Books by John Main

Offers insights into the kind of prayer that enables us to bring the whole of our being to God, and to let the power released into the world by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus flow through our hearts and into the world.

Many thousands of people across the world have found their spiritual lives enriches by the daily practice of Christian meditation, the method of silent prayer taught by Benedictine monk John Main. It is a tradition which draws on the ancient wisdom of the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the early Christian Desert Fathers.John Main wrote several books on contemplative prayer before he died in 1982, but this collection is the only one to draw the essence of all his teachings into one volume. Paul Harris has devotedly selected the essential extracts from each of John Main's works and arranged them here in an attractive and practical daily readings format.

"Learning to meditate is the most practical thing in the world. You require only one quality when you begin. That is seriously to want to learn to mediate."The central message of the New Testament is that there is really only one prayer and that this prayer is the prayer of Christ. It is a prayer that continues in our heart day and night. John Main describes this prayer as the stream of love that flows constantly between Jesus and his Father. This stream of love is the Holy SpiritIt is John Main's conviction that is it the most important task for any fully human life that we should become as open as possible to this stream of love. In order for us to do this we must learn a way that is a way of silence - of stillness - and this by a discipline that is most demanding.John Main talks about the many aspects of silent prayer: the way of the mantra, leaving distraction behind, fullness of life in love and silence. A striking feature of the book is its emphasis on simplicity, on transcending self-consciousness and moving beyond "techniques" of prayer.