At the Still Point: A Literary Guide to Prayer in Ordinary Time

This is a guide to prayer for the liturgical season known as Ordinary Time—that long stretch from Pentecost to Advent. However, it is not an ordinary guide to prayer. It does not contain readings from spiritual or devotional writings, discussing spiritual or devotional things through discursive thought. Rather, it is a journey of the imagination guided by poets and authors, both classic and contemporary, who have known the things of God but speak in metaphor. These are writers who tell the truth, as Emily Dickinson put it, but they “tell it slant.” In not stating out loud what they know, they have left much to our imaginations—which is a way of saying they have trusted the Holy Spirit.