Mysteries of the Lord’s Prayer: Wisdom from the Early Church, John Gavin, SJ, The Catholic University of America Press, 2021 (ISBN 9780813233826), xxiv + 168 pp., pb 24.95

A former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey once wrote that prayer and life are ‘properly inseparable’—that everyday existence is shaped by the way one prays, and vice versa. Ramsey then proceeds to assert that Christian worship is nothing less than ‘idolatrous perversion unless it is reflected in compassion towards the world’(Be Still and Know: A Study in the Life of Prayer[Fount, 1982], p. 120).The rather timeless point he is making is that proper worship of Godis defined by a concomitant concern for the well-being of anything the worshipper can and does encounter, a strong demand that Christians have been living out, and reflecting upon, since almost the very beginning. John Gavin’s excellent new book considers the venerable patchwork of patristic reflection on the Lord’s prayer as pregnant with such significance for spirituality and ethical action. According to Gavin (who is an associate professor at the College of the Holy Cross), the fathers knew that the ‘Christian lives in the world and has received the mission to transform it from within’, a posture profoundly ‘supernatural’ (Mysteries of the Lord’s Prayer, p. 10) and nourished by the inexhaustible wells of the Lord’s words.