Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
If I am to be the publican rather than the Pharisee, then the reality of my prayer will lie in the inner disposition and not the outward show. Benedict has predisposed me to understand the subject of prayer in all that he has been telling me in chapter 7 and so now, if in this chapter he turns naturally to the subject in an entirely practical way, this should not really surprise me.
I can also now see that the three preceding chapters have been trying to help form in me the attitude that 1s to underlie the art of praying: the fear of the Lord, the total dependence on God, the constant awareness of God's presence, the demand of continual perseverance and patience, and, above all, the motivation
_ of love. The whole end of life is to hear the Word and respond to it. The whole of my life is to become prayer.
But mindfulness and awareness, though the essential foundation of a life of prayer, are not in themselves sufficient. There must be some structure and framework, regular times for prayer, particularly shared prayer, and it is these that Benedict is establishing here, Prayer is never taken out of the natural flow of life itself. It is firmly inserted within the rhythm of the changing seasons, of winter and summer, of day and night, and not least of the rhythm of my own body. In a world in which the techniques of prayer are widely discussed and so many varying techniques seem to be offered, it is rather startling to have the subjects of sleep, digestion, and making time to go to the lavatory introduced into this short chapter. This, however, at once makes it clear that the daily office is tailored to suit the needs of the monks, rather than according to some idealized blueprint or an abstract principle. Benedict respects our total humanity—body, mind, and spirit—and recognizes that balance here: praying is disassociated neither from a gentle handling of bodily needs, nor from intellectual demand. The gap between the first two offices of the day
is to be used for reading and for study, for memorizing the psalms in order to make them one's own, "'to possess the psalms and be possessed by them."'
In the world of his day, Benedict's monks would go to bed at 6:00 p.m., so that after eight full hours of sleep they would awaken at 2:00 a.m. They would thus start the day in the dark, and the slow coming of the dawn would be a symbolic daily reminder of the movement from dark to light, from sleep and death to new life. Anyone who has read what Thomas Merton has told us of his life in his hermitage at Gethsemani will know, even if they have not experienced it for themselves, that those hours before dawn are perhaps the best time of all for prayer.
Merton himself would rise at 2:15 a.m., when the night was at its darkest and most silent.
It is necessary for me to see the first point of light which begins to dawn. It is necessary to be present alone at the resurrection of Day, in blank silence when the sun appears. In this completely neutral instant I receive from the eastern woods, the tall oaks, the one word ''Day'' which is never the same. It is never spoken in any known language. a