Lift Up Your Heart

Lift Up Your Heart is an unique introduction to the writings of St. Francis de Sales, offering readers a personal, ten-day mini-retreat based on ten famous meditations from de Sales’s spiritual classic, Introduction to the Devout Life. Inspired by this essential guide to holiness and his own experiences with de Sales’s spiritual writings, popular young adult speaker Rev. John Burns gives you a basic road map for living a more intentional and dynamic faith.

For more than four hundred years, Introduction to the Devout Life by Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales has been regarded as the essential guide to holiness and loving God. This spiritual classic takes on new life in Lift Up Your Heart, where Rev. John Burns has interpreted ten meditations for the modern reader and distilled them into a ten-day mini-retreat that can easily be completed in the midst of a busy life.

This practical book goes right to the heart of helping you kick the habit of floating along on your spiritual journey to start actively pursuing holiness and devotion to God. During the course of the retreat, you’ll learn the basics of forming a daily prayer routine, including how to offer yourself to God, meditate on his love, and maintain peace in the face of suffering and clarity in the midst of temptation.

The meditations will help you:

• Adopt gratitude as a daily prayer practice.

• Examine and reorder your priorities and relationships to better reflect your love for God.

• Discern between good and evil in your life.

• Desire to love and serve as Jesus did.

In a very real sense, Burns helps you take St. Francis de Sales as your spiritual director for ten days. As you do so, you’ll feel God’s fatherly love and restart your faith life, equipped with the tools to connect with God and live for heaven now.

Features & Benefits

• Rev. John Burns maintains an active speaking schedule, including Steubenville summer conferences, Theology on Tap, and ARISE ministries.

• Lift Up Your Heart is a popularization of the well-known spiritual classic, Introduction to the Devout Life, which regularly appears among the top one-hundred spiritual classics in Christianity.

• The appendix contains the ten original meditations written by St. Francis de Sales.

Rev. John Burns is pastor of St. Mary’s Parish in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. A 2003 graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Fr. Burns studied theology at the Pontifical North American College in Rome. He was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee in 2010 and completed a licentiate in moral theology from the Pontifical University of Santa Croce in 2011.

Fr. Burns is a speaker at Franciscan University of Steubenville’s annual conferences, archdiocesan engaged enrichment conferences, and Theology on Tap. He works in multiple capacities with both the Men of Christ and Women of Christ annual conferences, and contributes to the young adult renewal ministries of ARISE and Cor Jesu. He also serves as adjunct professor of moral theology at Sacred Heart School of Theology in Hales Corners, Wisconsin.

Fr. Burns is a regular guest on Relevant Radio’s The Inner Life. He works extensively with Mother Teresa’s sisters, the Missionaries of Charity, and has given retreats, conferences, and spiritual direction for the sisters in Romania, Armenia, Kenya, Italy, England, Spain, and the United States