Letters from the Desert: Two Centuries on Prayer in the Byzantine Tradition

Turn your Prayer from Something to do to Someone to MeetThe Desert Fathers of the East, the Church's first monks and hermits, left the tumult of the cities for the silence of the uninhabited spaces. But it wasn't solitude per se that they sought. It was a place - in the world and in their interior life - where they could practice contemplative prayer with focus and discipline. Their ultimate goal: divine intimacy.Many of the monks who followed after them wrote down their thoughts and observations. With "Letters from the Desert", Father Cliff Ermatinger guides us into the hearts and minds of those holy men. A collection of 200 brief yet profound quotes from the monks' writings, this book opens the Byzantine monastic experience to everyone seeking the same encounter with Christ.Those who do so via these selections will be richly rewarded. "My intent is not to come up with the correct answer to the question 'What is prayer?' writes Father Ermatinger in his Introduction, "but to assist the reader in [the] inward and upward journey toward the Face of Christ."