Virgin Time

A New York Times Notable Book

Patricia Hampl begins her quest not to find something, but to shake off the indelible brand of a Catholic upbringing. Yet even as an adult removed from the dogma of her early Catholic training, she feels the pull of contemplative prayer. In her search, she travels to the "old world" of Catholicism, to the golden haze of St. Francis's Assisi and to the surging crowds of Lourdes with their candles and incurable illnesses. Her pilgrimage is peopled with other wanderers--crotchety English agnostics, American Franciscan friars and nuns, and the seekers that fill every charter flight. Inevitably, she finds the "old world" right at home, in the very past she had tried to escape. What she was looking for confronts her, finally, on a retreat at a monastery near the Lost Coast of northern California in the still, virgin moments of silent prayer.

"Beautiful...Compassionate...A journey into silence and prayer, a journey to past, to the self...An abundance of elegant and gorgeous prose." --Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, The New York Times Book Review