God in the Moment: Making Every Day a Prayer

This book is about having an attitude of prayer, about broadening our understanding of the forms prayer takes so that we no longer separate prayer as a distinct activity but incorporate prayer as life lived in communication with God. As Kathy Coffey writes, "Bringing God into daily life means a constant movement back and forth between the action and the reflection." We respond to God's initiative, His activity in our lives, Ms. Coffey suggests, by immersing ourselves in the awareness that what is human is permeated by the divine. She uses short chapters to delineate how this may be accomplished. Using examples from her own life she takes ordinary experiences and reworks them into "material for meditation." At the conclusion of each chapter she poses questions for reflection. For example, in her section called "Transforming Time" she substitutes for the Liturgy of the Hours spontaneous prayer at each interval of the day and ends with these questions: "Have you ever tried to punctuate the day with prayer? How did it go? Choose a Psalm and expand an experience of morning, noon, afternoon, evening, or night into a meditation." I usually don't like such exercises, but I found these to be helpful in considering my reactions to her ideas. A very appealing book, easy to read in short snatches of time, and inspiring in the truest sense of the word--breathing new life into prayer.