Hi, I'm Edward Sree, and welcome to all things Catholic where real faith meets real life.

I so fondly remember spending time with some monks in South Dakota and living their life for a few days and so impressed about how they would get up early in the morning before the crack of dawn and they go into the

chapel and it was dark and there'd be candles and they would chant these hymns and

recite the Psalms and do the morning prayer and then we'd have mass in that chapel and

then we'd have a holy hour praying before the

blessed sacrament all before the sun even gave up and then we'd gather again for

midday prayer around noon in that same chapel with more Psalms and more prayers

and more hymns and then we'd have a meal

we'd say bless us oh Lord we'd have a concluding prayer after the meal we'd have the

rosary evening prayer and then before we went to bed each night we would go into

that chapel again and we would thank the Lord for the blessings of the day

examine our consciences tell him sorry for our sins and then entrust our souls into the Father's hands

before we went to sleep. I was so impressed about how beautiful

it was to see these men having prayer setting the rhythm of their day. What was marking their day, setting the rhythm of the day, the tone of the day, wasn't their

iPhone and responding to messages, responding to email.

It wasn't about running from one appointment in a meeting to the next to the next and it wasn't about

checking on what's happening at sports and what's happening on the news and in social media

No, what was marking the rhythm of their day was prayer these little moments they'd have throughout the day in prayer.

And even though we may be ordinary laypeople in the modern world, you know, working jobs,

raising families, having a social life, and all that.

We might not be monks, and yet we can still learn something from that life and sprinkle in

prayer at key moments of the day and have a rhythm that's set in our souls around prayer.

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