Beginner's Grace: Bringing Prayer to Life

Prayer is an ancient and simple way to prepare yourself for grace, or love, and to learn to recognize it when it comes. Even the briefest "grace" spoken before dinner offers its time-honored wisdom. Yet in spite of hundreds of traditions and teachings and books about prayer, millions of Americans have become ambivalent about it. They are unsure how, when, where, and even why they might pray, afraid they’ll do it wrong, or worried that they won’t be heard.

Writing in the beautiful, funny, honest narrative style that moved and inspired readers of her first book, Here If You Need Me, Kate Braestrup explains what prayer is and the many ways we can pray. With an approach that is both personal and inclusive, Beginner’s Grace is a new kind of prayer book. Even if you don’t pray and don’t consider yourself religious, there’s room in this book for you. In these pages, Braestrup explains how and why the practice of prayer can open a space in our busy lives for mindfulness, gratitude, contentment, and a wider compassion toward others.

Inspired by her work as a chaplain, Braestrup includes many examples of prayers to draw from—beginning with grace, a brief prayer of thanks. She provides clear models and practical suggestions for making your own and your family’s prayers meaningful and satisfying, and offers prayers for situations in which words might fail: times of anxiety, helplessness, or grief. And she invites you to explore forms of prayer that extend into the wider community, including prayer with and for people we don’t like or with whom we disagree.

 A welcoming modern guide to the simplest, most effective way to satisfy a universal spiritual hunger, Beginner’s Grace is for the religious and nonreligious and even irreligious in its generous, good-humored approach to spirituality. With its insight and warmth, Beginner’s Grace is sure to become a spiritual touchstone for people of all faiths

Kate Braestrup is a Unitarian-Universalist chaplain to the Forest Service in Maine who works with the search and rescue teams in Maine. Braestrup's novel, Onion, was published by Viking in 1990, her memoir, Here If You Need Me, was published by Little, Brown in 2007 and became a New York Times bestseller and won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award for non-fiction; her second memoir, Marriage and Other Acts of Charity, will be published in January 2010 by Reagan Arthur/LB. Her magazine articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Good Housekeeping, Reader’s Digest, O, The Oprah Magazine, Woman’s Day, Reader’s Digest, More, Mademoiselle, Ms., City Paper, Hope, and Law and Order.