Close to the Heart is a comprehensive guide that opens a world of imaginative yet simple ways to approach personal prayer. Breaking through boundaries and stereotypes, best-selling author Margaret Silf shows personal prayer to be a journey into reflective living as she invites readers to experience prayer as a natural, organic process. Silf's stories and suggestions, drawn from contemporary life, are solid and practical. She explains, "This book sets the scene for deep personal prayer by suggesting ways of inner stillness and reflective living. It tempts the reader to search for 'clues to the kingdom' on the sidewalks of his or her own hometown."

Also available by Margaret Silf:

 Compass Points

  Inner Compass

  Going on Retreat
 

Margaret Silf travels widely in her work as a retreat director and speaker on Ignatian spirituality. Her books include Close to the Heart: A Practical Approach to Personal Prayer (Loyola Press) and The Gift of Prayer: Embracing the Sacred in the Everyday (Bluebridge).

"This is an excellent book on prayer and its relationship to every aspect of life. Writing of ordinary things in simple, lucid prose, . . . the author helps us glimpse God, seamlessly woven into earthy experience."
1/1/2000 - By   Gerald W. Hughes, S.J.

"Silf's substantial but easily read book is neither esoteric nor condescending. She ably demonstrates that . . . prayer is natural to us and not the practice of a professional elite."
1/1/2000 - By   Ablan McCoy, The Tablet

"[Silf] has a great gift . . . She never skirts real life with its questions, fears, doubts, and desires. She doesn't clean anything up and make it 'spiritual and holy,' for she sees all of life as spiritual and holy."
1/1/2000 - By   Janet Schaeffler, Office of Religious Education, Archdiocese of Detroit

" . . . one of the most talented spiritual writers."
1/1/2000 - By   Margaret Hebblethwaite, The Tablet

Margaret Silf provides us with an excellent tool to enhance our prayer life and begin the process of seeing all of the experiences of our daily life as the material for meaningful prayer. One of the things this book so ably communicates is that for the Christian prayer should be a very natural part of our life – not something that we have to work up or agonize over. There are times when we will labor in prayer, but this book will help prayer become an even more meaningful aspect of your spiritual journey.
12/1/2002 - By   Columbia Baptist Conference