Having recently undertaken a thousand kilometre journey by car I lost track of the number of signs urging me to slow down. Police signs, AA signs, council signs, all of them in a variety of ways warning me of the dangers of speed or of tiredness arising out of travelling too far too quickly.

It’s ironic that my car, like most modern models, is designed to cut back wind resistance and is capable of speeds well in excess of legal limits. In addition, it has, nestling under the steering wheel, two Formula One type gear paddles at the ready, enabling me, should I so desire, to drive manually in motor racing mode.

Added to the roadside warnings, my briefcase in the car boot contained, among other things, a book by Canadian journalist Carl Honore entitled In Praise of Slowness. Published in 30 languages, it has been a bestseller in many countries.

One reviewer says: “Honore doesn’t come across as a rabid evangelist for the Church of Slow; instead he’s a slightly sceptical everyman observing a movement, comparing it to his own lifestyle and making changes where it makes sense.”

As with driving a modern car on modern highways, so in life, argues Honore, slower is better. He is not advocating doing everything at a snail’s pace but seeking to live life at the right pace. Fast and slow are not words, he says, describing rates of change so much as shorthand descriptions for life’s competing philosophies. Fast is busy, hurried, stressed, superficial, quantity-before-quality. Slow is calm, considered, still, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice, being hurried along the corridor of time by the Red Witch, asks, “Are we there yet?” She is told, “There yet, child – we’re past it.” Hurrying along the corridor of time we, modern day Alices, are discovering we have not only arrived but are past it. The clock increasingly controls our lives.

We need to slow down, savouring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them. Or, reverting to the motoring example, it’s time we all put on the brakes, or at least check the instruments on the dashboard and begin to live life at the right pace for each moment.

In Praise of Slowness piles illustration on illustration to make this point. Recognising the pressures to speed up, Carl Honore cites his own impatience and frustration with such mundane places as supermarket checkouts or, like millions of others, being caught in the frenetic world of modern technology that gives us access to people and information but in the case of emails leads to rampant overuse as we press “send” at the drop of a hat.

“Each day, the information superhighway carries over five billion emails, many of them superfluous memos, crude jokes and spam. For most of us the result is a daily hike up Email Mountain.”

On Facebook or MySpace people claim to have thousands of friends, yet, in the frenetic atmosphere of these social networks, the very idea of friendship is devalued. In Britain a major survey discovered that between 1986 and 2006 the number of teenagers who say they have no best friend in whom to confide rose from under one in eight to nearly one in five. Add to that speed dating, where you have three minutes with 30 possible prospects to see if you can strike up a romance, and you realise that we are unhealthily stuck on fast forward.

He recognises, “You have to be realistic. I am no utopian. I am a sceptic by nature. I don’t believe we will ever create a world where everyone does everything at the right speed and no one ever feels rushed. That’s just a fantasy. The world’s too complex and interconnected for that. Impatience is part of being human. Yet in our turbocharged world the hurry virus has spread from adulthood into the younger years. Children of all ages are growing up faster than ever.” To counteract that, he claims, with plenty of justification, that the idea “slow is beautiful” is rapidly gaining traction in the modern world.

The season of Lent commenced on March 9. It is the Church’s liturgical reminder that “slow is beautiful.” Savouring life’s deepest realities takes time. Lent’s a long season stretching 40 days, all the way from Ash Wednesday to Easter. It’s a season that does not exactly electrify modern day Christians. In this fast-moving world, an observance like Lent, lasting 40 days and 40 nights, is almost beyond imagining. A generation born and bred on the 60 second TV commercial or “surfing” from one site to another on the Internet clearly lacks the attention span to celebrate this venerable season based on our Lord’s 40 days and 40 nights in the desert.

Yet there are some things we can’t rush, and growing into Christ’s likeness is one of them. If I could, I would alter the old hymn “Take time to be holy” to read, ”It takes time to be holy.” The Church would be a richer community if we listened to journalists like Carl Honore and joined in the “Slow Movement,” fashioning our lives, our relationships, our communities and our faith around a different drum beat to that of the supercharged world we live in.

• Tom Cadman looks at life and faith through the lens of literature