How can we heal the rift between our daily lives and the sacred? How can we live a life capable of hearing "the still small voice" of God while experiencing the speed and sensory overload of modern life? This book is Ware's answer to these questions. She acknowledges that others have addressed the questions. On the one hand there are books which have significant depth but speak in academic or "in-group" language and provide little help adapting these insights to everyday life. On the other hand, there are practical "how-to" exercises which assist in very particular spiritual experiences but which do not offer integrated, sustainable, life-changing patterns. St. Benedict on the Freeway fills this gap. It "translates into twenty-first century life spiritually formative practices worked out in the past, creatively adapting those disciplines to contemporary daily life." This adaptation is the heart of Ware's book. She attempts first to draw attention to our own awareness of God. She discusses how a "Rule" functioned for Benedict's time, and how it can function for us as a liberating reminder of God instead of as another repressive and burdensome taskmaster. Ware also asks how the hours of prayer--vigils, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline--can increase our spiritual awareness even if our 'community' does not stop for prayer at designated times during the day. Also, Ware explores prayer in dimensions beyond the spoken word. The author targets what she terms "something more"-people: those who want to grow spiritually but do not know how to do so. Typically these people go on retreats and hear inspirational speakers, but their everyday lives lack the luster of those occasional times. They go from one spiritual oasis to another, wishing for something that will sustain them in between. St. Benedict on the Freeway responds to this yearning as both a book for personal reading and a resource for small groups in the church. Dr. Corrine Ware is Assistant Professor of Ascetical Theology at Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas, and serves as Director of the Masters of Arts in Pastoral Ministry. Her prior published work includes Discover Your Spiritual Type and Connecting to God, both published by Alban Institute. Saint Benedict on the Freeway A Rule of Life for the 21st Century By Corinne Ware Abingdon Press Copyright © 2001 Abingdon Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-687-04610-2 Contents FOREWORD, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, INTRODUCTION, CHAPTER 1. COLLECTED AND RECOLLECTED, CHAPTER 2. WHAT IS A RULE?, CHAPTER 3. THE SACRAMENTAL DAY, CHAPTER 4. ANCHORS, CHAPTER 5. WAYS TO PRAY, CHAPTER 6. FACING GODWARD, NOTES, STUDY GUIDE, CHAPTER 1 Collected and Recollected You are the topos tou theou (God's place) and the spiritual life is nothing more or less than to allow that space to exist where God can dwell, to create a space where his glory can manifest itself. —John Eudes Bamberger "I just have to stop and collect myself!" she says. "Everything's happening at once and I'm about to come apart." Down the hallway an executive cradles his head in his hands and moans, "This pressure is getting to me." Events crash in relentlessly and we experience the panicky despair common to us all, that feeling of being scattered, fragmented, and uncentered. It is more typical than not, in this century of acceleration, that we will be confronted by decisions before we have even had a chance to think through what we need to do. Few of us enjoy the luxury of "enough time." There are periods when we feel unprepared for even the expected and for what we have known all along was about to happen. We have days and months when it seems that everyone and everything makes demands on us at the same moment. Pressure builds and what we may want most in the world is a closet in which to hide, a stretch of wave-washed beach where we can forget it all, a person who will give us that soothing promise that things will be all right again. We want anything that will lift us out of our dilemmas. If only we might have just a moment to collect ourselves. Times like these illustrate—indeed, prove to us—that we believe ourselves to be happy or unhappy as a result of circumstance. Isn't it true, after all, that if things go well we will be happy? I think we must admit that it does help. Who among us can realistically say that circumstance, good or bad, does not affect us? It is more than reasonable that we should make efforts to secure for ourselves and those we love safety, security, comfort, and advantage. The person who does not strive to secure these blessings is usually called impractical and, at worst, masochistic. Singer Sophie Tucker told us, "I've been rich and I've been poor, and rich is better." Although we've seen that this is not true in every case, nevertheless, circumstances do matter. It helps to have resources! In asking the question, "Is that all there is?" we are actually wo