Andrew Nunn – författare

An accessible, adult, catholic prayer book which can become the well-used friend of the reader - it can be kept and prayed with. This is not another book for the shelf but to accompany us in our journey. We can add our own comments in the margins, highlight a prayer we will use regularly, add extra ribbons and use the blank pages at the back of the book to supplement this volume with other prayers that we come across which we will find useful. We can make this our working journal of prayer as we lift up our hearts, day by day, to God. When we pray we learn to pray; as we pray we enter into that rich experience of prayer which George Herbert describes in his poem at the front of this book.

We have no idea on what day of the week Jesus called his disciples, or when he told the parable of the sower, but the gospel accounts change dramatically when they relate the final days of Jesus’ life, becoming more like 24-hour news channels with constant updates and precise timings.The Hour is Come immerses us in the pace and urgency of the story, bringing alive the experiences of Jesus, his disciples and all the other players in the Passion in ‘real time’. For each stage in this journey, there is a passage of scripture, a reflection and a prayer with suggested times of reading, allowing you to witness the events in the timescale that they occurred. With more than 70 reflections and prayers spanning Lent to Pentecost, The Hour is Come reveals how Jesus enters the real time of our lives to bring us to his eternity.

The gospel accounts change when we come to the final days of Jesus’ life and for the first time we are given precise timings when things happen, ‘It was night’, ‘the next morning’, ‘it was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him’, ‘it was noon’, ‘it was three o’clock in the afternoon’. The Hour is Come enables readers to enter into the experience of Jesus, his disciples and all the other players in the Passion narrative by using ‘real time’ to immerse us in the story.Ideal for daily reading during Lent, Holy Week and Easter, it offers scripture reflections and prayers that trace the journey to and beyond the cross. It begins on Mothering Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of Lent, with a reminder that Jesus’ journey to the cross began in infancy. The pace is slow at the beginning but during the great ‘Three Days’ from Maundy Thursday evening until Easter Day, the story unfolds hour by hour as it happens. Then the pace slows again as we move through Easter’s fifty days to Pentecost.This presentation reveals a God so intimately involved with human life that the ticking clock becomes part of how we know Jesus.

It was not only Mary and Joseph who journeyed to Bethlehem – all the characters and creatures we meet in the nativity stories found their way to the manger, summoned by stars, angels or political circumstance. Each time we celebrate Christmas, we travel there too, and open ourselves to transformation. Bethlehem Bound is a daily spiritual travel companion for the season, beginning with the great Advent antiphons that herald the feast, and ending with the Presentation in the Temple. Each day it travels with a different character from scripture and the Christian tradition – Jesse, Anna, Gabriel, the donkey, the innkeeper and his wife, the shepherds, the martyrs we commemorate at Christmas and many more. The journey had its challenges for the original characters and it will for us, but at its end is a wondrous gift from God - God’s own self in a baby laid in a manger. Bethlehem Bound invites us to embrace that gift afresh.