There is wine in this cup -- the wine of spiritual joy. I am restless, uneasy, disillusioned, troubled. My heart has no deep and abiding contentment. I wander into fruitless seedbeds of sorrow, with a proud dejectedness and a cheerless weariness. But He puts the wine-cup to my lips, and I rejoice. For there is the peace of God here, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and the victory over the world, and the sure and invincible hope of glory! Water, milk, wine -- and I may have them, now and here, without money and without price! I am at the source of every gracious and glorious thing; and my part is simply to receive my Lord's munificence, and to say farewell to my hunger and thirst, and to be eternally satisfied!

Many thousands of people across the world have found their spiritual lives enriches by the daily practice of Christian meditation, the method of silent prayer taught by Benedictine monk John Main. It is a tradition which draws on the ancient wisdom of the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the early Christian Desert Fathers.John Main wrote several books on contemplative prayer before he died in 1982, but this collection is the only one to draw the essence of all his teachings into one volume. Paul Harris has devotedly selected the essential extracts from each of John Main's works and arranged them here in an attractive and practical daily readings format.>