This book is superb. The author, Joan Chittister, has lived the Christian year more times than I have the civic year. She is a Benedictine nun and served as prioress for twelve years to the Benedictine Sisters of Eerie, PA. In this book she takes you through the many days and seasons of the Christian calendar. It was a page turner. It was not only informative but it was a pleasure to read. I will end this review and recommendation with a few sections where her prose borders on poetry. • "For Christians, Sundays arrive like moments out of time, bringing, in their invisible mist, the sight of another way to be human" (33) • "By taking us into the depth of what it means to be a human on the way to God—to suffer and to wonder, to know abandonment and false support, to believe and to doubt—the liturgical year breaks us open to the divine" (58-59). • "We do not live the liturgical life to look good to other people. We do not develop a liturgical spirituality to affect a kind of spiritual dimension to our lives. And we certainly do not go to Mass regularly to avoid hell. We live a liturgical life in order to become like the One whom we follow from the manger to the Mount of Olives. We live liturgical life to learn to think like He thinks. To do what He would do. To make Him the center of our lives—not our work or our money or our status. In the cycle of the liturgical year we learn about what it means to live a Christian life. We learn to distinguish the important from the superficial things of life. It's not a history book; it is the celebration of the spiritual development of the soul. Liturgical spirituality is about learning to live an ordinary life extraordinarily well" (179).