The Way of Prayer

This acclaimed commentary on Saint Teresa of Avila's classic work, Way of Perfection, discusses the various forms of Christian prayer, with an emphasis on Teresa's meditation on the Our Father. The author, a renowned expert on Carmelite spirituality, includes many quotations from Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross, which have been conformed to the most current authorized translations.

Teresa of Avila reformed the Carmelite order in the sixteenth century. Seeing Teresa in deep prayer, her first companions asked her to teach them how to pray. The apostles made the same request of Jesus: "Teach us to pray." Jesus answered by teaching the Our Father. Teresa responded to her sisters by writing Way of Perfection, which contains an extended commentary upon the Lord's Prayer. As Jesus did in his Sermon on the Mount, Teresa, in her Way of Perfection, first teaches the necessary dispositions for prayer before teaching the different kinds of prayer.

Named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970, Teresa united not only prayer and the apostolate, but contemplation and the apostolate, for contemplation is a particular kind of prayer that tends toward the most sublime intimacy with our Lord.