When I was growing up in the 1970s, I loved hanging around the college where my dad taught in the department of religion. My ballet teacher lived at the edge of the campus, and sometimes, after my lesson, I would walk over and find my dad and his students sitting together around a seminar table in the late afternoon light. We called them the monks of Atlantic Christian College—MOACC, for short. By the time I slipped into the classroom where they gathered a couple of times a week, they had already sung the Divine Office and were deep into what they called "Chapter." They might be discussing a book—Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation is the one I remember best—or dealing with the business of the Order.
The Abbey of Gethsemani had supplied MOACC with psalters marked for chanting. Bound in plastic rings and covered with the kind of cheerful contact paper we used to line our kitchen shelves, these psalters were the heart of the monks' prayer. One of the Gethsemani monks had taught my dad and his students to chant during one of their visits to the monastery. The sound of it was beautiful—gravity and sweetness combined.
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