This is the first new English translation of Thomas à Kempis’s Garden of Roses and Valley of Lilies in four hundred years, and it is enchanting. The instruction and inspiration of the author of the perennially popular Imitation of Christ have been rendered into language that is fresh, lively, and perfectly suited to Thomas’s aphoristic style.

Griffin’s [translations] are books you can actually use as devotionals. Take them into your prayer closet and read them as they were meant to be read, slowly, a chapter or two at a time, as you think and pray about your life in God. You won’t be hearing the distant and thus irrelevant voice of a remote and impossibly pious saint.  Through Griffin’s brilliant recoveries of the originals, you are going to hear a wise and intimate voice speaking to you in shockingly contemporary and sprightly terms about ultimate things—things you know in your heart.

With Griffin, not only do inaccessible Christian classics become extraordinarily readable and personal, but we discover how much our own age has to learn from the past in terms of wisdom, devotion, and practicality.

The introduction was superb, and the inserts I found especially helpful; they are themselves a small compendium of wisdom for us today. What a clever way to make Kempis’s words relevant for the modern reader! Midrash will never grow old as a way of opening up a text.

Griffin’s helpful asides, scattered throughout the text, as well as in the afterword, provide illuminating background for someone wanting to go even deeper in reclaiming the old but far-from-musty insights of Kempis. A delight to read and ponder!

William Griffin’s translations are spiritual in the best sense of the word: they blow the dust off devotional classics by breathing fresh air into lively English paraphrases. Like his masters, Griffin knows that the Christian pilgrimage is serious play, a strange but exhilarating pas de deux between sacred and profane, and a reverence for holy things and the joyful irreverence that only true holiness can inspire.