When Father Tracy O’Sullivan was pastor of St. Raphael’s Parish in South Central Los Angeles, he had a little ritual he enacted every time the elementary school students gathered for Mass. “Who wants to walk with Jesus?” he would ask during the homily. The students knew what was coming. They would shout back their answer eagerly, “I want to walk with Jesus!” Father Tracy would ask again, and again, getting a louder and louder answer in response, till the rafters of the little parish church rang with the children’s cry, “I WANT TO WALK WITH JESUS!!!” And they could, no matter how small—that was Father Tracy’s message to them, every time. When you have a good message, there’s no need to innovate. Children delight in hearing the same story over and over again. And they delighted in Father Tracy’s word to them. Child, you too can walk with Jesus. Don’t you want to walk with Jesus?

            In this short, approachable primer on prayer in the Carmelite tradition, Father Tracy puts that question to us. His message is simple and profound: we too can walk with Jesus. Holiness, the Gospel, prayer—these do not require a doctorate in theology, or a special status within the Church. They are for everyone. What Father Tracy calls “deep personal prayer” is for everyone—prayer from and of the heart, prayer that expresses and feeds the intimacy of real relationship with Jesus. The Problem of Loving Jesus has a real solution, and one that is accessible to all, no matter their state in life. The solution is Jesus, who accompanies us at every point in our spiritual journeys, just like he accompanied the disciples along the Way. The problem of loving this Jesus is more a problem of letting him love us. We must “learn that, in the end, only God can deliver us.”

            Not that this emphasis on God’s all-embracing mercy requires nothing of us: Father Tracy relates, both by way of the tradition and personal example, that it requires real humility on our part, which is won only at the cost of painful self-knowledge. In his case, Father Tracy openly shares, that meant admitting not only that he was an alcoholic, but also that his ardent efforts as a social justice activist in the 1960s and 70s had at least as much to do with the service of his own ego as they did with the service of the Black community. In a bracing and moving passage, Father Tracy tells of his conversion, of a fateful call to the police that set him along the arduous road of recovery. “Humility is the truth,” Father Tracy says, with reference to Saint Teresa of Ávila. “Our essential reality is that God is the Creator and we are the creature.” In order to walk with Jesus, we must unlearn the “practical relativism” that places us at the center of our own little worlds, and instead, step into the much larger world that Jesus invites us into.

            There is a style of prayer that corresponds to this movement: the silent, contemplative mode of prayer in which we must say, with John the Baptist, “He must increase; I must decrease” (Jn 3:30). “The spirit of poverty is the goal,” Father Tracy says. In the not too distance past, such contemplative prayer was thought to be the special calling of the select few. Not so, Father Tracy argues, and he draws on both contemporary and historical sources to offer concrete, practical advice on how anyone can enter into this contemplative tradition. The problem here is not a question of time or method; the problem is the ego’s resistance to John the Baptist’s humbling words.

            This practical, accessible advice is one of the major contributions of Father Tracy’s latest book. So too is the insightful way that he weaves together the theme of prayer together with the universal call to evangelize. The call to spread the Good News of God’s Reign is not other than the universal call to holiness because, as Father Tracy points out, to walk with Jesus is not other than to walk along the Gospel Way. Evangelization and contemplation belong together, he argues. Drawing on Pope Francis and Evangelii Gaudium, as well as Pope Paul VI and Evangelii Nuntiandi, Father Tracy connects the tradition of contemplative prayer to the Gospel call to build God’s Kingdom. “All of our spiritual activities,” he concludes, “have the goal to help us develop an antenna to search for the opportunities to love: to love God and to love our brothers and sisters. This two-fold love of God and neighbor is what loving Jesus is all about.” While we can get our egos entangled with the call to ministry, the problem of the ego is not an excuse to withdraw into a pseudo-contemplative retreat from the world. The problem of loving Jesus demands we go out from ourselves, both in prayer and in loving service of others.

            There is, in a certain sense, nothing “new” here—but that is sort of the point. Readers will appreciate how deeply Father Tracy draws on the Church’s tradition, not least his extensive engagement with scripture, which grounds the book. They may appreciate more Father Tracy’s humble voice, not least the personal stories that leaven his teaching on prayer. The message is timeless. Friend, sister, brother—come, walk with Jesus.