God in the Moment: Making Every Day a Prayer

""The husband who watches beside the hospital bed of his wife. He says nothing; he holds her hand as he has for two weeks.... The protestor who takes a deep breath and steps across the line at the nuclear weapons plant, thinking, If I go to jail, I go to jail. But I can't let conscience lie down and die.... The young woman who spends the first or last moments of the day bent over a journal. Her roommates think she's doodling; in fact, she's struggling to make sense of her life, struggling to understand the day's twists and turns, gifts and challenges."" According to Coffey (Dancing in the Margins), all of these individuals are engaged in prayer. She contends that prayer is an ""attitude, not a formula,"" and she encourages readers to seek their own method of integrating prayer into their everyday lives. In a series of short chapters, she reflects on prayer as a balancing act between the glorious life of the spirit and the tedium of physical chores, prayer as gratitude, prayer as the fabric of our ordinary lives, and prayer as work and work as prayer. Coffey closes each chapter with questions for reflection and ""prayer prompts"" designed to help readers fold her meditations on prayer into their lives. She weaves personal anecdotes, humor, biblical passages and selections from the writings of such famous pray-ers as Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton into a hauntingly gorgeous quilt of meditations on prayer. (Aug.)