'Holiness is a word that may well alarm many potential readers; it suggests something solemn and hushed, at best something for only a few people, something belonging to admirable but not -- if we're honest -- a ll that attractive figures. Stephen Haskell offers us in this lucid, learned and intelligent book a wide-ranging picture of how the teachings of the great Carmelite spiritual reformers of the sixteenth century, Teresa and John of the Cross, can be understood and applied in all our lives, so that we grow in that authentic and joyful humanity for which we were made. And this is holiness -- not an 'extra' added to the human mix, but the essentially human, stripped of the embarrassing, destructive and futile habits with which we normally cover it up.'..