​Newly published books about silence and meditation as a spiritual discipline and contemplative living. Latest at the top.
Sensing God:
Learning to Meditate During Lent
by Laurence Freeman, Director of WCCM
​ Laurence Freeman introduces 'Christian Meditation', as taught by John Main, OSB, as a way to enter the desert experience. As well as instructions, guidance and support it offers 46 daily reflections on the Gospels, highlighting their continued relevance for modern living. Through this ascetic discipline, we learn to nurture the silence within. Sensing God can be used to enter into the desert experience in any liturgical season and through the three liturgical years.
Meditators on Meditation & Marriage:
the experiences of those who do both
by various contributors from WCCM
The contributors to this volume follow a contemplative practice and are also in relationships of deep commitment with another person. They speak of the challenges and lessons that both of these pilgrimages can bring, as well as the surprises and inexpressible joy. Not shying away from marriage breakdown and divorce, each relationship is revealed as unique; as a gift and an opportunity to grow, held by the stillness and simplicity of meditation – the work of love.
Just Turn Up!:
the meditator's Companion, a practical guide
by Julie Roberts
This book is a walk with an aspiring meditator who began meditation at an introductory programme and is now encountering roadblocks along the way. First, there are doubts and uncertainties that stem from a lifetime of conditioning. Then there are challenges that arise from life. Roberts accompanies meditators with gentle compassion and wisdom that flow from personal experience on her own journey. Her reflections are reassuring and the practical questions that follow help to understand meditation as a journey calling for commitment which bears fruit in its own time. 
Sacred Seasons: A Year of Meditations
by Beverly Lanzetta
Sacred Seasons is a collection of spiritual wisdom drawn from Beverly Lanzetta's expressive writings. As a daily practice, the meditative entries call us into living light of the Divine, encouraging us to slow down and savour the gift of sacred time. It is hoped that the meditations in this book will be a touch point with the Holy Spirit, an opening into the world on the other side of the precious veil that conceals the holy and the beautiful.
The Monastic Heart: 50 Simple Practices for a Contemplative and Fulfilling Life
by Joan Chittister
This book carries wisdom of the monastic spiritual tradition into the 21st century. At a time when people around the world are bearing witness to both human frailty and the endurance of the human spirit, this book invites readers to welcome this end of certainty and embrace a new beginning of faith. Without stepping foot in a monastery, like those before us we can become a deeper, freer self, a richer soul, so 'that in all things God may be glorified'.
Breath Prayer:
An Ancient Practice for the Everyday Sacred
by Christine Valtners Paintner
 For centuries the practice of breath prayer has helped centre people on the sacred in everyday life. Breath Prayer introduces us to this spiritual practice and offers beautiful poem-prayers for walking, , dressing, cleaning, silence, doing the dishes, community–breathing the divine into our daily lives. Over time these forty recitations become as natural as breathing, opening our hearts to the everyday sacred.
Poetica Divina: Poems to Redeem a Prose World
​by Sarah Bachelard
This book explores twelve contemporary poems in conversation with passages of scripture. With commentaries that nudge us to see differently, Bachelard's contemplative juxtaposition of unlikely texts, prompts us to make connections between our own life and the larger Life in which we live and move and have our being.  It is a book born of prayer that leads to prayer, with the capacity to challenge our minds, fire our hearts and transform our actions.
Contemplative Leaders: Personal Reflections 
by Members of the Bonnevaux Business Meditation Group 
A collection of personal reflections from leaders in the fields of business, public service, education, healthcare and other professions, who meditate.
​Each unique story tells of the challenges facing leaders today and how they are led through these challenges and uncertainties in the practice of meditation. 
Conversations with Silence:  
Rosetta Stone of the Soul
by Sally Longley
This is the next book for the Silence Reading Group, from September 2021.
For more info about joining the Silence Reading Group, please email.
Sally Longley, pastor, retreat leader and former president of the Australian Network for Spiritual Direction, invites you to tune the eyes and ears of your heart to the cadences of silence. It takes you to the Rosetta Stone of an ancient, forgotten language that some call God, or the soul. Immerse yourself in the silent realm of mystics, musicians, poets, and pilgrims as companions to explore the nuanced vocabulary of the worlds of silences.
A book about meditation for Children: 
Frankie the Still Fox
by Ernie Christie & Mary Hosking
In this book children make friends with Frankie and learn meditation along the way. It begins, "When you turn the pages of this book you will learn how to become still and silent. Even when the world around you is so noisy and busy and distracted, you, like Frankie, can choose another way of being and learn to be attentive. By being still, really still and being silent, really silent, you will learn to just 'BE'. "
Cost: $14.00 (US dollars), including shipping to the UK, or $18.75 outside the UK.
Available in paperback early 2021
​Women Choosing Silence:
Relationality & Transformation in Spiritual Practice
by Alison Woolley
This book discusses Alison Woolley's research findings about the role, value and impact of chose practices of silence in the faith lives of contemporary Christian women.
Based in her in-depth interviews with 20 women in the UK, it explores how their engagement in silence-based prayer brings about transformation in the women's relationships with God, with themselves and with others.
Also available in hardback and ebook formats.
God is All in All: The Evolution of the 
Contemplative Christian Spiritual Journey
​by Thomas Keating
In July 2018, approaching the end of his life, Fr. Thomas gave permission for the editors to publish in book form a keynote talk that he gave at the 2012 Annual Conference of Contemplative Outreach in Snowmass, Colorado. It addresses the infinite compassion and the mercy of God; the three stages of the transformational spiritual journey; the new cosmology, human nature, science and their relationship to spirituality; the message of the cross for our times; and the meaning of redemption.
Mindful Silence: 
The Heart of Christian Contemplation
by Phileena Heuertz
The hallmarks of contemplative spirituality — solitude, silence, and stillness — have never been more important for our fast-paced society. Filled with insights and wisdom from personal experiences, Phileena Heuertz introduces us to themes and teachers of contemplative spirituality, as well as several prayer practices, and invites us to greater healing and wholeness by learning to practice faith through prayer.
Chapters by Richard Rohr, Thomas Keating, Sarah Bachelard & more
Contemplation and Community:
A Gathering of Fresh Voices
for a Living Tradition
This collection brings together the diverse voices who have emerged as new leaders of the contemplative movement. Exploring a multitude of themes, such as silence, imagination, meditation, embodiment, community and social action, this volume introduces new voices who reflect globally on the gifts, challenges, differences and commonalities of Christian contemplation today for communities and people of faith.
Searching for a Silent God
by Sarah Parkinson
Following a bereavement, Sarah found herself searching for a God who no longer seemed to be there. Through prayer, exploration and spiritual direction, gradually her relationship with God grew into one that was more profound and mature. Searching for a Silent God, combines autobiographical reflection with poetry written during her encounter with divine silence, and her sensitive sharing of this wil enable others to engage with their spirituality in a new and different way.
​Giving Up without Giving Up:
Meditation and Depressions by Jim Green
Drawing on extensive experience of meditation within Christian and Buddhist contemplative traditions, as well as his own times of personal loss and bewilderment, Jim Green offers a moving account of how this wisdom practice can accompany those who make 'the gentle pilgrimage of recovery'. Guiding readers through 'the invention of depression' in the mid-twentieth century, he questions the increasing tendency to medicalise human suffering. 
​An Ocean of Light:
Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation 
by Martin Laird
This is Laird's third book about a spiritual discipline of silence.
It is aimed at those already well-established in a daily practice of silence and is full of wonderful wisdom. I love this sentence from the end of page 55: "Our created, creative identity flows from and is consummated by the eternal splendour of the ineffable, divinizing humanity of the mystery of God in Christ."