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Marked for Life - Prayer in the Easter Christ

Author:	Maria Boulding
Published By:	SPCK (London)
Pages:	118
Price:	£8.99
ISBN:	978 0 281 06396 3

Reviewed by Luke Penkett.

Dame Maria Boulding was an enclosed Benedictine nun. Born in London in 1929, she was accepted into the religious community at Stanbrook Abbey when it was based at Worcester, when she was 18. She turned down an offer to study at Oxford in favour of the religious life. She, in fact, became an external student of London University and read theology. Her writings were published and, like the present book, reissued, sometimes with revisions. She died in 2009, aged 80.

Marked for Life, which was first published in Great Britain in 1979, was reprinted twice, first by Triangle in 1985, and then by SPCK in 1995. It was reissued by SPCK in 2010. The book soon became a classic. Its subject is contemplative prayer and it warms my heart that Boulding never regarded this as the prerogative of the professed elite but, rather, a way of prayer that is there for everyone. Nor does she give the false impression that contemplation always leaves us on a spiritual high, for God continues to hold us through our failures and frustrations, our perplexities and the whole stuff of human existence.

Contemplative prayer is a gradual opening to God in which he may progressively show that he is always and everywhere present, and can completely transfigure the lives of those who turn to him in prayer.

Boulding writes about the experience of prayer among ordinary people and the Easter experience in the New Testament. Prayer can be a way of life and, I believe, it is possible to be in a state of constant prayer. On the way through, other types of praying are beautifully described, and we are taught how these, seen as launch pads or ways of tuning in, may nourish our contemplative prayer.

Nor is Boulding afraid to write about times of spiritual bewilderment or darkness, when God might seem to be far away or even absent. There is a wealth of teaching (Dame Maria was novice mistress 1965-74) and illustration ranging from Zen and the Bushmen of the Kalahari, to the Medieval Mystics and Swami Abhishiktananda.