Chapter 3: Daybreak: The Hour of Beginnings (64-80)

Chapter 3: Daybreak (The Hour of Beginnings) is a meditation on “lauds,” that monastic time of day which, at Mepkin Abbey, begins at 5:30 in the morning.

While I use a number of books that contains “lauds” as one of the “hours” of the day, my Lutheran tradition does not ordinarily use the term lauds as a time for that fixed-hour hour of prayer. What Ford and the Mepkin Abbey monks call Lauds, Lutherans call “Matins” or “Morning Prayer.” And, trust me, it doesn’t come at 5:30 a.m. (except at St. Augustine's House, a Lutheran Benedictine community in Oxford, Michigan); it’s more like 7:30 or 8:00 when most of us Lutherans do Morning Prayer. Whether we come to prayer at 5:30 or 8:00, Ford is quite right to say that at some point (he calls it the pointe vierge, the virginal point of the day), we Christians may well want to greet “the dawn of the day” and “of new life” (64).

With Lauds in mind, Ford introduces us to considerations of our own “awakening to God” (65). He tells us how Billy Graham and his wife Ruth came to know God. For Billy, it was within a discernable moment; for Ruth, a gradual lightening, like “the almost imperceptible coming of surise” (66). Having discussed his own beginning with his spiritual director, David (I wonder if this is David Steindl-Rast, about whom Ford speaks in Chapter 1), Ford tells about his early life with/out God, about his learning to preoccupied so as to be inattentive, about his life as an adopted boy whose parents were on and off again with their love. Eventually at fourteen years of age, he hesitatingly came to pray, paraphrasing verses from the psalms. Awakenings, Ford tells us, come in a variety of ways. For one friend, it happened in a chapel in Taos; for Francis Collins it was C. S. Lewis who opened the door. Ford himself used to tape psalm-like prayers to his bathroom mirror to help him comes into mornings with attention to God. Today, he says,

Often in the morning I will sit in a favorite chair in my study with a cup of coffee, with classical music playing, not trying to form a prayer with words but waiting, listening, until perhaps I sense the Spirit bringing to the surface a word from God. Then I offer a simple “Thank you.” I have found this time of silence, even it is is very short, to be a key to staring the day with attention.

Waiting is important for Ford, and he wishes it to be good for you too.

“Prayer is Like Watching for the Kingfisher” (a prayer by Ann Lewin that Ford suggests might “speak to you”) turned out to be especially appropriate for me and my understanding as to what Ford is driving at in this chapter. I have seen a kingfisher only once in my life; it happened last summer when I was out on my pontoon boat, well into evening, with Kurt, June’s nephew, who had every expectation that we might see one. I was doubtful. But sure enough, after we had slowly entered a cove whose banks were lined with overhanging trees, there we saw it: a streak of flashing colors, iridescent greens and blues. For maybe a minute I watched it fly back and forth across the shallow water. I had wanted to see one for decades. That evening I got my glimpse.

Since that glimpse I had gone out a number of times to resee the kingfisher. But without luck. I get to see great blue herons, turkey vultures, and warblers whose exact names I don’t know, but I still have to wait to see that kingfisher for a second time.

Ford tells us that prayer is like that: it’s a lot of waiting, birdbook (prayerbook) in hand, binoculars hanging on the shoulder, eyes more or less riveted on the trees, the psalms, the Scriptures. One needs to be fairly quiet. One needs to wait. Morning, Ford is convinced, is a really good time for waiting; it’s time for Lauds, for Morning Prayer, the opening of the day.