A Book of Uncommon Prayer

100 Celebrations of the Miracle & Muddle of the Ordinary.

Acclaimed, award-winning essayist and novelist Brian Doyle - whose writing, in the words of Mary Oliver, is “a gift to us all” - presents one hundred new prayers that evoke his deep Catholic belief in the mystery and miracle of the ordinary (and the whimsical) in human life.

In Brian Doyle's newest work, A Book of Uncommon Prayer: 100 Celebrations of the Miracle & Muddle of the Ordinary, his readers will find a series of prayers unlike any of the beautiful, formal, orthodox prayers of the Catholic tradition or the warm, extemporized prayers heard from pulpits and dinner tables. Doyle's often-dazzling, always-poignant prayers include eye-opening hymns to shoes and faith and family. In Doyle's words, “the world is crammed with miracles, so crammed and tumultuous that if we stop, see, savor, we are agog,” and the pages of his newest book give voice and body to this credo. By focusing on experiences that may seem the most unprayerful (one prayer is titled “Prayer on Seeing Yet Another Egregious Parade of Muddy Paw Prints on the Floor”), he gives permission to discover the joys and treasures in what he often calls the muddle of everyday life.

Doyle's combination of imagination and linguistic playfulness dovetail with his deep Catholic ethos. “Catholic is my language,” he has written, “Catholic is the coat I wear, Catholic is the house in which I live.”

Doyle has written more than a dozen books in as many years and hundreds of short pieces in virtually every Catholic and Christian periodical that exists.

This is not a collection of previously published essays and poems but an original work, none of whose contents have appeared in print before.