“It’s the very concept of truth that we’re calling into question.” That’s what a professor at a secular college said to me some years ago, summarizing the thinking of many Americans. While such relativistic instincts raise concerns for any Catholic, they present a particularly serious problem for the Catholic preacher. How can someone charged with preaching communicate the truths of the faith to people who doubt the “very concept of truth”? Fr. Paul Murray, O.P. suggests an answer to this question in his new book Preachers at Prayer: Soundings in the Dominican Spiritual Tradition. His counsel is simple: lead with the Church’s spiritual tradition.

The Catholic spiritual tradition, emerging out of the lives and writings of the saints, certainly does not disregard questions of truth. But it presents the truths of the faith in subjective, experiential language—language attractive to the contemporary ear. Murray has spent much of his scholarly life making more available the depths of this spiritual tradition, and, in particular, the Dominican strand of that tradition. This latest book continues that work, encouraging preachers in their task and offering them an example of what living preaching can look like today.

Preachers at Prayer is quite approachable. The contents were first conceived and delivered as talks by Murray to fellow Dominicans. While not colloquial, the tone is certainly conversational. And while Murray addresses his contemporaries in his Order, he also includes many of the most profound voices from the Dominican tradition, with St. Dominic himself given a prominent place. Murray ponders the depths of the Dominican spiritual tradition and embodies its genius as he shares with his reader the riches he has discovered in his prayer and study.

The first chapter comes from a talk Murray gave in 2001, in which he suggested that “there is an opportunity to enable the contemplative dimension of the Dominican tradition to speak with a new and telling authority to a new generation” (p.1). Because of the pace of modern life, Murray sees that the “new generation” of friars needs to hear of the contemplative, spiritual aspect of the tradition. Murray organizes his remarks in this chapter by considering three distinct objects of contemplation: Christ, the World, and Neighbor (4). In each section, Murray highlights how the preacher’s vocation shapes his contemplation of each object. As men called to a challenging task, preachers ponder Christ in a spirit of great need. As men who speak to the world again and again, preachers desperately need prayer to avoid “becoming prisoners of the spirit and fashions of the age” (p.20). Finally, as men charged with aiding their neighbors with life giving words, preachers must ponder the needs of those around them. Murray includes the story of St. Dominic’s nighttime tears for sinners as a monument to this aspect of the preacher’s prayer (p.27).

In Murray’s encouraging telling, the preacher’s prayer must be bold in its scope and brutal in its honesty. Everything comes under consideration as the preacher ponders God’s word and seeks to communicate it. He must not fear to seek the heights. At the same time, the preacher must again and again confront his own wounds and limits. Self-knowledge emerges as a dominant theme for Murray. On this point, he cites a Biblical gloss that considers the link between self-knowledge and knowledge of others: “Understand from what you know about yourself the condition of your neighbor” (p.3). It is only when a preacher knows himself that he will be able to speak a word that helps others.

The second chapter, the shortest, considers “What Makes for Good Preaching?” Murray does not focus on technique, strategy, or content—his concern is the preacher himself. Pondering the success of the preaching of St. Dominic and St. Catherine, he states, “What strikes one immediately about men and women shaped by the Gospel vision is that all the words they speak are at one with the lives they lead” (p.38). Such coherence appears only within a life touched by Christ. An interior encounter with God must be the source of preaching, if that preaching is to have the power to bring life.

No discussion of Catholic prayer, Dominican or otherwise, would be complete without something about the “dark night.” This is the topic of Murray’s third chapter. The sixteenth-century Carmelites often seem to have cornered the market on “dark night” language. Murray, however, finds a Dominican precursor to the Carmelite greats in the Rhineland mystics: Eckhart, Tauler, and Bl. Henry Suso. He notes that “few authors in the Christian tradition explored in such depth the radiant dark mystery of God’s absence or seeming absence in the life of prayer” (p.69) as did these Dominicans.

The Dominican interest in the darkness of the mystery of faith, of course, is connected both to prayer and preaching. Preachers close to their people hear time and again the woes of unanswered prayers, a seemingly distant God, and the shadows that threaten faith. Eckhart and his disciples knew these experiences from their own prayer. The Rhineland mystics’ personal witness to these trials, Murray argues, was one of the most powerful and consoling features of their preaching (pp. 70-71).

Murray’s most original contribution in his discussion of the dark night comes in his analysis of St. Dominic’s own prayer and the prayer of the early Dominicans. Particularly evocative was the citation of St. Dominic’s praying of psalms, such as Psalm 143:6-7, that express real aridity: “I have stretched out my hands to you. My soul is like soil without water before you, speedily hear me Lord” (p.73). The preacher, by being a man of prayer, suffers in such a way as to become able to offer to others the encouragement and insight they need.

The final chapter of the book comes from a 2023 talk Murray gave at a retreat for Dominican students studying in Rome. His aim through this chapter is to consider the life of study within the context of a life of prayer and preaching. Most fundamentally, the preacher should be a student who studies the truths of the faith aware that his own life and the lives of his people depend on it: “We need . . . as soon as we are made aware of our own poverty, to study in depth the Word of God, not as an isolated text but as a living truth, a wisdom that speaks like nothing else on earth to the needs of the present hour” (83). The need for study follows upon the existential need for living truth. And when we begin to know that living truth, it begins to set us free from “the dominant fashions of thought and feeling of one particular generation” (86). We become receptive not just to knowledge, but to the expansive, graced vision of wisdom.

Within that vision of wisdom, the preacher appreciates in a new way the challenges that so often accompany a life of study. Just as times of darkness in prayer make us more useful to those we serve, so too times of struggle in study “awaken within us a grace of attention to others” (p.94). When the preacher’s failures thus open him to the needs of others, his life of study can achieve a new balance—enlivened by prayer, inspired by compassion, and grounded in humility.

The take-away message of this book is clear: for preaching to be good, the preacher must be a person of prayer. Murray sees this message throughout the Dominican spiritual tradition and especially in the life of St. Dominic, who serves as an icon of what it means to be a preacher who prays: “Dominic was a man possessed not only by a vision of God but also by a profound inner conviction of people’s need” (p.27). That said, the themes of this book are none other than the themes of the Gospel expressed in a Dominican idiom. Building from the Dominican vision of what it means to be a preacher, Murray speaks fluently of poverty of spirit, compassion, freedom, joy, and the burning desire to share the love of God. Any person tasked with preaching will find in these pages an invitation to live that task with an ever-deepening integrity, hope, and sacrifice.

As all preachers know, it is better to say too little than too much. Still, if I have one complaint about the book, it is that it is too short—about one hundred pages. Murray’s four talks-turned-chapters provide rich fare but leave much unsaid about such classical Dominican concerns as doctrinal preaching or the relationship between communal life and the apostolate. This book is a gem, but a brief one.

Murray isn’t saying anything particularly revolutionary when he calls preachers to be men of prayer. In fact, most preachers would readily agree that their life and ministry has to depend on prayer. That said, a preacher can know something about the ideal shape of his life without necessarily living it. Murray’s book offers a warm invitation for preachers to live with zeal their own relationship with the Lord. He puts the Dominican spiritual tradition on display in all its magnetic power. A preacher who drinks deeply of this tradition will not only be renewed himself but will be able to offer a living word to a hungry world.

Reviewed by: Philip Nolan, O.P.