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On my recent Celtic Pilgrimage, I was inspired by the lives of Aiden and Oswald. Oswald was from a royal family, but he had to flee his homeland in Northumbria in England when his father was killed. He was raised near Iona in Scotland where he became a Christian and was mentored by the monks there for 17 years.
When he returned to his home to become king, he asked the monks to send someone to help him reach his people for Christ. The community at Iona sent Aiden along with twelve other monks who left their homeland in Scotland to go on pilgrimage never to return.
When Aiden arrived at Bamburgh Castle, he knew he could not base his ministry there because the place was too loud and busy to provide the time and space needed for the life of prayer he and his fellow monks needed. So he asked the king to allow them to settle on Lindisfarne, a small island off the coast of Northumberland, which is linked to the mainland by a causeway exposed only at low tide.
This isolated place is where the monks built their monastery in AD 635 and continued their practices of solitude, silence, and prayer. These practices centered them in their life in God and in community so that they could fulfill their God-given mission. The picture above is of ruins of the Benedictine church and monastery established on the Holy Island around AD 1150.
The choice of this location reflects the Celtic monasticism’s sense of time and space. They believed you have to move to the edge of the world —to withdraw from all of the distractions of life to be present to God. It was a different feeling than being in the center of city life and provided what was needed to attend to God in prayer.
The Celts also had a sense of fullness of time that went beyond chronological time of minutes and seconds and hours passing by. All time was a Kairos moment, an opportune moment, or a due season. A Celtic saying asserts: “When God made time, he made plenty of it.” Time was understood to be a gift from God. While they recognized they could find God in all of time and in everything they did, they also understood the need to mark time with intentional prayer.
On our Celtic Pilgrimage in August, we lived into this way of life by practicing fixed-hour prayers in the morning, at noon, early evening before dinner, and at the end of the day. In Spiritual Disciplines Handbook, Adele Calhoun explains that fixed-hour prayers “call for the regular and consistent pattern of attending to God throughout the day. The desire is to stop my work and pray throughout the day.” This was a wonderful means of grace in helping us keep God at the center of our pilgrimage as together we turned our attention to God in prayer and worship in community.
Two months after departing for the Celtic Pilgrimage, I went on a silence and solitude retreat at The Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, which is a Cistercian monastery. The Cistercians are a reform group of the Benedictines. Both traditions are committed to praying throughout the day.
In her book Receiving the Day, Dorothy Bass writes, “The Liturgy of the Hours of the Order of Saint Benedict, which has structured the prayers of communities of women and men around the world for nearly fifteen hundred years, consists of up to eight sessions of psalmody during each twenty-four period. The rhythms of Benedictine life embody a steadfast attention to the ‘sanctification of time,’ not just for the sake of the monastics but for the sake of the world.”
The primary work of the Cistercians is prayer. The Holy Cross website states: “The monastery is a school of the Lord’s service where Christ is formed in the hearts of the brothers and where in solitude and silence they aspire to that interior quiet in which wisdom is born. By generous hospitality they share with their fellow pilgrims the peace and hope which Christ has freely given.”
It’s remarkable to think that these brothers pray through the entire Bible in a year and the psalms once a month. I have gone to Holy Cross Abbey many times over the past decade, but this particular retreat marked the end of my sabbatical. It was also especially meaningful to me because I had the joy of praying the hours with the brothers throughout the day, which I had not been able to do for some time due to Covid. It was a very holy time to be present and to participate in their praying. If you are interested, they now live-stream and post most of their prayer services on their website: Holy Cross Abbey – Clarke County Virginia (virginiatrappists.org)
It’s important to remember that monks were not the first to follow this daily rhythm. In Psalm 119:164, David declares “Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous ordinances.” Daniel 6:10, tells us, “Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God.” Jesus followed the Jewish tradition of praying at regular intervals throughout the day, and this pattern was then followed in the early church as well (Acts 3:1; 10:3, 9, 30).
I was first introduced to this pattern of prayer 20 years ago when I had the joy and privilege of being a part of the first weekend retreat of the Transforming Center led by Ruth Haley Barton, Adele Calhoun, and others. Over the course of two years, pastors and other Christian leaders gathered for quarterly two-day retreats. Together, we prayed the hours, received teaching, and shared our lives and processed what we were learning in community.
We also spent significant time in silence and solitude listening for the heart of God and discerning what he wanted to say to each of us. This was an immersive experience in not just learning about spiritual formation themes and practices but leaning and living into them. The teaching later became part of Barton’s book Sacred Rhythms. I learned from that experience not only the value of daily prayer rhythms but also the importance of retreats, which I have taken at least twice a year for 20 years.
While I admire the life of these monks and their commitment to prayer, and I have enjoyed praying the hours on many occasions, I understand not everyone is called to this lifestyle. However, their commitment and example can inspire us to consider the ways we can arrange our lives to keep mindful of God’s presence with us and continually to learn “to pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). It’s important to remember that we are called to do as we can, not as we can’t. We can find ways to intentionally order our days in such a way that we grow in awareness of God’s presence and engage in an ongoing conversation with him throughout each day of our lives.
Here is what we can do if we so desire and make intentional choices to do so. We can choose to take at least five to ten minutes at the beginning of each day as we drink our coffee to read a psalm or another short passage and thank God for a new day. As we begin our work and/or send our children off to school, we can choose to pause to pray for ourselves and for them to know God’s love and be a vessel of his love to others. At each meal, we can choose to pause and pray before eating to thank God for our food and other provisions and to ask him to continue to fill us with his Spirit and help us to rely on his grace and power for whatever work God has given us to do this day. At the end of the day, we can choose to review our day and to notice where we felt connected to God and others and give thanks for the many blessings we have received and enjoyed. And we can choose to acknowledge the ways we fell short as we confess our sin and we can thank God for the forgiveness we have in Christ.
The goal is not to check the box in practicing fixed-hour prayer. The goal is to become more and more aware of God’s presence with us and to engage in an ongoing conversation with him. As we learn to embrace all of life as prayer, we are able to fulfill our purpose—to glorify God and enjoy our eternal relationship with him now and forever.
