Three very different writers explain that prayer is not something reserved for the professionally religious, but is instead for people like us, with all our sins and problems.

Caryll Houselander’s Christ within Me is a compressed meditation on the humility of God, who comes to us in the form of bread and uses what seem to us trivial and insignificant things, the routine monotonies and despairs of daily life, so as to be present, through us, to the world. Her writing is wholly original; Ronald Knox, after reading her, wrote her the only fan-letter of his life.

Delia Smith presents a profound message of simplicity and making time for God to act in us, rather than feeling we have to do something.

Herbert Fincham’s Second Conversion is on one level a technical treatise about the mystical life; but on another, it reminds us that our initial turning to God, whatever form it took, needs to be renewed by a deeper and more honest welcoming of God’s life into every part of ours.