There is a website called The Daily Office that posts Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer according to the US and New Zealand Prayer Books everyday. This is no small feat since the various psalms, scriptures, and prayers assigned for each day continuously change. To keep up with all that in a paper and ink world is a chore, and before you get all “when I was a kid, we had prayer books printed on scrolls” at me, just consider all the people who don’t do morning prayer or evening prayer or whatever simply because it is too much work to figure out.
I’m a pretty nerdy religious dude, but when I have tried getting it done with the actual book, I’m pretty sure I’m not getting it right. It used to be that I would read the website on my iPod Touch or, later, on my android phone. Those screens were kind of small. This morning I used my tablet for the first time, and as you might imagine, it was just the thing. As an added bonus, I get to see the little widget from the full site that shows the locations of people who have recently logged in. There was someone on from Turkey not long before I came on the site.
Which was not too early this morning, but I am usually up well before the sun in order to get Morning Prayer and whatever else I need under my belt before the day starts. Seeing that there are other people up and reading the office gives my a sense of our being bound together. Thomas Merton in his autobiography wrote about visiting the monks at Gethsemane for the first time and hearing them sing Morning Prayer in the early predawn hours. To Merton it felt like they were singing the world into existence. I sort of feel that way with this little group that gathers around morning prayer each morning. Through a simple widget on a blog page, we are joined together in the work that every person is called to do.