those within the walls of the community as well as anyone within earshot. The bells have been mostly muted since then; we’re left to our own devices now. Heads down, we individually and carelessly note what time it is on the faces and screens of the digital gizmos and gadgets that virtually rule our lives today.
In each of the world’s great religions, praise of the holy revolves around the disciplined and sanctified use of time. And all the faithful everywhere gather especially and intentionally at twilight—at dusk and at dawn—to sing praise to Whatever or Whomever created this clockwork and mind-bogglingly complex universe. The Book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible speaks often of prayer at fixed times, especially at the twilight moments of morning and evening, and the famous story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den revolves around the prophet’s commitment to pray to his God morning, noon, and night (Dan 6:10). Sabbath begins and ends in twilight. Likewise, ritual fasting in Islam is measured from dawn to dusk. Muslims pray five times a day from early morning to evening to night. Both formal and informal prayer services have been constructed around morning and evening in almost every Christian denomination. The moments on either side of sunrise are considered especially auspicious for prayer, meditation, practicing forgiveness, and reciting excerpts from sacred scripture in the Hindu tradition, as are the evening hours. Considered sacred times, dawn and dusk are when many Hindus perform one of the oldest extant liturgies in the world: Sandhyāvandana—literally, “salutation to the transition moments of the day” (meaning the twin twilights of dawn and dusk).
Twilight, it turned out, was a naturally occurring twice-daily gong; the dependable bell-strike of dawn and dusk the perfect call to prayer.
Whether at cockcrow or the call of the cricket, sunrises and sunsets strike an ancient chord in us that wakes something primal and attentive within and so it is, perhaps, that these two astronomical events have found their place as key reminders of attention, prayer, and mindfulness in every world religion. Setting aside and honoring fixed times for prayer is never convenient or easy, though; prayer is neither routinely our first instinct upon rising in the morning, nor necessarily the last thing we think of at the end of a busy day. But what all spiritual traditions recognize is that to engage in that practice is to make every moment holy, sanctifying time itself—and therefore our lives.
“Seven times a day I praise you. . .” the Psalmist sang (Ps 119:164). Much later Christian monks based their call to prayer throughout the day in part on that verse from the Hebrew Bible, praying at least that often. The number seven is a meaningful one in scripture, though, often associated with perfection or the infinite. The seven-fold prayer passage could also be interpreted to mean that we should simply pray always, all the time. After the ascension of Jesus, who also prayed in the morning and in the evening (Mark 1:35; 6:46; Matt 14:23), there were many who “constantly devoted themselves to prayer” (Acts 1:14) as they kept one eye trained on the heavens above, awaiting his imminent return.
In the beginning was always twilight, darkness, and the hope of a new day. We begin as sky-watchers who come from a long line of sky-watchers before us.
Starry, Starry Night
Nightfall, and therefore the timing of either beginning or ending one’s evening prayer, has long been associated with the moment when at least three small stars can be discerned in the darkening sky. The ever-twinkling stars made for a good marker of slippery time and uncertain prayer: ever-present—and always just beyond our grasp. But marking the exact moment when the long-awaited stars appeared, or for that matter the precise time of sunset or sunrise, the gradual shift from day to night to day, was highly subjective. It still is: there can be about as many variables as—well, as there are stars in the sky. In fact our deep longing and desire for the holy is linked quite literally to the stars. The etymology of the word “desire” leads back to the Latin de sidere, or “from the stars,” which in turn can also be thought of as meaning “awaiting what the stars will bring.”
The Talmud, the seemingly inexhaustible treasury of a wealth of Hebraic law and custom, says that three medium-sized stars visible in the sky signify when nightfall (or “starshine” as it more poetically puts it) begins. But even according to Jewish law, this astronomical event can arrive anywhere from twenty minutes to more than an hour after sunset—not to mention the factor of from what point on the spinning globe one happens to be looking up at the stars. The Talmud’s evening skies over ancient Babylonia and Israel were quite different from those visible from modern-day Taipei or Toronto—or even above a fiddler balanced precariously at sunrise or sunset on the roof of a milkman’s humble home in the fictional shtetl of Anatevka on the eve of an eternal Sabbath in a very real Imperial Russia.3
Some rabbis opted for a more flexible determination of the arrival of night as when the sky was dark except for the faintest glow of the gloaming on the western horizon, a reckoning not unlike that most Muslims follow. In Islam, the ṣalāt al-maġrib, or evening prayer, is the fourth of five formal daily prayers and can be prayed anytime from just after the sun sets until all but the slightest twilight color has disappeared from the sky and darkness is complete—at which point the time for night prayers begins.
It wasn’t only rabbis and imams and theologians that were counting on the stars, though. Poets and painters, scientists and mathematicians have long read the night sky for illumination. The poets were, perhaps, the first to call dusk the “blue hour”—a moment in-between sunset and night and the earliest pinpricks of astral light. Dickens sanctified the phenomenon and called it blessed twilight. The French perfumer Jacques Guerlain tried to capture the fragrance of that elusive time in “l’Heure Bleue,” the scent he created to pay tribute to the moment when, in his lovely words, “the sky has lost the sun, but has not yet gained the stars.”4 In fact the canon of the firmament has produced more than a few star-struck believers—poets like Blake, Poe, Emerson, and Thoreau; scientists like Einstein, Kepler, Hutton, and Hubble. The Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, when he had need for church, simply went outside and worshipped beneath the vast dome of night. Before he ever completed what would surely come to be one of his most celebrated paintings—The Starry Night—he wrote in one of his many surviving letters about his desire to express human hope by indelibly painting the stars; to portray the eagerness of the human soul by capturing the colors of sunset.5
Begin Again
“Always we begin again.” These four gracious words travel down through the ages to us from when they were first penned by Saint Benedict of Nursia sometime around the middle of the sixth century. They are a part of a set of precepts by which medieval monks lived in communion with each other and by which many contemporary monastics still live. A code of conduct known today as the Rule of St. Benedict, it governed every manner in which a monk lived, from sleep to work, eating, speaking, and prayer.6 This document has been and continues to be a unique and influential treatise on the disciplined and sanctified use of time. At its core: a regular schedule of “hours” at which the religious attended to specific activities as mundane as eating or working, and as profound as communal worship and prayer. Either way, the life was routine—and austere. Nowhere in the Christian tradition was the rhythm of daily prayer more refined and more closely associated with measured time than in the monastic communities founded by Saint Benedict.
Before Benedict there was certainly a kind of calendar as it then existed in the Christian faith: a loose collection of feast days associated with saints and martyrs, and holy days linked to the events of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But Benedict gave equal attention to every day of the year, assigning a specific function and kind of work to each one—and then went on to sanctify every hour of every day. His philosophy is succinctly summed up in the community’s over-arching motto of ora et labora—“pray and work.” More than a mere fixation with measuring time, Benedict’s Rule was
