Approach to Prayer

by Hubert Van Zeller

"Prayer must necessarily involve a discipline, but it need not involve a system...In our prayer we must return to the primary purpose of what we are trying to we are trying to bring worship to God. The greatest act of worship that man can give to God is to refer back to him what God has already given. Man has nothing of his own to offer, nothing that has not been lent by God."
Almost everyone who has believed in God has wondered how to pray to him. But in the same way that no two relationships are identical, no two people's prayer life with God are identical. More important than praying perfectly is praying diligently, with reliance on God's grace, and a readiness to "remain in whatever state of spirituality God chooses to allow." By uniting penance, confidence, and humility to prayer, man will avoid the snares of the devil and come to greater union with God.
This book is not for those seeking a step-by-step guide to the interior life of prayer. But it is for those who desire to do everything they can to come close to God. By laying out the principles of prayer, Van Zeller provides both an understandable education for those who have just begun to think about prayer, as well as a helpful review and self-examination for those who have been praying for many years.

124 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

Dom Hubert van Zeller lived a life of spiritual adventure and holy renunciation. He was born in Egypt when that nation was a British protectorate, and entered the Benedictine novitiate at age nineteen. His soul thirsted for an austere way of life; at one point he even left the Benedictines to enter a strict Carthusian monastery. However, he soon returned to the Benedictines. A talented sculptor as well as a writer, his artworks adorn churches in Britain and the United States. He was a friend of the great Catholic writers Msgr. Ronald Knox and Evelyn Waugh, and is the author of Holiness: A Guide for Beginners, Holiness for Housewives, and Spirit of Penance, Path to God.

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just outstanding; one of those down-to-earth, published-just-before-Vatican-II texts (there are many of these, I'm finding, at least from English language authors and usually published by Sheed & Ward) you find in a used section and turns out to be nothing but treasure from start to finish. This is the most useful, practical, simple, and insightful manual on prayer I've read that isn't by Fr. Jacques Philippe. It might even be better than that, in spite of a rather technical learning curve with language. Dom van Zeller, a Benedictine, is very careful in laying out the Church's traditional schema for prayer and sometimes this means slowing down to absorb and reread more theologically-oriented sections, but as it proceeds one finds momentum building and it becomes much easier in the second half to insert one's own life situations into the framework, effects, and dangers he describes. I will be drawing from this one for the rest of my life.