Keeping the Hours

After a minimal amount of Googling around, I found a list of the more-or-less official liturgical hours:

Lauds -- dawn
Terce -- breakfast
Sext -- 9 AM - mid-morning
None ---- Noon
Vespers -- nightfall
Compline -- bedtime
Matins -- midnight
Vigils -- 3 AM

Angelus is a separate bell that is rung three times a day when prayers commemorating the Annunciation of the Incarnation to the Virgin Mary in the Christian tradition, the idea being that God has made Mary pregnant but she is still a virgin -- someone has to tell her the plan. So you see, Jesus DID have a belly button because he was created as a blastosphere, attached to the uterine wall, and developing with a placenta. Mary had a normal pregnancy. (I think I’ll start a Cult of the Placenta and a tradition about where it was buried.)

What’s not clear is whether God used Mary’s ovum or simply planted His/Her own egg, which must have been a clone. I mean, presumably a god’s chromosomes would not match with human chromosomes. The Creationists would be reassured to know that human genes will not match with primate genes because the primate genes -- though very close to the same -- are arranged on a different number of chromosomes. The Trinitarians (three Gods in one) will love the clone idea.

Anyway, an angel was sent to announce the achievement to Mary and serious admirers of Mary say the appropriate prayer three times a day. The bell is to remind them to do that in case they have lost track of the time.

When time was a matter of dawn and dark, sun and moon, or even, for the sophisticated, a matter of stars wheeling through the night, one didn’t lose track of it except possibly on a day like this: overcast, uniformly gray and chilly, damp. I have a mental image of the Blackfeet women withdrawing into lodges to do something with their hands that didn’t require much light while they sat by the fire. If they’d had sheep, they might have invented knitting or crochet. The men this time of year were probably hunting, keeping warm with exercise.

Scholars tell us that in the early European days, hours were of uneven length because the sun rose and set at different times as the seasons passed. Staying up late was a matter of wealth, because it would be costly to provide candles or oil lamps. But around a fire, one could linger a bit with a musical instrument or a storyteller.

Finally, the clock was invented: a matter of wealth to buy one, so the church or city hall supplied a bell for the others. Nicholas Whyte, who supplied this information and a lot more on his remarkable website http://explorers.whyte.com/default.htm
supplies this poem:

L’Orloge est, au vray considerer,
Un instrument tres bel et tres notable,
Et s’est aussy plaisant et pourfitable,
Car nuict et iour les heures nous aprent
Par la soubtilite qu’ell comprent
En l’absence meisme dou soleil.

The clock is, when you think about it,
A very beautiful and remarkable instrument,
And it’s also pleasant and useful,
Because night and day it tells the hours
By the subtlety of its mechanism
Even when there’s no sun.
___ Froissart

I have a clock in every room. That might seem silly for an old retired woman, but I still have to set a timer to get my muffins out of the oven unscorched. Most of the time I go by the radio, NPR, not just the time of day but what day of the week. I listen to Yellowstone Public Radio, which can be streamed. (yellowstonepublicradio.org or ypradio.org) My favorite weekday is Thursday when “From the Top” features young classical musicians of phenomenal talent, along with a little friendly teasing by Chris O’Reilly. (There’s a website: Fromthetop.org.) and at 9PM Lennie Holliman plays her redactions of the various book festivals around Montana -- sometimes bringing order to rather scrambled spontaneous panel discussions at the events.

It is important to keep a schedule, even on overcast days indoors, and to do the same things at about the same times. The mail is up at 9AM and the same regular Valerians are there at the same time. We are old and if one of us is missing, others will inquire, and if no one knows whether you are out of town or your pickup is still in the driveway, someone might drop by -- casually. They say that for purposes of digestion, one should eat about the same things at about the same times every day. For purposes of sleep, one should retire and arise at about the same time every day. And for purposes of thought, one should sit down at the keyboard at about the same hour.

For various reasons, including delivering the newspaper for a month and using the Internet for a reduced rate in the middle of the night -- like 3 AM (Vigils) -- I’ve grown used to getting up at that hour. It’s a mysterious hour that I always connect with a photograph I saw of a Cistercian monastery. The Cistercians date back to the recovery from the Black Plague when much land lay fallow for lack of cultivation and people were hungry. The photo was black and white, of the “night stairs” which led directly from the dormitory to the chapel for prayer at Vigils. Hence, “vigilance.” They prayed for plagues to be kept away. And they built their monasteries over tumbling mountain streams, bringing clean water in and discharging dirtied water out, to preserve sanitation. (The opposite of a cistern!) They ought to be called to New Orleans.

But my real guides to time are the cats. They’ve learned to wake at 3AM or maybe 4AM (Lauds in summer, so laudable), because then I open the cat flap to outdoors. We have a night door rather than night stairs. I feed them a bite, make coffee, read the paper, go back to bed. At 9AM they are back, time to get up and feed them a bite, go to the post office. At Terce or Sext, they are ready to sleep. I do None (noon) alone. Mid-afternoon they reappear for a little something to eat and a long vigil outside through vespers, their favorite hour. They are diurnal. At Compline I find one cat in my bed and the other curled in the window next to my computer. Liturgical cats acting out a litugy based on their biology and my culture. Christians do that, too.