Don Shockley may be the only person in America who likes to wait. He has discovered that active waiting opens the door to spiritual experiences that are often humorous as well as serious and deep. He believes that the key to prayer is not in the act of asking but in the art of listening. For more than twenty-five years he has transformed the necessity to wait into an opportunity to look, listen and learn. More often than not this distinctive form of meditation has been practiced in urban environments: waiting rooms of doctors and dentists; on buses, planes and trains; in bakeries, coffee shops and college cafeterias; in libraries, parks and bars. These spiritual interludes have been captured in exceptionally vivid writing; you can "see" what the author is saying.

When the late Howard Thurman, one of America's foremost spiritual thinkers, saw some of the early pieces included in this book, he said they were "precisely on target" and should be shared. Over the years since, these Private Prayers in Public Places have been well received when read before various groups, and at long last they are now available in print.