The Name Above Every Name

When the Heart Learns to Speak the Name That Never Ceases

“At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

— Philippians 2:10–11

There are books that seek to explain the spiritual life, and there are books that quietly invite us to enter it.

The Name Above Every Name was written with that second hope.

It grew slowly through months of prayer, years of reading the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the modern elders, and the hidden witnesses of the Christian East, but it finally found its voice during our recent retreat of the same name. Week after week we gathered not simply to study the Jesus Prayer but to stand before the mystery of the One whose Name it bears. Again and again the conversation returned to a single realization: the Jesus Prayer is not first a method. It is not a technique. It is not even primarily a discipline. It is a relationship. It is the cry of the heart awakened to the living Christ.

That is the burden of this book.

In an age overflowing with information yet starving for communion, we do not need another spirituality built upon mastering religious practices. We need to rediscover the Person who stands at the center of every authentic prayer. The holy Name is precious not because of the words themselves but because they reveal the One who alone can heal the fragmented human heart.

In many ways, this volume is the natural companion to The Monastic Heart. That first book sought to uncover the deepest wound of our age—the fragmentation of the human person—and to suggest that the wisdom of the desert remains one of God’s great gifts for the renewal of the Church. Yet every diagnosis ultimately points beyond itself. Healing has a face. Renewal has a Name.

That Name is Jesus Christ.

The Fathers never separated ascetic struggle from love for Christ. Silence was never an end in itself. Stillness was never an escape. Tears were never sought for their own sake. Every struggle, every act of watchfulness, every hidden battle of the heart existed for one reason alone: to remove whatever prevented the soul from standing before Christ with simplicity, wonder, and love.

The Jesus Prayer gathers all of this into a single breath.

It teaches us that prayer is not something we accomplish but Someone into whose life we are gradually drawn. As the holy Name descends from the lips into the heart, it slowly reshapes the entire person. Our thoughts begin to change. Our loves begin to change. Even our suffering begins to change. We discover that beneath all the noise, beneath every fear, beneath every false identity we have constructed, Christ has been waiting quietly within us all along.

Perhaps this explains why the desert tradition has never ceased speaking to every generation. It refuses to flatter the ego, yet it never crushes the person. It exposes our illusions only so that we may discover the One who knows us more deeply than we know ourselves. The Fathers do not hand us another burden to carry. They place us before Christ.

That has always been my deepest hope.

If these pages accomplish anything, I pray they will leave the reader thinking less about the book itself and more about the beauty of the Lord whose Name it proclaims. If, after closing its final page, someone finds themselves quietly whispering, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me,” then the book will have fulfilled its purpose.

Everything else is secondary.

For the Christian life has never been about becoming experts in spirituality. It has always been about becoming lovers of Christ.

And there is no greater gift than to spend a lifetime learning to speak the Name that heaven itself never ceases to adore.

• Release Date August 6, 2026 Feast of the Transfiguration