Product Description

For people drawn to a life of contemplation, the dawning of luminous awareness in a mind full of clutter is deeply liberating. In the third of his best-selling books on Christian contemplative life, Martin Laird turns his attention to those who are well-settled in their contemplative practice.

An Ocean of Light speaks both to those just entering the contemplative path and to those with a maturing practice of contemplation. Gradually the practice of contemplation lifts the soul, freeing it from the blockages that introduce confusion about the mystery we call God. In the course of a lifetime of inner silencing, the flower of awareness emerges: a living realization that we have never been separate from God or from the rest of humanity while we each fully become what each of us is created to be. in contemplation we become so silent before God that the “before” drops away.

Laird draws from a wide and diverse range of writers – St Augustine, Evagrius Ponticus, and St Teresa of Avila, to David Foster Wallace. Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Wright – to ground his insight in an ancient practice and give it a voice in contemporary language. With his characteristic lyricism and gentleness, Laird guides readers through new challenges of contemplative life, such as making ourselves the focus of our own contemplative project; dealing with old pain; transforming the isolation of loneliness and depression into a liberating solidarity with all who suffer; and the danger of using a spiritual practice as a strategy to acquire and control