Remembering to Pray

I've been trying to pray the Liturgy of the Hours for half a decade now. Some years, I'm more successful than others. I use Phyllis Tickle's books, The Divine Hours. When my husband was working 80 hours a week and my job only required me to be on site 20 hours a week, I'd just move the book around the house with me. But now, I'm in an office 40 hours a week, and I feel odd about taking the book to the office with me.

I thought, no big deal, I'll use an online site (go here for my favorite; I love the image of the candles at the top of the page). But I often forget. So, I've put notes to myself around my tiny office, but they often get buried under other notes to myself.

I thought about putting reminders in Outlook, an application on which I'm becoming increasingly dependent. But that seemed weird to me too.

So now, as I'm opening Internet sites, I open the one for the Divine Hours. I just leave it open, one tab among many. So far, that's doing the trick. I have to refresh the site (it took me a day to realize that); on my work computer, it doesn't update itself. But it reminds me.

If anyone walks in, there's nothing to see, nothing that might offend them, aside from the fact that I'm not on a site that I can even remotely claim is about work. Our technology use guidelines are a bit unclear as to whether or not I'd be in trouble if anyone ever decided to make a fuss. If I was streaming something, I could be in big trouble. But going to a site that's unrelated to work? I think our organization has given up policing that.

I figure if smokers are still allowed to take smoking breaks, I can take a prayer break. It calms me and gets me re-centered. I could argue that I'm more productive with prayer breaks. But so far, no one has complained, and I don't expect them to do so. With the economy swirling down the drain, we've got far bigger concerns than a lowly worker who takes a break to wander down a back street of the Internet, looking for the Liturgy of the Hours.