love what vanishes; it is time’s ineluctable beams we cannot bear. The bygone days of days gone by, time gone by. Time irretrievable, irredeemable—time since, time without—time then and there . . .
And then again.
Begin with the brevity of—the urgency of—life. Begin with trajectory.
Begin with the fire of time in which we burn.
III.
Or begin with the sky on fire, begin with a word: sunset—another: gloaming. A bouquet of time arranged just so, a vase full of evening: sprays of starlight, night branches, a sprig of sunshine.
A single long-stemmed moment.
A perfect blue hour where we measure space with our hearts and love is that measure, where time is elastic and our passions expand it—time present, time immemorial.
Four o’Clocks ticking out their fragrance. Moonflowers and starflowers and morning glories clutching and clinging—their curling tendrils, their vining stems pulling them up to the light. A sunflower: its golden face chasing after the burning transit of a distant star in the sky. The blue gentian and forget-me-nots whispering pure words from the mountain-slopes of another time, another place.
Van Gogh arranging twilight in a sky blue vase:
Still / Life (the clutch, the cling)
Begin here, begin now. Begin always.
The Hours
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