Great River of Prayer

I came across the quote below tonight in the book "In Constant Prayer" by Robert Benson, and just wanted to share...

In the early days and years of the monastic traditions, as more and more communities began to spread across the desert and into Europe, such communities were often built in proximity to one another.

One of the notions they held dear was that one community's prayer was beginning just as another's was ending. The goal was to ensure that there were no hours of the day when the prayer that sanctifies the day was not being offered. There were no minutes on God's good earth when the One who made it was not being worshiped and praised.

For thousands of years, the people of Yahweh-the children of Abraham and the followers of Moses and all those who waited for the Messiah to come-offered their praise and worship to God in offices of prayer that were much like the ones that have been passed down to us. Then came the first Christians, those astonished first ones, whose heritage was Jewish and whose practice of daily prayer and daily worship was shaped by what they had learned as the faithful people of Yahweh, who was even more worthy of devotion now that the Messiah had come.

Then the Gentiles, who learned the practice of the life of the devout from Jewish Christians, took up the mantle of saying the prayers. Then the desert fathers and mothers, the people of the Church of the Middle Ages, and the people of the Reformation all took their places in the line of the faithful followers. Together they formed a great river of prayer that has rolled across the centuries, offered by the unknown and unseen saints, a great river of prayer that sustained the Church....

...And now it is our turn