On Fire with God

This book was supposed to be ashes.

In November of 1411, in a priory near Zwolle, a young canon lay dying. He was thirty-three years old, half blind, and on fire with God. In his cell lay everything he had ever written — prayers, confessions, and cries of love set down on loose leaves, meant for no eyes but God's. He asked his prior to burn them all.

The prior refused.

The rescued pages became one of the most beloved devotional works of the late Middle Ages, printed at Cologne in 1616 under a startling title: Alter Thomas de Kempis — "a second Thomas à Kempis." For generations it was treasured beside the Imitation of Christ. Then it faded from the shelves and waited in Latin, never given to readers in the English of our own day. Until now.

Gerlac Petersen was not writing a book. He was talking to God. Walking with his brethren at the edge of town, he would sometimes stop and excuse himself with a single sentence: "Brethren, I must return to my cell, for there is One who awaits me there."

This edition presents the first new English translation in over a century, rendered directly from the Latin of the 1616 Cologne edition, in thirty-nine short chapters — one to a morning — with the story of Gerlac's remarkable life drawn from the Windesheim Chronicle, a reader's guide, a glossary, and endnotes tracing the Scriptures and church fathers behind his boldest lines.

If you have tasted enough of God to know there is more — if you are hungry for the walk with Him that the old saints seemed to know — this book was saved from the fire for you. Readers of Brother Lawrence, Thomas à Kempis, and Gerhard Tersteegen will recognize the country at once.

The door stands open. A light is burning inside.

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