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Christian persons today might seek spiritual development and ponder the benefit of mindfulness exercises but also maintain concerns if they perceive such exercises to originate from other religious traditions. Such persons may not be aware of a long tradition of meditation practice in Christianity that promotes personal growth. This spiritual tradition receives a careful formulation by Christian mo- nastic authors in the twelfth century. One such teaching on meditation is found in the treatise De consideratione written by St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) to Pope Eugene III (d. 1153). In textual passages where St. Bernard exhibits a clear concern for the mental health of the Pope (due to numerous ongoing ecclesial, political, and military problems), St. Bernard reminds Eugene III of his original monastic vocation and the meditation exercises associated with that vocation. The advice that St. Bernard gives to Eugene III can be received today in a way that provides a structure for Christian meditation practice which is relevant for personal develop- ment, spiritual direction, and civil psychotherapy that integrates a client’s spirituality into the course of treatment. St. Bernard thus might be interpreted as a teacher of a kind of Christian mindfulness that can benefit both a person’s mental health as well as a person’s relationship with God. Meditation as Spiritual Therapy examines the historical context of Bernard’s work, his purpose for writing it, as well as the numerous Christian sources he drew upon to formulate his teaching. Bernard’s teaching on the course of meditation itself is explored in depth and in dialogue with his other treatises, letters, and sermons. Lastly, a contemporary summary of Bernard’s teaching is provided with reflections concerning the relationship of this teaching to contemporary spiritual direction and spiritually integrated civil psychotherapy.

In this book, Deacon James Keating provides an opportunity for one spiritual director to introduce his mind to the minds of other directors with the hope that his ideas may season their own already developed method of direction. The book does not attend to all the possible realities a director may encounter within his or her training or within the daily execution of this ministry. The author wishes to share his approach to directing seminarians by reflecting upon themes and experiences which regularly appear within direction sessions. Spiritual direction certainly has some universal components to it. All directors want their directees to internalize a habit of prayer, to choose a life of remaining with God, to suffer the vulnerability necessary to know divine love and to then embody that love as heralds of the Gospel. But each director approaches his or her directees from within their own skin, from within a personality that is unique, and by way of a formation that reflects the unique attractions of each director and his or her own sufferings, failures, and fidelities. These unique embodiments no one writer can know or capture in a book. And so, this book simply begins a conversation that the author invites other directors to enter and add to according to their own insights. The spiritual life of those in seminary occupies the integrating center of a projected life of priestly ministry. Time needed to secure an interior life of prayer is one of the key reasons the Church demands years of formation before the celibate state is entered. Such a state in life is entered as a testimony to the reality that God lives and loves. In light of such love a man enters seminary to discern if he desires to surrender his whole life in response to God sharing His own. To live as a cleric without a vital interior life leaves a man in a state of meaninglessness. Instilling the virtue of prayer during priestly formation can help assure that celibate priesthood retains its inspiration and meaning throughout the life of a priest. Spiritual directors minister to assist a future priest to secure a lifetime habit of prayer so as to secure his commitment to communicate with the living God.

Although not well-known in the English-speaking world, Fr. Ambroise Gardeil, OP (1859-1931) was a Dominican of significant influence in French Catholic thought at the turn of the 20th century. Conservative theologians like Frs. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP, Michel Labourdette, OP, Jean-Hervé Nicolas, OP and many others hailed him as a careful expositor of the supernaturality of faith, a defender of the theological nature of rational apologetics, and a spiritual master. In his controversial Le Saulchoir: Une école de théologie, Fr. Marie-Dominique Chenu, OP praised Fr. Gardeil as an important Dominican initiator of reforms in historical theology, presenting the latter as a kind of precursor to one of the streams of what is now referred to historically as the “Nouvelle Théologie.” And one cannot read the words of Fr. Gardeil’s contemporary Fr. Antoine Lemonnyer, OP, without hearing echoes and re-echoes of common cause regarding our lofty spiritual vocation, resounding within the halls of the Saulchoir. With such a broad appeal, it is no surprise that in private correspondence, a young Yves Simon, writing to Jacques Maritain, referred to Fr. Gardeil as “The Great Gardeil.” The True Christian Life provides a thorough and stirring introduction to Fr. Gardeil’s work in spiritual theology. The volume was originally published posthumously through the collaboration of Fr. Gardeil’s nephew, Fr. Henri-Dominique Gardeil, OP and Jacques Maritain. Fr. Ambroise, prior to beginning work on his masterpiece on spiritual experience, La Structure de l'âme et l'expérience mystique, drafted nearly eight-hundred pages that would have set forth a full presentation of moral-ascetical theology. While drafting this massive work, his reflection on the soul’s receptive capacity for grace led him to the two-volume study, La Structure, and he never was able to finish his original designs for a comprehensive study of the Christian moral-spiritual life. Soon after his death, his nephew gathered several essays from the Revue thomiste and Revue de Jeunes, along with a complete-but-unpublished study on prayer. Drafting a lengthy introduction on the basis of Fr. Ambroise’s unpublished notes, Fr. Henri-Dominique assembled a volume of moral / spiritual theology that sets out the principles of many important themes: divinization through grace, Christian prudence /conscience, the virtue of religion, devotion, and prayer. In his In memoriam written after the passing of Fr. Gardeil, Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange emphasized Fr. Gardeil’s ability to meditate on a given topic’s central principles, like someone who sees the highest peaks that give structure to the entire mountain range of theology. In this volume, the reader will find a clear and rhetorically striking presentation of the central mysteries of the spiritual life, presented with stirring and beautiful rhetoric by a theological master from the Thomist tradition.