There are not many books that I have gone back to for multiple reads, but one that I have and regularly recommend to others is the small but profound Searching for and Maintaining Peace by Fr Jacques Philippe. The book’s short sections make it perfect content for retreats, daily prayer times or night reading, especially if you are, as the preface suggests, keen to acquire the peace of Christ in this time of “agitation and inquietude”.
Hearing that my wife was pregnant again, this time with our third child, I felt it was time for a re-read, and was immediately struck by the passage focused on in the book’s opening chapter: “Without me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Reading these words, this call to surrender entirely to Christ, I recognised how numbed I had become to the idea of surrender. For so long, due to its common recurrence in spiritual teaching, songs and testimonies, it had been reduced to a buzzword in my life. It was something understood and believed in intellectually, but which lacked any resonance in my heart. Something I could encourage other people to practise, while blindly not recognising the many ways I still cling to self-dependence.
