Five levels of Awakening within each stage to be at home with your life’s story:

1. Acknowledging
2. Accessing
3. Letting Go
4. Integrating, and
5. Living the New Story (the one in which you accept yourself and live up to your full potential).

1. Meditation and Breathing
2. Movement
3. Sound
4. Writing
5. and Visual Art

An excerpt from Writing Home:
A Threshold Practice for the Hours of the Day

While being at the threshold integrates all of who we are, it is a state of being right here, right now. Sitting on your own, reading and writing your responses to the writing prompts is a threshold state. Sitting in the circle, speaking with intention, is a threshold state.

When I read The Music of Silence: A Journey Through the Hours of the Day, I realized we could apply the rhythms of a monastery day to our daily lives. The book is about silence, prayer, music and the places where angels dwell. David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, describes monastic life through the hours of the day: Vigils, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline, from the darkness of morning through the light of day and on into the dark of night.

As a writer, much of The Music of Silence resonated with me. My office was in a former Jesuit college at the time and I could relate to the monk’s life of silence, community, the courtyard garden, meals at certain times of the day, sleeping cells devoted to blessed sleep and living with intention.

Brother David reminds us that “everything we do is prayer.” The prayer he is referring to “is not sending an order and expecting it to be fulfilled. Prayer is attuning yourself to the life of the world, to love, the force that moves the sun and the moon and the stars.” As monks pay very close attention to the “flow of hours around them” as Kathleen Norris said in the introduction to the book, I wondered how we could, in our daily lives, do the same.

The monastic understanding of the word “hour”, as Brother David points out, goes back to the Greek word hora. It’s a word much older than the notion of a 24-hour day. “It is not a numerical measure: it is a soul measure.” How different our days would be if we approached each hour as a soul measure and treated each hour as a season of the day.

Here are some brief descriptions of the monastic hours of the day followed by some prompts for your writing at the threshold practice.

Vigils, also known as Matins, is the night watch hour, a time for learning to trust the darkness. “Looking up to the night sky, we are reminded of the immense mystery in which we are immersed,” writes Brother David. The root meaning of the word “mystery” is to shut one’s eyes and ears. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of poems called The Book of Hours, the title of which is taken from the book from which monks chant the canonical hours. The poet prays: “You darkness from which I come, I love you more than the flare that sets boundaries.”

Each of the hours or seasons of the day in The Music of Silence has an angel associated with it. As Brother David says, “We meet an angel whenever a life-giving message touches a human heart”. What better way to express the surprise visits by messengers that can appear in the midst of a busy day. “We need only look through the rushing waters to the stillness in its depth,” Brother David reminds us.

For Vigils, the angel wears a dark scarlet garment and holds his horn ready to blow. Monks rise for Vigils before dawn to go to the oratory, the heart of the monastery and a place dedicated to prayer. Outside the monastery, we may get up before the alarm and before others in the house so we can connect to that mystery, the womb of darkness and silence.

Writing Practice: What do you do at the pre-dawn hour or how could you use that time if you chose to get up earlier than usual? (You will find some suggestions on the chart that follows.)

Lauds, the coming of the light. The angel’s garment at Lauds is much brighter than the angel who watched over Vigils. This angel has cymbals and is looking for the cue to crash them together for sunrise, the breaking forth of light.

Brother David associates Lauds with the high oratory windows. As light dawns, the windows begin to show their colours, images and designs. A reminder to open our eyes with gratitude to anything that comes our way and to see the divine light shining through everything. Lauds reminds us that this day is a gift.

Writing Practice: What do you notice as light dawns in your room or outside your window? What do you see on the way to work whether it’s along the path to your writing cabin or on the street car looking out the window at the shopkeepers setting out their wares?

Prime, the hour of deliberate beginning. Prime is the hour or “season” of the day when duties are given out. Monks meet in the chapter room to address the practical concerns of their community. The first two hours have been somewhat meditative. Now it’s time for action. You’re at your workplace by now.

The angel at Prime has the brightest face, reflecting the sun while beating the drum.

Writing Practice: What approach could you take to your “to do” list to make it a deliberate and intentional beginning? 

Terce, the third hour of the day, blessing. Terce is announced by an angel with a dance instrument (not named by the author). It could be a lyre. It is the middle of the morning when the focus is on Holy Spirit, the spirit that is called down on all our work.

At this time of day, food is being prepared in the monastery kitchen. St. Benedict said, “In the monastery, every pot and pan should be as sacred as the sacred vessels of the altar.”

Writing Practice: If your job is as a cook, you will be preparing the mid-day meal. If you’re working in an office or a construction site and it’s not quite time for lunch, what minutes of sacred play could you create for yourself? Just a few moments of being aware of where you are with the Holy Spirit shining down and blessing your work.

Sext, fervor and commitment. The middle of the day, the middle of everything. The time of opportunity and the time of crisis. Angelus bells ring and the monks share their main meal of the day. It’s a celebration of all those who have laboured to bring you the food, with all those creatures who have lived and died to give you the food and with all others who eat on earth. It’s a communion with all even if you’re eating by yourself.

The noonday angel is blowing a trumpet with full force with his cheeks swelled out.

Writing Practice: What crisis may have arisen in your work day by noon? Is there an affirmation you can say about your commitment to your work in the world? How can you take a moment to commune with all who brought you the food you are about to eat?

None, the shadows grow longer. The waning of the light. The angel of the hour has a faint purple gown and dark wings. He seems to be muffling the sound of the tambourine.

The day is curving back on itself. The sound of music and dance ceases. The angel of None is listening intently to the music that never stops, that inner music. The music of silence.

The monks go to their cells, a place of forgiveness. A place to face reality and to make peace.

Writing Practice: How do you show compassion for yourself? (See the chart that follows for some suggestions.)

Vespers, lighting the lamps. Evening descends. You’ve put your tools away and removed your work clothes. The monk is freshly dressed for the evening celebration in the monastery which is lit with lamps and candles.

The author associates Vespers with the monastery garden. Usually a monastery is built in a square with the garden in the centre. That’s why I’ve alway admired the Spanish style homes with the inner courtyard. I’ve seen them in Turkey as well. At the monastery often a cloister walk surrounds the enclosure with a fountain in the middle. The monks call the enclosure with the fountain, paradise. The centre garden “conveys the centrality of nature and her rhythms in monastic life. The garden teaches us each day that life is a round of gestation, birth, growth, flowering, fruit bearing, fading, dying, and new gestation in the dark of winter.”

The angel of Vespers is wearing an evening blue robe. He has stopped playing and serenely holds the tambourine with the evening star on it. It is time to reconcile the contradictions within ourselves and around us. Joan Borysenko’s suggestion in A Woman’s Journey to God is to review your day – look for places where there was guilt, judgment, anger. She mentions the bedtime shema which means “listen”, the first word in Judaism’s holiest prayer. Repeating the shema is an experience of oneness. The four archangels to be called on for this bedtime shema are Uriel for light, Raphael for healing, Michael for compassion and Gabriel for strength. “Wrapping ourselves in this love and divine protection, we then commend our soul to God for the night.”

Writing Practice: How do you reconcile your day? (See suggestions on the chart that follows.)

Compline, completes the circle of the day. The word “compline” means completion. Originally, Compline wasn’t even prayed in the oratory but in the cloister where the monks live, just before they went to bed. It makes the ancient tradition of night prayer before bed, a communal experience.

It’s time to be tucked into bed. The Lady Chapel is what the author thinks of for Compline when we return to our room as womb to be reborn again the next morning.

The angel of Compline has a darkish robe, eyes closed, face bent down, hands lightly playing a small organ. Or is the angel’s hand making a gesture of refusal to play, Brother David wonders. Faith is the virtue of Compline.

Writing Practice: Write yourself a new version of “Now I lay me down to sleep” that includes gratitude, forgiveness, reconciliation and faith. Faith is faith in ourselves when we’re shining, as well as at our darkest hour.

What I see no one else has ever seen before;
not with my unique vision,
not from my unique point of view.
I am a creator of each new day.
I am given the opportunity with this new light to see,
to appreciate, to respond,
as the person I uniquely am.

     – Rainer Maria Rilke

How can we apply the hours of the monastic day to our lives? Each hour or season of the day asks us to “respond” as Rilke points out in his poem above. Each of us is a creator of our own day. So rather than unconsciously reacting, we can “make the aware inner gesture of response to what is before us in each moment.” As Brother David says, “With this inner attitude, we will meet the angel of each hour and come to an understanding of the seeds the angel calls us to sow, the virtue the hour calls us to develop in our own lives.”Here are some suggestions I came up with after reading The Music of Silence. Consider them as you respond to these threshold states throughout your day.