| NTRODUCTIONFor thousands of years our ancestors marked the daily cycle of darkand light with poems, prayers, stories, songs. Recognizing therepetition and variation of changing light was a matter of survivalas well as sacred knowledge. Throughout the world people haveprayed at the border between sleep and waking, turned their fiaceseast to greet the sun, chanted and taken purifying baths at dawn,oftlered sun salutations in the morning and sun dances on specialdays, petitioned the moon with love poems, counted their monthfrom new moon to new moon. Children s lullabies were often akind of prayer fbr singing the child to a safe sleep. The traditional Catholic prayer cycle includes prayers forthe eight canonical hours. Traditional Moslems pray five times aday; Jews gather in groups of ten for morning, late afternoon, andevening prayers. In medieval Europe The Book of Hours presenteda series of prayers, psahns, stories from the lives of Jesus and Maryin words and pictures. It was the main book in people s homes, abeautifully illustrated manuscript arranged according to the churchhours: matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, nones, vespers, complines. Time Sanctified is the title of a contemporary book aboutthe Book of Hours. This title is startling to our modern ears; sacredrune is not a part of our lives. At the doorway of the 21st centuryin our rush to be on time and take time off most of us don t givemuch attention to how we live in time. Feeling controlled by time,we in turn try to control and conquer time. At night we watch thestars on television instead of the stars in the sky. Both the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and the Jewishscholar Abraham Heschel wrote movingly about sacred time.Merton was com,inced that if you let the hours of the day saturate you,and you gave them time, something would happen. He said that one ofthe best things that ~@pened to him when he became a hermit was "being |
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