sublime and mature of Teresa's works, offering profound and inspiring reflections on such subjects as self-knowledge, humility, detachment, and suffering.One of the most celebrated works on mystical theology in existence, as timely today as when St. Teresa of Avila wrote it centuries ago, this is a treasury of unforgettable maxims on self-knowledge and fulfillment.

    Designed to help readers recognize, ritualize, reflect on, and reorient themselves.

    To help us on our way, Coutinho introduces us to people in various world religions—from Hindu friends to Buddhist teachers to St. Ignatius of Loyola—who have shaped his spiritual life and made possible his deep, personal relationship with God.

    Foster offers a warm, compelling, and sensitive primer on prayer, helping us to understand, experience, and practice it in its many forms-from the simple prayer of beginning again to unceasing prayer. He clarifies the prayer process, answers common misconceptions, and shows the way into prayers of contemplation, healing, blessing, forgiveness, and rest.Coming to prayer is like coming home, Foster says. "Nothing feels more right, more like what we are created to be and to do. Yet at the same time we are confronted with great mysteries. Who hasn't struggled with the puzzle of unanswered prayer? Who hasn't wondered how a finite person can commune with the infinite Creator of the universe? Who hasn't questioned whether prayer isn't merely psychological manipulation after all? We do our best, of course, to answer these knotty questions but when all is said and done, there is a sense in which these mysteries remain unanswered and unanswerable . . . At such times we must learn to become comfortable with the mystery."Foster shows how prayer can move us inward into personal transformation, upward toward intimacy with God, and outward to minister to others. He leads us beyond questions to a deeper understanding and practice of prayer, bringing us closer to God, to ourselves, and to our community.

    With Nouwen's guidance, we can reorient our lives and open the door to true spiritual transformation.Henri Nouwen, the world-renowned spiritual guide and counselor, understood the spiritual life as a journey of faith and transformation that is deepened by accountability, community, and relationships. Though he counseled many people during his lifetime, his principles of spiritual direction were never written down. Now two of his longtime students, Michael Christensen and Rebecca Laird, have taken his famous course in spiritual direction and supplemented it with his unpublished writings to create the definitive work on Nouwen's thoughts on the Christian life. Stories, readings, and thematically organized questions for reflection and guided journal writing provide an unparalleled resource for spiritual direction, both for individuals and for small groups.

    It is the art of “practicing the presence of God in one single act that does not end.” He often stated that it is God who paints Himself in the depths of our souls. We must merely open our hearts to receive Him and His loving presence. As a humble cook, Brother Lawrence learned an important lesson through each daily chore: The time he spent in communion with the Lord should be the same, whether he was bustling around in the kitchen—with several people asking questions at the same time—or on his knees in prayer. He learned to cultivate the deep presence of God so thoroughly in his own heart that he was able to joyfully exclaim, “I am doing now what I will do for all eternity. I am blessing God, praising Him, adoring Him, and loving Him with all my heart.” This unparalleled classic has given both blessing and instruction to those who can be content with nothing less than knowing God in all His majesty and feeling His loving presence throughout each simple day.

    They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares the way for this, or results from this.’This is the key statement of ‘Miracles’, in which C. S. Lewis shows that a Christian must not only accept but rejoice in miracles as a testimony of the unique personal involvement of God in his creation.Using his characteristic lucidity and wit to develop his argument, Lewis challenges the rationalists, agnostics and deists on their own grounds and provides a poetic and joyous affirmation that miracles really do occur in our everyday lives

    Christians and non-Christians alike have joined in praising it as a notable successor in the meditative tradition of St. John of the Cross, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the medieval mystics, while others have compared Merton's reflections with those of Thoreau. New Seeds of Contemplation seeks to awaken the dormant inner depths of the spirit so long neglected by Western man, to nurture a deeply contemplative and mystical dimension in our lives. For Merton, "Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the soil of freedom, spontaneity and love."