Dear Benedict,
I’m skipping out a bit here, that I’ll come back to later (chapters 2-7) to arrive at chapter 8. One of the gifts of Benedictine spirituality to me is the practice of prayer at night. I was doing it before I met any Benedictines, but the affirmation of night prayer has been a real encouragement. So I’ve moved on to this bit about prayer at night, partly due to current context: the increase in restrictions about COVID19 and the accompanying increase in anxieties of all sorts.
As a child I was afraid of the dark and so I began to pray at night to allay my fears. It seemed the natural thing to do. If I woke up then God was there. This has continued all my life. I would wake often in the later stages of my pregnancy, which is not unusual: I’d pray. In ministry there were wakeful nights: I’d pray. When my mother died and I was mourning, I’d often be awake at night: I’d pray. So too in this Pandemic: I pray.
During the day I often collect up lots of prayer requests and notions. During the night is when I pray many of them. It may not be the complex formula of the night office you describe but it is prayer that rolls unstopping around the world. You liked structure and thought it helped community life, so your words about the night office reflect that. Whatever we face the underlying thought is the same: God hears us at night.
And so I’ve prayed at night in many places: in hospital, at home, in a tent, on a boat, on a train, for example. There are lots more places I’ve not prayed in yet, but who knows? What I do know is that many other people will have found the same thing and this does make a community of sorts, if not the same kind of community that the Rule is about.
At this time high levels of COVID19 infections are driving anxieties of all kinds in all places. It’s not that surprising and neither is it surprising that sleep eludes us. Night prayer is a gift to us all at the moment. I urge anyone who has not already done so to try it.
From some remembered psalms:
The Unsleeping One keeps watch….
Day and night are both alike to God….
Help me to keep watch and pray.
From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.