A reading from the book of Matt

Normally I get up at 5.30am and, once dressed, have an invigorating cup of tea before Lauds begins at 6am.

At that hour of the morning, few of us feel inspired or particularly holy, but I think we are all conscious of the support that praying in a community provides.

One can feel slightly smug about being up and about at that early hour, but on the whole we’re on automatic pilot. Lauds is a routine that sets us up for work and prayer.

Recently I had a few days’ holiday staying with friends. On waking one morning, I reached for my breviary to begin Lauds as usual. Praying the Divine Office on one’s own is far more difficult than praying it in a community: the impetus is so much easier to sustain when you’re singing in a monastic choir.

By mistake, I picked up an album of the cartoonist Matt. I find his cartoons irresistibly funny, and see them all too rarely. The temptation was to swallow the book whole, but I confined myself to laughing aloud at just a couple of his jokes, before going on dutifully to the psalmody.

I was fortunate in that the Psalm of the day was 104. It is a marvel in its own right, and was notably enhanced by those few seconds of mirth. Solemnity in liturgy is totally suitable most of the time, but even liturgy needs the occasional light interval. God is playful as well as transcendent.

‘How many are your works, O Lord! In wisdom, you have made them all. The earth is full of your riches. There is the sea, vast and wide, with its moving swarms past counting, living things great and small. The ships are moving there and the monsters you made to play with’ (Psalms 104:24-26).

The monster the psalmist had in mind was Leviathan, a dragon-like creature in the complicated mythology of the Old Testament and the Near East. Our great blue whale, over 100 feet long and weighing up to 200 tons, is just as appropriate. It is most emphatically not a plaything for any human being – but for God, why should it not be as much fun as a floating toy in a child’s bath? It is such moments as these that give the lie to the idea that churchgoing should be a stuffy duty. A somewhat belated Lenten resolution for both clergy and laity could be the effort to make our prayer life – whether private or public – more sprightly and therefore much more enjoyable and more likely to take place.