No barrel can hold two different drinks. If it is to contain wine, then the water must be poured out so that the barrel is quite empty. Therefore, if you wish to be filled with God and divine joy, then you must pour the creatures out of yourself. St Augustine says: ‘Pour out, so that you may be filled. Learn not to love in order that you may learn to love. turn away, so that you may be turned towards.’ In short, if anything is to be receptive and to receive, it must be empty.

Meister Eckhart, The Book of Divine Consolation, 2

The quote I mentioned from Eckhart is:

“they do him wrong who take God just in one particular way. They take the way rather than God”.

It is from Sermon 19. Eckhart is a Dominican who lived from around 1260 to 1328. His history is controversial, but his writings are profound.

The Orthodox podcast I recommended is Our Life in Christ. If you go to their archives page and look for Feb 2005 you’ll find a four part series on Prayers to the Saints. The rest of their output is well worth listening to.

Daily Prayers (services for Morning, Evening and Night Prayer) can be found at the Church of England website.

I was asked for some book recommendations on church history. There are very few one volume histories (2,000 years is a lot to fit into a few pages) but I would recommend:

• Mark Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity
• John McManners (ed), The Oxford History of Christianity

If you want to look in more detail at a particular period, there is an absolutely superb annotated Bibliography here.

For more online on Benedictine monasticism see the Order of Saint Benedict. For Franciscans in this country go here and look also at the Dominicans.

For plenty of historic texts go to the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. You’ll find St. Teresa of Avila here. A good discussion of her life and work is by Rowan Williams called, unsurprisingly, Teresa of Avila.

A good site for early texts is Early Christian Writings.

Finally, I have posted some book recommendations elsewhere for the third years which might also be of interest to you.

A free mind is one which is untroubled and unfettered by anything, which has bot bound its best part to any particular manner of being or devotion and which does not seek its own interest in anything but is always immersed in God’s most precious will, having gone out of what is its own. There is no work which men and women can perform, however small, which does not draw from this power and its strength.
Meister Eckhart, The Talks of Instruction, 2

Take any work you wish, however minor it may be, true obedience will make it nobler and better for you. Obedience always brings out the very best in all things.
Meister Eckhart, The Talks of Instruction, 1

… they do him wrong who take God just in one particular way. They take the way rather than God.
Meister Eckhart, Sermon 19

The man who has submitted his will and purposes entirely to God, carries God with him in all his works and in all circumstances. Therein can no man hinder him, for he neither aims at nor enjoys anything else, save God. God is united with Him in all his purposes and designs. Even as no manifoldness can dissipate God, so nothing can dissipate such a man, or destroy his unity. Man, therefore, should take God with him in all things; God should be always present to his mind and will and affections. The same disposition that thou hast in church or in thy cell, thou shouldst keep and maintain in a crowd, and amid the unrest and manifoldness of the world.
Meister Eckhart