The Glenstal Prayerbook (2025)

Description

The Glenstal Prayerbook: A Benedictine Book of Prayer

The new 2025 edition of The Glenstal Prayerbook is a rich, nourishing resource for your prayer journey. Drawing on the wisdom of the Bible, enshrined in Benedictine liturgy and reflecting in a special way the Celtic popular and devotional prayers.

It is beautifully bound and designed for both inspiration and prayer.

Section one describes the liturgical calendar, with notes on each liturgical season as well as prayers specific to the season that can be used in place of the prayer at the end of morning and evening prayer. There is also a calendar of saints and feasts through the year.

Section two contains one complete week of the daily prayer cycle or Liturgy of the Hours, following the structure of  Glenstal monastic liturgy and is the heart of The Glenstal Prayerbook, but now in a more contemporary translation.

Section three includes additional prayers, offering even more prayers than the previous 2001 edition. Selections include the Jesus Prayer, prayers with Mary, traditional Church prayers, prayers with the angels and saints and more.

Section four includes prayers for various occasions and situations–prayers for the sick, the dying, prayers before meals, and prayers for exams.

Authors: Monks of Glenstal Abbey

The 2025 edition was originally intended to be a reprint of the 2001 edition of the Glenstal Book of Prayer which was an international bestseller. But what has emerged is something quite different. There are many more prayers, and the biblical texts use a very different translation.

Eugene Peterson’s influence runs through this prayer book, especially in the Introduction and in the use of The Message, his translation of the Bible.

Prayer has not changed since 2001, but the world has moved on. Life is even more hectic, and hope has receded. There seems little time for an extra activity, especially prayer. This book is built on the premise that hectic though our lives are, we are deficient without a connection with the living God. Without this connection, we will spend our lives seeking to fill the God-shaped hole with substitutes. And they don’t deliver.

Prayer is the language we use to sustain that relationship with the living God. We all need a ‘maintenance plan’ to sustain a faith in God – a life of faith. This book is intended as a part of that maintenance plan. The Glenstal Prayerbook provides a traditional approach to prayer, taking its essential form from the monastic prayer life as lived in Glenstal Abbey.

Glenstal Abbey, Murroe Co Limerick

Glenstal Abbey is home to a community of Benedictine monks in Murroe, Co. Limerick, Ireland, and is a place of prayer, education, work and hospitality. The monastery sits alongside a popular guesthouse, farm and a boarding school for boys, housed within a nineteenth-century Normanesque castle amidst five hundred magnificent acres of Limerick farmland, forest, lakes and streams.