Today the internet is awash with photos of the Northern Lights taken from all over the UK. I wonder what you would have made of them 1,500 years ago, or even if they were visible in Italy?
I’ve had them explained to me but actually they are just awesome. Sheets and bursts of colour dancing across the night sky. Last night was clear and ideal for them after such a big ‘solar burp’.
Aurora over Longdendale
Everyone who saw it is talking about it and everyone who didn’t is kicking themselves for missing it. It seems that lots of people had them on their ‘bucket list’: a must-see sight or event that notion of which would probably puzzle you too.
Between Compline and Lauds, Benedictines still observe the great silence. There’s no more fitting time to contemplate the heavens. They are immense and vital, providing air to breathe, highways for aerial species and space to pray. As human activity messes with the air we must do all we can to raise awareness and right the balance.
Aurora in Longdendale
Remembered bible: Keep watch and pray.
Make me air aware.
Janet Lees, Friend of Scholastica, Wandering Anchorite of Longdendale. 11.05.2024
In chapter 21 you give your attention to sleep. I do so now in my letter to you. Sleep is important, vital.
In your day, ordinary people would have expected little private space, if any, in which to sleep. Families bedded down together and if you worked as a servant for a richer family, then servants would have shared sleeping space. But you say ‘each sleeps in their own bed’. An early attempt at safe-guarding? Hard to say. The concept is still a relatively new one to us even. But it’s a timely piece of advice.
Of course even today not everyone has the space to sleep alone. Homeless and on the streets, it’s warmer in a doorway with a dog and a companion or two. Under a leaking tarpaulin trying to cross Europe as a refugee, people take shelter where they can. Even in Britain today not everyone gets to sleep in their own bed.
For those who can choose, private space for sleeping has become the norm. Shared dormitories of the type you describe are much less welcome. But a small room with a closed door could be more dangerous than an open room with many beds. Our understandings of consent are challenged all of the time. We must wake up to that, at least!
But sleep is important if you are going to get up early to sing and pray the offices. Proper sleeping arrangements are therefore vital. Yet too often we, who have these basics, seek to deny them to others, pushing out those who seek asylum, for example, to sleep in places we have long since abandoned or consider inappropriate now, like disused barracks. When hotels or B and B’s are used for people claiming benefits we decry the luxury, even when the places themselves are far from luxurious. When the un-imprisoned learn prisoners have televisions in their cells they are incensed. All this seems to be the response of the fearful who live wondering if their flimsy security could be stripped away.
Patchwork bed quilt I have made with fabric reused from garments
You knew that a bed would help a person feel valued, give them a place. Well slept monastics could better serve the community to which they belonged. We could learn this too. Giving people beds is not a luxury; it just helps them sleep and wake up better able to contribute.
From the remembered bible: I lay down and sleep in safety.
Let me sleep!
From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay community of St Benedict.
Yes, I’m still awake. Of course, I understand that my version of prayer at night is not like the Night Office you describe. I rarely leave my bed let alone pick up a book. I rely on my remembered bible and psalm snippets rather than full passages of text. Each of us has a way that works and my husband tells me that, yes, he sometimes prays at night too.
Today my friend in Korea asked me to pray, yesterday it was my friend in Kenya, a few days ago a friend in Uganda. Alongside that are many concerns of people I don’t know, particularly during this Pandemic, as well as quite a lot I don’t agree with: it’s quite a community.
One of the things I do is try to visualise the person or situation I’m praying about in order to sort of take myself there and be alongside them in solidarity. So I imagine the place or space where I saw these people or a photo of them if I can. There are psalm snippets which help me like Psalm 100: All people who live on earth. I don’t sing aloud (so as not to wake my companion) but I do sing in my head. Some nights, it’s all I can do.
From a remembered psalm: All you people living on earth, sing cheerfully to God.
I‘m still awake.
From a Friend of Scholastica and Member of the Lay Community of St 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.
