"Prayer is a hard topic for most of us modern folk, and we have little place to talk about it. My own first conversation partners were the great ancient teachers, the Abbas and Ammas of the Egyptian desert...These men and women have been urging me for nearly thirty years to pray and to seek healing for the wounds of my heart I carry from childhood, from my own temperament, from my culture, even the culture of my church. They have also urged me all along to write about what I have learned from them and from my own experience, for, as they tell us, nothing, neither the most wonderful nor the most humiliating thing we are given as Christians, is ever given for ourselves alone...The chapters that follow are in the form of letters to a friend. My intention, of course, is that you, the reader, understand yourself to be the friend to whom I am writing..." --excerpted from the author's Preface "What a wonderful example of spiritual guidance through letters! Out of her own rich experience and struggle and scholarship Roberta Bondi speaks about prayer as one who knows. Those who have a lot of questions about experience of God in everyday life will not want to miss reading In Ordinary Time." --E. Glenn Hinson, Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, Richmond, Virginia