Awful and painful video from Egypt. At such moments we forget about Christian confessions and think only about brothers in Christ... Look at the man in white shirt. He tries to defend his church with outstretched arms. Almost alone... God bless him!
For those who would like to, a good way to pray for them is to pray a part of their daily Coptic Office: www.agpeya.com [agpeya.com]
Copts pray seven times daily and when they can't manage the full round of daily prayers, they are asked to go to Confession before approaching Holy Communion.
I knew a Coptic student who kept his Office book in his back-pack. What exemplary piety!!
Twelve psalms + Psalm 50 are prayed at every service as a minimum. Prime has seven additional psalms added to that number and the Midnight Hour is composed of three services with 12 psalms each. The office of the Veil is for monastics and clergy and there are 30 psalms in that service.
The services jump over certain psalms and the last two services of the Midnight Hour have the same psalms as Vespers and Compline.
So while a great number of psalms are used, the entire book of the Psalter is not recited daily.
However, an alternative method of saying the Office is to pray 30 psalms consecutively in each of the five middle Office (between Prime and Midnight Hour).
It would certainly be possible to pray the entire psalter, dividing the psalms up over the seven canonical Hours.
The Assyrian Church of the East in its monastic practice has a Psalter that is similarly divided up into 21 units or marmitha and each of these is subdivided into three Hulala sections - very much like the Byzantine division of the Psalter.
The Assyrian monastics recited the entire psalter daily by reciting three marmithas during each of the seven Hours.
In Byzantine practice, some monastics referred to the nine Odes that follow the 20 kathismata as the "21st Kathisma" of the Psalter.
The full Rule of St Pachomius calls for the recitation of the entire Psalter TWICE in every 24 hours, with 12/13 psalms recited at the beginning of each hour of the day and night.
The holy Anglican family of Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding actually made it a standard practice to recite the Psalter twice in one day like this. They would first do the entire Psalter with 12/13 psalms at the turn of every hour. And then, from nine o'clock to one in the morning, they would take turns for their seventh canonical Hour of Night Vigils and pray the psalter again.
And certainly, the recitation of half the Psalter in the Byzantine tradition would replace the Horologion.
In all that horror, I saw one comment in an article that gave me hope. 3 Fransiscan nuns were teachers at Catholic school that was overcome in the current rioting, and some Muslim men captured them and were parading them through the streets like prisoners of war. Here is the part that gave me hope: a Muslim woman saw all this happening, and she gave these Catholic women asylum in her home. Quite a brave thing for a WOMAN in a country like that!
Women are stronger than men, they must endure much more pain than men ever have to and, added to this, they are not afraid of their emotions - as men are often socialized to do.
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