Liturgy of the hours

Here at Anglicamp, we do morning and evening prayer every weekday. It's one of the things I'm going to miss the most - and one of the best things about coming to live here this year. It sets a rhythm to the day. This is the service record we keep, of all the services, the attendance, etc. It's sort of a way to keep time, I think - both the service record and the services. Time is so top-down in our lives, for the most part. Clocks, jobs, set schedules... but I think we still all find ways to keep time in our own, personal ways. How we start our mornings, what we do on public transportation, how we take our meals, how we end our days, maybe even how we approach spending time alone in the bathroom?

This is what our weekly ordo looks like. It's really confusing-looking for most visitors to our chapel. We use half a dozen different books, plus inserts that we might pick up on the way in, we stand up, sit down, sing antiphonally, sing responsively, sing in unison. Sometimes I wonder if being Anglican is about making liturgy as complicated as possible, while keeping doctrine or beliefs as personal, intuitive, or just plain unknown as is practical. For me, it's a perfect combination.

OK, one more chapel image... behind the scenes. You can see into the sacristy, where we keep all our liturgy "stuff": chalices, little places and bowls, linens, incense, candles, vestments, music inserts, flower vases, holy water vessels, etc. You can see Susan looking in drawers for the right linens to use for a liturgy class later in the day.

But you can also see the little piano that plays some of the bells in our carillon. We only use one key - there's a tiny piece of paper with a red cross drawn on it that's taped onto it. It's the far left key. One morning, that bell broke in mid peal! And so we used the second key from the left for a couple weeks, until the maintenance crew could get up in the bell tower and fix the broken bell.

The bells are rung three times a day, usually. Five bells five minutes before a chapel service, and three bells just as the service is beginning. Another very monastic thing about this place. Another way of keeping time. Although all the people who live around the seminary have to be subjected to our way of doing it! Which was probably especially annoying at 6:30 am on Easter morning.