I came with a range of teenage experience shaped by my youth fellowship in Montana–I think especially of "morning watch," that prayerful practice at our Flathead Lake Methodist Camp, sitting on logs arranged in a makeshift chapel that faced out across the lake and the mountains beyond toward to rising sun. There we sat for inspirational songs and heartfelt teenage prayers in the loveliness of a Montana summer.

I will never forget my first week in Banaras, India as a college junior. Early in the morning, I went to the Ganges riverfront in this holiest and most formidable of Hindu cities. And there, just as dawn was breaking, I experienced for myself that vast "morning watch" observed by thousands of Hindus every day, a combination of morning prayer and religious bathing that stretched along the riverfront for miles.

This is just one example of the ways in which my years in India, which now are many, opened my eyes to a range of Hindu religious experience, both different and yet familiar, that has broadened and deepened my self-understanding as a Christian. Why should it surprise us, after all, that people greet the dawning day with prayer?

Formative? On reflection, even now at Harvard University, I make my way every morning at 8:45 am to Appleton Chapel in Harvard Yard where a 15-minute morning prayer service has gathered a group of students and faculty for some 300 years. It's a long way from Flathead Lake and from the Ganges riverfront in Banaras, but the impulse to begin the day with prayer links us all.