LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

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 meant to instill order and community, but also to test a seeker’s spiritual stamina, faith, and willpower.

      The 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

Скачать книгу