Many people today are looking for opportunities to bring the spiritual into their everyday lives in non-traditional ways. Their days are so busy they can't imagine how they can fit in time to kneel or sit in prayer on a regular basis. As a result, they fly from one activity to the next at breakneck speed, always looking forward to some nonexistent time in the future when things will slow down long enough to allow them to breathe, center themselves, and pray.
Everyday Divine: A Catholic Guide to Active Spirituality helps busy readers explore different ways to achieve a place of stillness and peace while remaining very much in the world. In fact, the day-to-day activities of life become the pathway to prayer-even the prayer itself. Drawing on Catholic tradition, from the Desert Fathers and Mothers to ancient monastics to modern-day saints and sages, Everyday Divine looks at how we can adapt these ancient practices for modern times, quoting holy men and women on various methods and offering practical instructions and suggestions to help people put them into practice. Readers learn how to find spiritual peace while immersed in everyday activities, such as:
- Housework and chores
- Workouts and exercise
- Cooking, eating, and fasting
- Listening to music
- Traveling and making pilgrimages
- Living among the noise of daily life
The book also includes personal stories from the author and others, and will weave in practices from specific spiritualities-such as Franciscan, Benedictine, and Trappist-to show how these practices fit into the bigger Catholic picture. Mary DeTurris Poust is an author, columnist, and blogger who has focused on Catholic issues for more than 25 years. She is the author of The Essential Guide to Catholic Prayer and the Mass, The Complete Idiot's Guide® to the Catholic Catechism, as well as Parenting a Grieving Child and Walking Together: Discovering the Catholic Tradition of Spiritual Friendship. She has been a contributing editor for Our Sunday Visitor and blogs regularly at OSV Daily Take and at her own blog, Not Strictly Spiritual. Her monthly column, "Life Lines," has been published in Catholic New York since 2001, and her articles have appeared in dozens of national and regional publications. I love this book because it's practical. Too often spirituality is seen as something reserved either for mystics or, well, "someone else." Mary DeTurris Poust shows us that the spiritual life is not removed from your daily life, it is your daily life. Her new book will invite you to try some simple, down-to-earth and accessible ways of encountering God in what you might consider your "ordinary" life. But after you've discovered God while you pray, but also while you work, clean, hike, exercise, do yoga and look at a sunset, your life will begin to seem pretty extraordinary indeed. Because it is.
