Eph 6:18), many have knowingly, or unknowingly heeded the advice of Cyprian, the third-century martyred bishop of Carthage, who wrote of the necessity of prayer “at the sunsetting” and decline of day.
Indeed, there is nothing quite like the human body at prayer—naming, thanking, beseeching, proclaiming, wondering, remembering, praising, longing, belonging, returning. We bend our human bodies into one of the innumerable shapes of prayer: we fall to our knees, or sit cross-legged, or we stand and raise our hands to our hearts or to the sky; we light a candle or lamp, or we whisper into the dark; we lift our voices, or bow down and kiss the ground; we whirl around, or press our palms together, or fold our fingers into any number of age-old gestures.
The Talmud, the long-revered and authoritative compendium of Jewish law and custom, says, “Every blade of grass has an angel bending over it saying, ‘grow, grow!’” (Midrash Rabba, Bereshit 10:6). Islam teaches: “For every soul there is a guardian watching it” (The Qur’an, aṭ-Ṭāriq 86:4). I have felt the same more than once standing in the twilight: that some divine source or conduit was leaning nearer than usual to whisper something in my ear. Each day’s sunrise and sunset has become for me a pair of painted parentheses between which I try to hear and discern the holy sentences of my life unfolding in time. Sometimes I listen and pay attention. Many times I do not, and rush headlong and mindlessly into the next moment as the gorgeous colors of sunrise or sunset slide unnoticed into just another day or night in ordinary time.
Gradually though, the lesson began to dawn in me—slowly, incrementally, like the sun itself rises—as I began to consider that maybe what really matters isn’t what happens before or after any sunrise or sunset so much as what we do in between each rising and setting: that our everyday moments in ordinary time are, in fact, the point of the matter. We ought to marvel at the commonplace, as Confucius observed so very long ago. And yet we seldom pause to even pay attention to our most ordinary moments, not to mention hallow them. Our minutes and hours and days all too often slip away completely unnoticed.
Meanwhile the sacred unfolds, if it unfolds anywhere, in ordinary time.
Where else would it?
This book is about that unfolding, and not only through the physics and optics of any twilight hour or rising or setting sun, but through our own rising and setting—and rising again; about time and eternity and being present; about prayer and gratitude and the daily practice of resurrection; about beginnings and endings . . .
and beginning again.
In the transient, twin twilights of each day I unwittingly crafted my own version of what, in the Christian monastic tradition is called the Daily Office or the Liturgy of the Hours. Pre-eminent in that tradition are the prayer hours of Vespers and Lauds, said in the evening and at dawn respectively. Along the way, as I began to wonder about time and eternity I also began to wonder about the many boundaries we place around time. Exactly when does the glimmering vesper light of dusk become night’s darkness, for example, or the welcome light of dawn drift into the plain old light of day? When does the day actually begin? (A seemingly simple question with more than one answer.) Or for that matter, what is a “day,” one of the most basic measurements of time in our lives?
In many religious traditions the day begins not with the dawn but in the gloaming with the approaching night, with the evening dusk, at sunset—or in a word, twilight. The pages that follow are arranged to echo that same ancient pattern and rhythm. Part One is tinted with images of the evening twilight and explores our relationship with time. Vespers and other evening prayers, as well as the practice of keeping a Sabbath, are invoked. Part Two, is painted with the first light of dawn and the gratitude of Lauds, and looks at the physical and spiritual practices of wakefulness and attentiveness, and the rich tradition of discovering the eternal in the present. Between Vespers and Lauds the night sky always awaits with its stars and all that darkness in which they burn. Accordingly, in the Entr’acte—“Night”—I explore the role that darkness has played for so many seekers of illumination.
For me, observing the liminal hours of twilight has become less a discipline to keep and more an opportunity to listen closely for the sacred every day, and a reminder to fully inhabit my life in time as well as space. At their best, my prayerful twilights have been times of reason and reflection and revelation: the marvel and wonder of astronomy and physics and prayer and poetry all at once. Indeed, there have been some memorable skies along the way, spectacular sunsets that come readily to mind. Although it’s tempting to want to extend those memorable twilit hours, to preserve forever their remarkable colors somehow, I know the sun will surely set and rise again.
And just as surely as there was, in the beginning, a day without any yesterday, there will come a time for each of us when there will be a day without a tomorrow.
In the end all we really have is our material and mortal bodies in time and space.
I have come to believe that twilight is so much more than optics alone. Dusk and dawn are moments when the curtains of Creation are briefly pulled back to reveal a glimpse of how everything rises and returns, including us; that we are not mere accidental combinations of stardust and happenstance elements, but implausibly and wonderfully made. The twin twilights of night becoming day and day becoming night reveal that we are never still or stuck but always beginning; that what holds this spinning universe together is not only gravity, but relationship and becoming.
That our salvation is in the everyday acts of rising and falling—
—and rising again.
And that there is much holiness in these ordinary, extraordinary acts.
Light/Years
I.
Begin with cosmic calculation.
A star not much different than billions of others, a blue planet spinning in its orbit, a thin blanket of oxygen swaddling that star-struck ball . . . and us. Between the star and the planet, between the star and us: approximately ninety-three million miles. It takes more than eight minutes for the star’s light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, to navigate the darkness between and alight upon our faces.
The planet spins, tilted on its axis just so, and there is evening, and there is day. First the night, then the light—every dawn, the light—and after the light: night.
Begin with a moon circling the planet that is circling the sun; begin with reflection, with gravity and grace, with tides that rise and fall and rise up.
(Again)
Begin with revolution: Twenty-four hours, a measure of time, a day.
Multiply by 365.242199, the time it takes for the blue planet to make one complete circuit around the star and we get a year—time past, time present, time future—begin here: with the distance and duration of stars, the transit and timelessness of light. How everything depends on the tilt, the spin, the orbit—the circling around, irrevocably bound to each other.
And on spinning through space so fast we don’t even know we are moving.
II.
Or begin with the end in which is our beginning, no “before” or “after” and yet we are born and we live and we die. Begin with the ancient light that reaches our eyes from our next nearest star which, being so many light-years away, will have left that sun more than four years ago—a star-beam reaching back in space more than twenty-five trillion miles.
Wherever we look we look backward in time: what was, what might have been. Time does not pass . . .
We do.
We know time only from the fleeting flight of things. Time doesn’t simply fall like sand through an hourglass, we sieve it like powdered sugar dusted over flaked memories. Every breath and every moment is an end and a beginning; every person an epigraph and epitaph and that—that is where we start.
And where we depart . . .
Begin with us turned around just so, always looking over our shoulders, eternally saying goodbye. We are put