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We take the tick or digital sweep of the clock for granted, but long before it reigned over a global marketplace or became the tyrannical ruler of our time-torn lives it is today, the clock was a simple call to community and prayer. Before we ever gave time a face, sticks of incense and strings of beads fragrantly kept track of our holy moments as they measured the length of our prayers, and therefore our hours. They still do in ashrams, temples, and churches around the world. But this measure of time contained too much variability; tempo and cadence could easily skew any prayerful hour. More precise timekeeping could be found in the waning wax of a burning candle, or the steady drops of dripping water, or even grains of sands through the narrow opening of an “hourglass.” While abstract time—invisible, intangible, immaterial—was far from concrete, we quickly learned that it cast an overarching shadow over all of our days nevertheless. The lengthening or shortening shadows cast by a perpendicular rod, spike, or pin set in the sun more reliably measured the day-lit hours.

Telling time by shadows was all well and good by the light of day, but what about when there was no source of illumination, when everything was shadow? When the shadows were breathing down our necks from all around?

Facing Time

Perhaps our earliest ancestors hoped the dark hours didn’t count, but the perennial problem was how to accurately keep track of prayer time through the night. Beyond the command to “pray always” (1 Thess 5:16–18; Eph 6:18), there were times when it was good to know what time it was, even if it was in the middle of the night. Whoever had the night watch, though, more often than not failed to keep his eyes open and the community inevitably and unknowingly slept through the hours—and their prayers—in the dark.

Primitive sundials eventually gave way to the more elaborate contraptions of cogs and wheels we would more readily recognize as a “clock” today. They may not have looked anything like our wristwatches, not to mention the digital read-outs of the screens and devices we seem to take for granted these days, but they were in fact the technical wonders of their day. Still, these earliest timepieces were not meant to remind one of time, but of eternity. Or, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel would much later note, the everlasting is to be found not beyond time but within it: “The days of our lives are representatives of eternity rather than fugitives,” he wrote, “and we must live as if the fate of all time would totally depend on a single moment.”1 Likewise, the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists of New England found an active “correspondence” between the spiritual realm and the most ordinary daily experiences; that the hum of the holy could always be heard in the humdrum. For them the ordinary day was not merely an observable unit of time wrested from the clock or calendar, but a spiritual example to emulate: “You must become a day yourself,” Emerson wrote.2

The first clocks had no hands at all, as their sole function was simply to remind monks to pray always, day and night. Only eventually did we lend time a hand—and only one—to mark the hours. The first minute hand didn’t show up on clock faces until sometime in the sixteenth century, gaining greater popularity almost a century after that when the corrective and steady swing of the pendulum regulator was added to most clockworks. Obsessed as we are nowadays over speed and seconds, our ancestors seemed relatively unconcerned with those slimmest divisions of time. The thin line of the second hand didn’t show up on clock faces until much later in the day.

The ubiquitous clock’s religious beginnings are ironic: intended to assist the monastic in moving beyond time, the clock ultimately took the eternal and made of it something temporal; bound timelessness to time itself. Meant to mark time for worshiping God, the pendulum gradually swung the other way and the clock became a god itself to be worshiped. The word “clock” echoes out from the Medieval Latin clocca and the Old French cloque to even earlier words that all meant “bell.” The endless chime of time has always called to those that listen. The only reason any hour strikes any number on any clock at all is that the passing of time has for so long been associated with the reverberating sound of mallet against metal.

Because the lives of committed monastics included praying at fixed times day and night, they invented the ceaselessly ticking, tolling machines that we now take for granted, but upon which the monks depended to govern the consistent ringing of the clocca, or prayer bells. When the monastery bells rang they drew attention to the interior present moment as well as eternity, calling the faithful everywhere—both 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 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 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 the way things are,” we say with as much authority as we can muster. “The night is dark because that’s what night is.”

And, of course this might work once or twice, until the curious expanding little mind catches on. So, we transpose the why into the more answerable how and explain the science or physics of something. But that still hasn’t answered the question. We can always figure out how. It’s the why that always leaves us wondering. I can study and come to understand, for example, the fascinating science and optics of how twilight interacts with the rods and cones of our eyes. But that doesn’t come anywhere near answering what I think is the more interesting question of why the dawn or dusk stirs the soul or imagination so. That’s something else entirely.

All our human nature ever really wants is a final answer. But the fact is any search for understanding is most productive when every question leads not to a succinct answer but to yet another even more interesting question. The most profound truths always feel more like beginnings than endings. All of this isn’t to say that how cannot be a helpful question—it can be. Especially when asked in the context of such inquiries as “how do we know what we know?” or “how do we know something is real?” Or, “how can we be certain of a certain thing—of anything?” But then the answers to these questions probably have more to do with squirrely belief than actual proof. Further, they are about the difference between believing that something is or happened, versus believing in something as truth. Or as the poet Rilke famously suggested, about not seeking or finding the answers, so much as living out the questions themselves.9

Perhaps best known for his contributions to physics and mathematics, Sir Isaac Newton produced far more written materials on biblical interpretation. While he acknowledged the clutch of gravity and its role in the universe—the motions of the planets—he ultimately found (and admitted) it could not explain who or what first set the planets in motion. Henry David Thoreau tried to keep two journals, one for recording “just the facts,” and the other for more poetical musings. But he ultimately found the world full of poetry.10 Science and religion operate in the same arena. They simply speak different languages: one a dialect of fact, the other a poetry of faith; one of knowing, the other of believing.

Truth is never singular.

There are forces in the universe which we do not, and cannot understand, despite our endless inquiry—forces that are not diminishing but expanding. Forces that bind atom to atom across time and space; forces like gravity that bring us into each other’s orbit; forces that catch us when we fall and lift us up; forces that propel light through darkness faster than we can ever imagine. Some refer to the dynamic forces that are thought to move throughout the universe as Shakti. Others call those same forces Brahma, or Holy Spirit, or even God (by whatever name). Still others call this life-force Source, or the Absolute, or the Tao. For some the forces that both expand and hold together the universe are simply energy, light, and matter.

I use the word “prayer” to express the discipline of striving to pay attention to the why and speechless wonder of these forces. But there are plenty of other choices. If you’re not comfortable with prayer, there’s contemplation, concentration, careful observation, or even the call of the heart. For some putting one foot in front of the other can be prayer. Listening deeply is perhaps one of the most profound spiritual disciplines. I would no sooner presume to tell you what words to use when engaging with the eternal than how to do it. If a word gets in your way, translate it into something that has meaning for you and what you take seriously about life. The Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi famously noted there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. The Talmud states that it is permissible to pray in any language that you can understand. “Pray as you can,” one Christian monastic adage councils, “not as you can’t.”

There is, in fact, a charming story from the Jewish tradition that speaks to this aspect prayer. There was once a young boy who wanted to pray but did not yet know many Hebrew words; all he knew was the letters of the aleph-beth, or “alphabet,” so that became his prayer. One day as he was praying what he knew—his letters—a rabbi heard him and asked why he prayed in that way. The wise little one declared, “The Holy One knows my heart. I give him the letters, and he puts the words together.”

Eventually, the Benedictine sense of time overflowed the walls of medieval monasteries and the Liturgy of the Hours became a rhythm of life even for some who lived and worked in the distinctly secular villages beyond the religious compounds. Elegantly penned and bound Christian devotional manuscripts known as “Books of Hours” contained an abbreviated form of the Divine Office designed for the average lay person and were widely available and popular by the fifteenth century. The original daily planners, every appointment was with God. Their pages were comprised of a collection of litanies, prayers, psalms, and excerpts from the Gospels, and were considered palm-sized and portable cathedrals. The wide margins surrounding the elegant medieval calligraphy of each page’s sacred text were often elaborately decorated with illustrations—illuminations—of the daily, the mundane, and the ordinary moments of everyday life.

If the mystics were right, as surely they were, and every creature is a book about God, then each moment is a letter in a sacred alphabet even if we don’t yet understand the whole word. And every one of our hours is a holy chapter in the story of eternity—the story of us.

A book of ours.

1. Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 205.

2. Emerson, The Complete Works, VII: 180.

3. I refer, of course, to Tevye the Dairyman, the central character in an eponymous story originally written by Sholem Aleichem, and the opening scene of its more widely known theatrical and film incarnations, “Fiddler on the Roof.” See Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman; and Norman Jewison et al., Fiddler on the Roof.

4. In Hoeppe, Why the Sky Is Blue, 236.

5. An idea he expressed in a letter to his brother Theo. See “Letter 531” in van Gogh, The Complete Letters, III:26. Perhaps more famously, Vincent expressed in later correspondence his struggle between organized religion and personal worship: “That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.” See “Letter 543” in ibid., III: 56.

6. See, for example, Kardong, Benedict’s Rule, especially chapter 73; and McQuiston, Always We Begin Again.

7 Mother Teresa expressed this sentiment many times and in many ways. See, for example, The Joy in Loving, 43; and throughout Stern, Everything Starts from Prayer.

8. Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 26.

9. His oft-quoted advice to an aspiring poet: “Don’t search for answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” In Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 46.

10. On February 18, 1852 he wrote in his journal: “I have a commonplace book for facts, and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much more poetry and that is their success. They are transmuted from earth to heaven. I see that is my facts were sufficiently vital and significant—perhaps transmuted into the substance of the human mind—I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all.” In Thoreau, The Journal, 114.