Thank you for checking out this book by Theophania Publishing. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you soon. We have thousands of titles available, and we invite you to search for us by name, contact us via our website, or download our most recent catalogues. The "spiritual life," just like every other kind of life or aspect of living and being and relating, begins in darkness and obscurity, long before any particular awareness has started to emerge. The bonds of living and relating are there long before we become consciously aware of them. And as we do become aware, we begin to explore and cultivate these bonds of living and relating, and then the journey of discovery, the adventure of seeking begins in earnest. Descriptions and studies of the spiritual journey, this adventure, abound, not surprisingly produced for the most part by those who most professionally attend to it, religious men and women and priests. But of course the project is common to all human beings, and, one way or another, more or less consciously and explicitly, we all fumble through it, through the varied ups and downs of a life-time. Some of the authors dealing with this aspect of human existence, particularly in the Christian context, seem to present an ordered progression, with predictable laws governing it and passing through characteristic "stages." But it is a fairly common experience that life is not always so flawlessly organised, that there are indeed ups and downs, twists and turns, and when we have every reason to believe that we are on a consistently ascending path, darkness and disenchantment may hit, and the whole project may come to appear as futile. Or, on the other hand, when all things seem to be going wrong, and the ground seems to have been pulled from under our feet, we are surprised by an unexpected gift of light. We are tempted to try and measure our progress, but we find that we are at a loss for a measure, a yardstick, that comparisons are not helpful, and we are in no position to make sense of the will, or plan, or logic of God with respect to our life. The nature of a posthumous collection of studies and reflections on the various aspects of a life aimed at deepening and realising a contemplative love at the heart of everything we live through, of diverse articles on varied aspects of this often unpredictable journey, perhaps corresponds more closely to the fits and starts of a real spiritual life than what many a systematic treatise would have us imagine. In fact, we shall plunge early on into the puzzling setbacks systematicians of the spiritual life usually place further along the road, after the glow of one's "honeymoon" with God has worn off and the initial euphoria and enthusiasm have run out of steam. We will encounter the "'familiar figure' we all know - indeed whom we meet in ourselves...'the time-filler whose sole effort seems to be to avoid getting down to the job and whose singular joy is a well-stretched coffee break and a long lunch hour.'" Acedia seems to be "the Noon-Day Devil" most pilgrims on the way struggle with for the longest stretches: the fertile ground in which all distractions, temptations, discouragement and habitual sins flourish.