In Search of Solitude: Living the Classic Christian Hours of Prayer

In Search of Solitude is a collection of meditations that record moments of a spiritual pilgrimage. The purpose of these meditations is to put the soul in touch with the eternal in an ordinary time frame. Tom Oden relies on the ancient classic pattern of daily meditative ‘hours’ to order the life of prayer. An ‘hour’ here refers not to sixty minutes but to the phases of the daily cycle, related to darkness and light. Spending even a minute in prayer and meditation, seven times a day, sanctifies the entire daily cycle. In Search of Solitude presents selections from Tom Oden’s lifetime of personal meditations, arranged according to the daily ‘hours’ for seven weeks. A series of prose interludes explain the understanding of the flow of time in which the acts of praise occur. Organized during the ten years following his wife’s death, the meditations point to particular events and glimpses of reality. Readers can meditate on them to grasp meaning and applications for their own lives. Those who mourn the lost richness of an ordered prayer life will find In Search of Solitude a contemporary means of re-grounding their spirituality, simply by accessing this celebrated ancient structure, made available in electronic format at their fingertips.