Praying the Hours

Book excerpt: In Praying the Hours Suzanne Guthrie offers us a contemporary way to practice the ancient tradition of hallowing time throughout the day by marking the hours with prayer and thanksgiving. With humor and wisdom she draws on her experience as a wife, mother, Episcopal priest, and teacher of children, showing us through her own life how these devotions can fold into the times of a hectic day. By praying the hours all the activities of our days — our eating, sleeping, working, cleaning, playing, and reading — become part of the sanctification of time and place. In part one Guthrie focuses on the importance of stability of place in the life of prayer. “Every time I move,” she observes, “I have to learn to pray all over again,” and she describes how she has learned to make a new home a house of prayer. In part two Guthrie takes us through the hours of prayer in the monastic day and explores how praying at fixed hours through the day can draw us closer to God. Praying the Hours is one of our series of Cowley Cloister Books: smaller format, gift edition books designed for meditative and devotional reading.