Bob Hostetler > Book Reviews

Book Reviews

The Shaping of a Prayer Life

Publishers Weekly religion editor Phyllis Tickle's engaging and entertaining memoir, The Shaping of a Life: A Spiritual Landscape is a lovely book, though perhaps not as impactful for this reader as Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk or Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies. Beginning with a charming and honest account of her childhood in Eastern Tennessee, Tickle charts her spiritual journey. Accounts of sneaking smokes in her freshman college dorm, marriage to a childhood friend and med student, and a near-death experience are related with largely unemotional matter-of-factness. Though I found myself wishing for more insight into the details of her spiritual journey and prayer practices, the book was at times brilliant and absorbing.

It is Tickle's three-volume The Divine Hours that has had the greatest impact on my life, however. In fact, my daily use of The Divine Hours was the catalyst for my purchase and reading of The Shaping of a Life.

The Divine Hours is a user-friendly and tremendously helpful manual for "fixed hour prayer" (also sometimes called "the hours" or "the Divine Offices") a practice of Christians for centuries of saying prayers at certain times of the day. Though I had previously used various resources and helps in my personal prayer practices (such as The Book of Common Prayer, from which Tickle largely draws The Divine Hours), I had never found anything that combined the depth I craved with ease of use. The Divine Hours did just that, and I've used it daily ever since.

The book is organized simply, allowing the user to easily turn to the Morning, Midday, and "Vespers Office" (between 5 and 8 p.m.) for every day of the month. The Compline office (for use prior to retiring) is placed in a separate section at the end of each month's prayers and readings. In addition to helpfully organizing content from The Book of Common Prayer, Tickle also incorporates other prayers and readings, such as "Pied Beauty," by Gerald Manley Hopkins and "The Sacrament of the Present Moment," by Jean Pierre de Caussade.

It all sounds quite liturgical, and it is. But far from dry. In fact, via The Divine Hours, Phyllis Tickle has had a more profound impact on my prayer life-and thus, of course, on my life, period-than perhaps anyone else I've never met.

Copyright © 2005, Bob Hostetler