Journey into the Heart of God explores the meanings and relationships of the seasons of the Church Year as they have developed and are now received and lived. This study, holding always in view the breadth and richness of the liturgical tradition of the whole Church, is illuminated by insightful liturgical texts of the Eucharist and also of the less familiar Daily Office; it also gives attention to the people's theology expressed in hymns from a broad spectrum of traditions, ancient and modern. Careful attention to the liturgy and its setting in the turning of the seasons reveals a profound concern for ecology and for the whole cosmos. The liturgical year as it has developed through the centuries is a work of art, the collaborative achievement of many hands and minds, resulting in an extraordinarily rich fabric with layers of insight and suggestion. The work of Christ celebrated and set forth in the Church's year is experienced not as mere recollection of past events in salvation history, but rather as a living reality, the appropriation of the mighty acts of God alive in his people, the experience today of the life that those great historical deeds have accomplished. The Church year, sifted and tested through centuries, even millennia, of use, dramatizes and makes real a way of living, recognizing, accepting, and making use of the complexity and even the strangeness of human experience. In this way it encourages honesty, humility, growth, and maturity in those who live it.

Well-known liturgical scholar and writer Philip Pfatteicher turns his attention in this book to "liturgical spirituality" as distinct from "liturgy and spirituality," which assumes two essentially separate disciplines."Liturgical spirituality" is a holistic concept, bringing together both liturgy and spirituality with reference to the interior life of the spirit that is formed and nurtured by the church's liturgy. Pfatteicher acknowledges that there are other kinds of spirituality that appear to flourish apart from and in addition to the liturgy: for example, the spirituality of the desert ascetics of the early centuries of christianity, the devotion of the Religious Society of Friends, and many forms of meditation and spiritual discipline such as the Spiritual Exercise of Ignatius Loyola. The focus of the present volume, however, is on the spiritual life as formed by the liturgy, the ordered form of Christian worship, East and West, Catholic and Protestant.In addition to the form of worship one might experience on a Sunday morning, Liturgical Spirituality guides the reader through and into the experience of daily prayer, the Easter Vigil, the Church Year, the Eucharist, hymns and music, Baptism, and even church architecture as "hallowing space."In 1955 Louis Bouyer published an admirable study entitled Liturgical Piety, written before Vatican II and its far-reaching reforms that fundamentally changed the entire Western church. Philip Pfatteicher has now taken up the challenge of expanding upon Bouyer with a current and invigorating study not of "liturgical piety" but of "liturgical spirituality."Philip Phatteicher is Professor of English at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, a frequent writer and lecturer on liturgical issues, and author of A Dictionary of Liturgical Terms and The School of the Church: Worship and Christian Formation, both published by Trinity Press.