The Lord of the Journey edited & compiled by Roger Pooley and Philip Seddon

This was a book I selected to read during 2016 and just finalized it today. The Lord of the Journey was indeed a Reader in Christian Spirituality. There were over 250 authors, who display the myriad aspects of the Christian experience: from Augustine to John Bunyan, Martin Luther and Jean Calvin, John and Charles Wesley, Ignatius of Loyola and Charles Simeon, John Donne and Soren Kierkegaard and a host of others, known and unknown. These authors are evangelical, orthodox, catholic and ecumenical, writing in verse and in prose, in histories, memoirs, biography, letters, prayers and hymns. This collection illustrates the variety and depth of the Christian experience and presents the life-stages of the Christian pilgrimage.

From the Introduction: "At the heart of Christian faith lies the deep conviction that we can know and love God because God first loved and knew us. The one true existent God we believe, has been so poured out, so make known to us in Christ and the Spirit, that we can respond with mutual personal knowledge and in the intimacy and awe of love. At the heart of a true Christian spirituality, lies the conviction that the beginning of the Christian life is only a beginning, even if it has touched the End; that not merely outward appearances but hidden bases of false living are to be challenged; that not just ideas but experiences are to be shaped by the Spirit. In short, there is a future: there is a journey, a pilgrimage to be undertaken in Christ who is the Beginning and the End, the Way, the Truth and the Life. Knowledge of and joy in God increasingly take over as the central desire, fed by prayer, Scripture and sacrament; and it does so in the context of the church, that community of believers with whom we experience both mutual solidarity in joy and suffering as well as frustration with the personal and institutional imperfections that remain epidemic. And we begin to see that love of God is exercised in loving our neighbours, in witness and service. Christian spirituality is our longing to enter, experience and express the love and the knowledge of God more and more in ourselves, in the community of faith, and beyond." 

This is a worthy book to journey with through any year.