We all pray, but few of us pray well. And although that's troubling, few of us have found a spiritual director capable of leading us further along the path of prayer.

Fr Raoul Plus, S.J., is such a director, and reading this little book about the four types of prayer will be for you like hearing the voice of the wise and gentle counsellor you long for but can't find: one who knows your soul well and understands its needs.

How can this be? Well, the interior life is in most ways the same and in lesser ways different for each of us. The good director understands the ways it must always be the same, and allows for all the ways in which it will be different, uniquely our own. By showing us in these pages the saints in prayer, their struggles and their insights, and by drawing on 2,000 years of Christian experience Fr. Plus is here able to make his spiritual advice both concrete and universal: suited to each of us as if we were speaking with him face-to-face.

To read is not always to pray; but to read this book is to be led to the very threshold of true prayer.