The Perfect Model for Christian Prayer

My little book ‘How to Pray’ had been commissioned by a Carmelite publishing house in Prague, as part of a pocket book series concentrating on different aspects of spirituality? I was delighted when it won the prize for the best spiritual book of 2004, and was then translated into twelve foreign languages. When I went to Prague to receive it I was asked to give a lecture on prayer. I was more than half way through it when I was interrupted by a rather angry looking parish priest. He was angry because there had been no mention of the Mass, It was difficult for me to answer, because he did not understand English, so I asked the interpreter to read out the words of the great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, who I had quoted at the beginning of the book. The words were these: - ‘The Mass should so form us that the whole of our lives become the Mass, the place where we continually offer ourselves to the Father’. This quotation not only summed what my little book had been written to achieve, but the much bigger book that I am working on at the moment –‘How to Pray the Christian way’.