•Great Books for Great Lent • Chiefly Lenten • Books on Prayer • Books on Fasting • Books on Almsgiving

On Prayer
The inner significance of Lent is best summed up in the triad of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. To quote Bishop Kallistos Ware, "Divorced from prayer and from the reception of the holy sacraments, unaccompanied by acts of compassion, our fasting becomes pharisaical or even demonic. It leads, not to contrition and joyfulness, put to pride, inward tension and irritability."

That said, here are our picks (among the myriad available) On Prayer...

Orthodox Prayer Life
Matthew the Poor
A contemporary Egyptian monastic points the way to those who desire, and are willing to sacrifice for, an existence formed by the practice of unceasing prayer.

Beginning to Pray
Anthony Bloom
"The day when God is absent, when He is silent - that is the beginning of prayer."

Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Personal Prayer According to the Patristic Tradition
Gabriel Bunge, O.S.B.
Written by a Benedictine monk and patristic scholar, this book belongs in the hands of anyone who seriously desires a life of prayer.

Prayer for Beginners
Peter Kreeft
A clear and eminently reasonable approach to prayer for people not very good at praying.

How to Pray
Jean-Nicholas Grou
An instruction which gives equal weight to grace, personal effort, interior intention, outward acts and prescribed forms of prayer.

Prayer: Living With God
Simon Tugwell
Focuses on our relationship with God and ways we can learn to enjoy and appreciate that relationship through prayer.

Prayer in Practice
Simon Tugwell
An unblinkingly honest and even humorous treatise on different forms of prayer.

Three Prayers
Olivier Clement
A meditation on three of the most essential prayers of the Christian tradition.

On the Prayer of Jesus
Ignatius Brianchaninov
Blunt and trustworthy advice about the right and wrong ways to approach the practice of the Jesus Prayer.

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