A Second Book from City a Desert Press

The Name Above Every Name: The Revelation of Christ in the Heart

The Jesus Prayer and the Life of Communion

I am grateful to share that The Name Above Every Name: The Jesus Prayer and the Life of Communion is now available, the second volume in a series exploring the wisdom of the Christian desert and the recovery of the inner life.

The first book, The Monastic Heart and the Future of the Church: Recovering the Inner Kingdom in an Age of Fragmentation, began with a conviction that has only deepened for me: the renewal of the Church begins in the human heart. The monastic heart is not the possession of monks and nuns, nor is it primarily a matter of withdrawing from the world. It is the heart gathered from fragmentation, turned toward the One Thing Necessary, and gradually made spacious enough to receive God and neighbor in love.

The Name Above Every Name follows naturally from that beginning. If The Monastic Heart asks what kind of heart the Church needs, this second book asks how such a heart is formed.

Its answer is ancient and remarkably simple: the Name of Jesus.

The book enters into the tradition of the Jesus Prayer—Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me—not primarily as a technique or specialized form of Eastern Christian spirituality, but as a way of remaining in Christ. Drawing upon the Desert Fathers, the Philokalic tradition, and modern elders of the Church, it explores prayer of the heart, watchfulness, silence, repentance, mercy, and the gradual gathering of the whole person into communion with God.

At its deepest level, however, this is a book about presence.

We live in an age of extraordinary distraction. Our attention is continually drawn outward, divided among innumerable voices, anxieties, images, and demands. The Jesus Prayer leads us in another direction—not in flight from the world, but toward that hidden place where Christ already waits for us. The repetition of His Name becomes less an accumulation of words than a returning: a return of the mind to the heart, of desire to its true object, and of the person to communion.

Eventually even the words themselves point beyond themselves.

The Name gathers us into the presence of the One whom we name.

In this sense, The Name Above Every Name continues the movement begun in The Monastic Heart. The first book speaks of recovering the inner kingdom; the second enters more deeply into one of the great pathways by which the Fathers discovered that kingdom within themselves. The movement is from fragmentation toward recollection, from recollection toward prayer, and from prayer toward communion.

And the journey continues.

The third volume, Desire and Wonder: St. Isaac the Syrian and Living in the Embrace of Divine Eros, turns toward one of the great teachers of the Christian East and toward something even more fundamental: desire.

St. Isaac understood the spiritual life not principally as the management of religious obligations, but as the transformation of the human heart by its encounter with the overwhelming love of God. Asceticism, silence, tears, vigil, mercy, and prayer become comprehensible only when they arise from longing for the Beloved.

If The Monastic Heart is an invitation to recover the inner kingdom, and The Name Above Every Name teaches us to remain there with Christ, Desire and Wonder asks what happens when the heart begins to awaken to the beauty of the One it encounters there.

The movement of these books is therefore increasingly inward: from the monastic heart, to the Holy Name, to desire and wonder. Not toward an enclosed spirituality, but toward the discovery that the deeper we enter the heart, the more we find ourselves drawn into God—and, in Him, into communion with the whole world.

Perhaps this is what the desert has always sought to teach us.

The journey to God is not finally a journey elsewhere.

It is the awakening of the heart to the One who has been there all along.

The third volume in the series, Desire and Wonder: St. Isaac the Syrian and Living in the Embrace of Divine Eros, is expected to be available in mid to late September.