monastery bells rang day and night, at which point the monks pulled themselves up from either the ground where they were diligently working, or the straw mats or wooden pallets on which they slept, and prayed. From Vigils in the middle of the night to morning prayer known as Matins or Lauds at sunrise; from Prime just after dawn to Terce mid-morning and Sext at midday; from None, or afternoon prayer, to Vespers just before sunset, every segment of every twenty-four-hour cycle was punctuated with prayer. Benedict even added an eighth service in the traditional cycle: Compline, a night prayer to be sung after dark. If the monks weren’t working or praying, it seems they were studying scripture. The Psalms provided a constant measure to the monastics’ every day. Their goal in marking time so regularly: to keep the attention of their ephemeral lives trained on the hereafter, living every hour sub specie aeternitatis—or from the perspective of eternity.
This pattern of prayer and scripture reading interwoven with the rest of life’s ordinary moments has been variously called the daily or divine office, common prayer, fixed-hour prayer, the canonical hours, or the Liturgy of the Hours. But because time was then calculated by simply dividing the number of daylight hours by twelve—a remnant and imposition of the ruling Roman army—the actual length of the monks’ divine hours of prayer differed depending on what time of the year it was. By whatever name, the hours stretched out lazily in the long summer sun; they were mercifully short in the cold, dark winter. The length of any “hour” was open to much interpretation and translation depending on one’s location and season of the year—hardly the regular and rigid sixty minutes of our contemporary definition of what we think makes an hour. For our prayerful ancestors an “hour” was simply one-twelfth of whatever amount of daylight there was on any specific “day.” The only times all the hours ever equaled the same length and approached exactly sixty minutes were the two days each year when heaven and earth perfectly aligned—the Spring and Autumn equinoxes—when there were exactly twelve equal hours of daylight and twelve of dark.
Regardless of what time of the year it was, the liturgical hours were always measured from sunrise or sunset. It seems our souls have always been drawn to the solar, never meant to be analogue or digital. The primal sunrise gave the office of Prime its name. Terce, or roughly “third,” arrived three not-necessarily-sixty-minute-long “hours” after that astronomical event. Sext was said six hours after sunrise, and the mid-afternoon prayer of None was recited nine hours after sunrise. Vespers is always said before sunset; compline after. Similarly, many Jewish rituals that are to be performed at specific times are calculated with an eye to the sky and a special unit of time known as sha’ah zmanit, a proportional hour that takes into account one’s location and the seasonal length of any day. Ultimately, saying there are only a certain amount of minutes in every hour is as deceptive as saying there is a calculable number of how many moments make a life.
Uncommon: Prayer
Something happens to time when it is routinely pierced by prayer. The earliest Christian monks knew this. The ancient Hebrews knew this. The ascetics and mystics of the Eastern traditions knew this. Which, for many of us, begs the question: why is it so darn difficult to incorporate routine prayer into our lives? Ironically, the answer we offer most often is time itself—or, more precisely, the lack thereof. We’re just too busy, there’s too much going on, and we have too many demands on our precious little time already. But if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s not only that we’re just too busy to pray; we’re also too occupied with what else might be going on. (We wouldn’t want to miss out on anything, after all.) And let’s face it, prayer isn’t always thrilling. We too often think, hope, or expect that we will hear trumpets and cymbals sound when we pray, or even hear God speaking personally to us. But more often than not prayer is remarkably uneventful. We may have as an iconic image a romantic notion of medieval monks with quills in hand tirelessly scribing sacred scrolls with exotic colored inks and elegantly gilded illuminations. But the three Rs of the monastery were never reading, writing, nor ‘rithmetic; they were regular, routine, and repeat.
Like the daily motions of the earth, the everyday rising and setting of the sun.
For the twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen, prayer meant breathing in and out the one constant breath of the universe. The twentieth-century French philosopher Simone Weil considered our absolute attention the same thing as prayer. Meister Eckhart said that if the only prayer we ever whispered was “thank-you,” that would be enough. Kierkegaard likened laughter to a form of prayer. Ignatius of Loyola taught that anything turned in the direction of God is prayer. Indeed, an entire library would be required to contain our various definitions of prayer over time.
The simplest prayer I know is “Yes.” Another one: “Trust.”
Or the two Greek words at the very root of all Christian prayer: Kyrie, eleison.
“Lord, have mercy.”
In the beginning has always been prayer. Because, as Mother Teresa clarified, “everything begins with prayer.”7
As basic and imperative as that sounds, common prayer is still all too uncommon. If anything it seems to be becoming ever rarer. For some it is, perhaps, the word itself that gets in the way: The word “prayer” can evoke both positive as well as negative associations depending on one’s experience of, and relationship to it. The same can be said of its alternatives, like mindfulness or meditation. Still, “prayer” seems most accurate at its roots; it comes from the Latin precari, meaning to ask earnestly. And in fact we more often than not tend to ask for something—a specific outcome ranging anywhere from good health and comfortable wealth to world peace—in our prayers. We naturally pray for the best outcome and relief from the alternative. And inevitably we never get all we really want. The result: prayer—not to mention God—can seem inconsistent and arbitrary at best.
But what if the truest form of intercession isn’t praying to or for, but with? This can of course take the form of recitation, but there is also the Jewish notion of mitzvah, of “a good work.” We can “do” as well as “say” our prayers. Muslims practice ṣalāt, an Arabic word that is often interchanged with its closest English equivalent: “prayer.” But ṣalāt implies not only the stillness commonly associated with prayer but also supplication, a devotional integration of spiritual surrender with physical motion. “Pray without ceasing,” Saint Francis of Assisi is supposed to have said, “if necessary, use words.”
Ultimately, whatever form it takes, prayer does not necessarily alter the circumstances as much as it changes the perspective of the one who prays. We each and all would do well if our only prayer was the ceaseless question curious young children ask: “Why?”—and then lived out our precarious lives as provocatively as that ultimately unanswerable question. “We will not perish from lack of information,” Rabbi Heschel wrote, “but only for want of appreciation: What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”8
Wondering why and knowing how are two very different postures, though. As children we naturally expressed our insatiable curiosity about the world and our place in it by constantly asking the seemingly simple, yet wonder-filled question: “Why?” Eventually—sadly—too many of us lose that holy curiosity and stop wondering altogether. Why are there stars in the sky? Why don’t we see them during the day? Why is the night dark? If the stars are always shining then why isn’t the night light? Always appearing to be about things we should all know, the innocent why’s children ask are more often than not profound and probing questions that reveal ever more complex subtleties and seldom have definitive answers. The more we consider the question, the more we realize we don’t have a clue what the answer is. So we fall back on the old standard: “Because.”
This inevitably leads to the child’s second most favorite question: “Because why?”
“Because that’s
