The Silence of God: Meditations on Prayer

If you want an in-depth treatment of prayer, an existential encounter, not at "how to," I recommend this book highly--

This book is extraordinary. It opens us to the possibillity for totally new ways to approach God, faith, and the life of the spirit. This opening is achieved by showing the critical difference between talking about God and talking to God, a God who is present to us in a silence pregnant with listening. This key entry point allows Carse to reveal new meanings of gift, receiving, property, division, and world. This book should be valuable to Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists alike. It is especially helpful to Christians as we have a faith so overladen with a deadly and moralizing familiarity. One powerful benefit for me in Carse's book is that he opened me up to powerfully new ways of receiving the parables of Jesus and to their intended gift of a disturbing, disorienting suprise. So many of the parables have been reduce to moral platitutdes. Moralizing the parables hides their shocking truth from us, blinding us to the astonishment of an entirely new way of seeing and receiving the world, a seeing and receiving that I think Jesus may have intended with his parables of the Kingdom.

A careful read-and it requires concentration, Carse reveals no interest in any mamby-pamby feel-good horsefoolery here-gains one of the rarest rewards in literature: not just the complex made simple, but the delicious experience of having something you thought was only simple turn abundantly complex. Another kudo: no particular religious persuasion, synod or theological bias seems to have sway. Which is not to suggest this isn't about God and talking with Him; rather, it's only about that.

Don't be put off by the title! This is about God listening. Because God, and you and I, can listen only when we are silent. The silence of God is what opens us to pray, gives us permission and encouragement. Praying into the silence of God gives us what we pray for: the presence of God.