Deep Conversion, Deep Prayer

Our book club loved this book and the common response was that it needs to be re-read every couple of months - it was that good.

I love Fr. Thomas Dubay's writtings. In this book you will learn some simple and practical advice on a deeper spiritual life with God.

Thomas Dubay is a wonderful author and guide to the spiritual life. He gives clear, concise directions and guidelines on how to make your way through intricacies of mystical prayer. He uses Scripture, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila to authenticate his guide. A wonderful book for anyone who is trying to advance in the spiritual life.

This book reads more like a roadmap and guides it's readers out of spiritual malaise, complacency and indifference and into an examination of one's soul, conscience and relationship to others, to God. If you desire to remove the stumbling blocks to God, here's a great tool. It's easy to read, refreshingly blunt and to the point. I highlighted half the book.

In a world in which mediocrity seems to be the Plague, it becomes too easy to fall into complacency, to give up in disgust, or to founder in frustration. Thomas Dubay reminds us that the solution to the mediocrity that surrounds us lies as close to us as our willingness to remove mediocrity from our own hearts. A monk friend once told me a story about a young monk who had visited a great teacher of monasticism and spirituality. "I want to be a saint," he told the old monk. "I pray and I try...when will it happen?" The old monk suddenly picked up a stick and began chasing the young monk, screaming, "Now! Now!" Father Dubay convicts the reader with that same, intense, "Now!" He goes the further step by providing, not a stick, but a ruler by which to measure and follow a straight line which, with the help of God's grace, leads to what can be the only complete response to Jesus' command: "Be converted and accept the gospel!" His writing is engaging and straightforward. His examples are direct and taken from everyday experience. His advice is simple. The question is, will the reader take it, and engage his will to achieve the simple and reasonable, yet awesome? Or will the reader prefer to abandon his will to the easy, though irrational and mediocre?