NTRODUCTION

For thousands of years our ancestors marked the daily cycle of dark

and light with poems, prayers, stories, songs. Recognizing the

repetition and variation of changing light was a matter of survival

as well as sacred knowledge. Throughout the world people have

prayed at the border between sleep and waking, turned their fiaces

east to greet the sun, chanted and taken purifying baths at dawn,

oftlered sun salutations in the morning and sun dances on special

days, petitioned the moon with love poems, counted their month

from new moon to new moon. Children s lullabies were often a

kind of prayer fbr singing the child to a safe sleep.

The traditional Catholic prayer cycle includes prayers for

the eight canonical hours. Traditional Moslems pray five times a

day; Jews gather in groups of ten for morning, late afternoon, and

evening prayers. In medieval Europe The Book of Hours presented

a series of prayers, psahns, stories from the lives of Jesus and Mary

in words and pictures. It was the main book in people s homes, a

beautifully illustrated manuscript arranged according to the church

hours: matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, nones, vespers, complines.

Time Sanctified is the title of a contemporary book about

the Book of Hours. This title is startling to our modern ears; sacred

rune is not a part of our lives. At the doorway of the 21st century

in our rush to be on time and take time off most of us don t give

much attention to how we live in time. Feeling controlled by time,

we in turn try to control and conquer time. At night we watch the

stars on television instead of the stars in the sky.

Both the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and the Jewish

scholar 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 of

the best things that ~@pened to him when he became a hermit was "being