At Home with Jesus: Contemplation and Scripture

Contemplation is a gift to us all. We see it in a baby’s fascination with its toes, in a child absorbed in playing in the sand, in our own gazing upon a magnificent sunset. Contemplation is ‘being with’, sitting in the presence of another. And contemplative prayer is, in the words of Teresa of Avila, ‘nothing else than a close sharing between friends’. Tom O'Hara draws our attention to contemplation as a way of praying that is given to everyone. He explores in rich detail the scriptural basis of contemplation, and encourages the reader to pray in union with the prayer of Jesus, of Paul and the great contemplatives of the Christian tradition. All Christian prayer - the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus’s Gethsemane prayer, that of contemplatives, and our own - is shown to have a simple profound unity. This book invites us to recognize this gift in ourselves and to experience its deepening through a contemplative reading of its text.