You’re behind already. Late as the White Rabbit for your next appointment. No time to say hello. Goodbye. You’re late. Late. Late.

You sneak into a café for a quick break between two frantic halves of your day. You’re yearning for something, though you don’t know what. You wonder if anyone else feels this way. You suspect everyone does.

Some Tom Waits tune, a glimpsed movement of sunlight, the earthy smell of espresso swiftly opens a door to the world that runs below the surface of your life. Only half an hour passes, but you wake up a lifetime later.

You’ve been praying the hours.

Each of us is given a portion of life, whether it lasts 27 years or 83, and most of us spend it consumed by the urgent, missing what is essential. But we are surrounded by things that have the power to take us beyond ourselves into the flow of what the ancients called kairos time. Contrary to the artificial time by which we hack up our lives in incremental bits, kairos moves like a great river beneath even the most mundane of days.

Praying the Hours tells the stories of eight interwoven characters impacted at just such epiphanal moments throughout a day. These are the chances they are given to glimpse the eternal, chances to step into new life. Their own. [more...]