Before dawn, the alarm breaks the night’s silence. I roll over to shut it off, rising to turn on the bedside table lights as my feet stand on the cool wood floor. I make the bed before I leave the bedroom.
I wander from room to room, opening curtains, blinds, and shutters, knowing I’ll be glad they are open when we return home later this morning.
Beginnings lead to endings. Endings lead to beginnings.
My husband brews his dark roast coffee, while I brew a pot of To-Do-Lists in my mind. I tell myself, Remember, when we get back home later, to put cinnamon sticks and cloves in a simmering pot on the stove. Oh, and add in a few sliced lemons. Maybe it will help eradicate the stale smell from last night’s pan-fried flounder.
After breakfast and quick showers, we pull on pants and sling on shirts, then emerge into the cool, crisp 50° pre-dawn world.
With peripheral artery disease, Bob’s doctors require regular ultrasounds to ensure that his arteries aren’t closing down and that the stents meant to improve blood flow are doing their job properly.
We aren’t the first to arrive at the vascular surgeon’s office, as I had expected. Families huddle, blurry-eyed, in the surgery waiting area side of the reception. SpongeBob blares, mingling with kid noises. Pajama-clad kids twirl and giggle, oblivious to operating rooms just beyond the surgical side’s doorway, awaiting their arrival.
On the ultrasound waiting side, the overhead lights aren’t even on yet. Bob and I huddle near the windows, for there are no light switched on to illuminate the room. Slowly, the sky outside brightens, and the space we sit in catches its soft glow.
Beginnings and endings often sit in the same space.
Those little ones over there, as well as their parents, are in the first quarter of life. We, however, are entering the last quarter of our lives, though, of course, none of us knows exactly where the end mark will be.
As this vignette before me unfolds, I think of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. There is indeed a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven, and on this particular morning, this facility offered a place to heal.
Learning the Grace of Closing the Day
Since April 1969, that cool spring morning when Jesus stretched out His hand in invitation to me, I have continually joined Him, longing for life to the full. I’ve usually started the morning with conversations with God. Some were a mere word or two; others, a long discussion between us. I’m a morning person, so God, and everyone else, gets the best of me in the early part of the day. However, I fade easily as the day closes, so my last conversations with Him are rather haphazard, with not much more than a nod of a good night to God.
Of course, when I was a young mother, the nightly ritual of bath time, books, and then bedtime prayers structured post-dinner, post-homework routines. When did those end? Was it when sports ran headlong into sunset, or when homework heavily covered each evening’s presence? Maybe it was when each child’s bedtime changed to meet their school’s homework and project demands?
Many a night back then, I would tumble into bed with merely a word and a whisper of a wish for more prayer before I’d visit dreamland.
Over the years, I’ve experimented with ways to close the curtain on the day. I’ve enjoyed praying through The Psalter, following its pattern of two or three psalms for the morning and two or three more for the evening. In a month’s time, I’d bookend my days with conversations with God centered around His Word, traveling from Psalm 1 to Psalm 150.
In other seasons, the structure of fixed-hour prayers such as the Daily Office or the Liturgy of the Hours influenced the way the dialogue flowed with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Ignatius’ Prayer of Examen as well as extemporaneous prayers have traced my days’ concerns, confessions, and celebrations. God and I have wrestled, wondered, and walked together, allowing the scaffolding on various prayers to guide the exchange of thoughts. Routines at night, though, are more sporadic. God’s always available, I know, but He knows I’ve never been a night person, so when I fade, I fade quickly.
I know beginnings matter, and so do endings.
Young children and well-seasoned folks in need of vascular surgeons’ care both need care for bodies hampered from well-being. What holds us in the first quarter is different from what holds us in the fourth quarter, yet both matter.
The lights suddenly flood the room on our side of the waiting area. A nurse pokes her head out and invites my husband back for his ultrasound. She’ll trace the arteries in the legs and neck to identify where blood flows well and where plaque may be impeding it.
On the other side, another nurse calls out a name. Mother, father, and child stand and move towards the surgery rooms. I notice a grandmother or grandfather among the bunch, hugging little ones as they follow the nurse whose jaunty-colored scrubs display cartoon characters that kids know well. Each child holds a fuzzy blanket, and many clutch a well-loved stuffed animal, a source of comfort for what lies ahead as they will be put to sleep for whatever procedure they need.
Maybe that’s what I’m looking for right now as I ponder nightly prayer rhythms: a blanket of comfort at day’s end, a reminder that what is and what will be, all held under the blanket of God’s care. At the close of the day, I want to settle into a gentle colloquy before a restful night of sleep. I like closures to help conclude the day.
Not long ago, I exchanged texts with a dear friend. After coordinating our calendars, we scheduled a phone visit to continue our connection and conversations. We set up a time to meet by phone, as we live hours apart. Our plan was to catch up shortly after her return from hosting their ministry board retreat.
Our meeting never happened.
Before her ministry weekend gathering even began, she flew to Jesus, an unexpected departure as a result of a horrific car accident.
Instead of gathering with her, I gathered with others to say our farewells. Whether folks were in person or online, families and friends recounted the impact of her deep love of Jesus. We’d each known her love for God as a gift spread thick and sweet like jam on buttered toast.
Endings sometimes come on unexpectedly, though other times they are foreknown. I think again of Ecclesiastes, “a time to be born and a time to die.” A celebration of life is one way to mark endings, and it offers a bit of closure for what the days have held.
The Tender Weight of Seasonal Goodbyes
The month of May holds closures galore, doesn’t it? How many ways and how many things can we celebrate? I think back over the years to all the gatherings I’ve attended in May. Sports banquets. The final drama presentation of the year. The last relay for the cross-country team, the last match for the tennis team, the last pep rally assembly for the class about to graduate. Field days. The last bus ride for the school year. Graduation of one kind or another: from kindergarten, from elementary school, from middle school, from high school, from college, or grad school. Add to that spring and early summer weddings, and it’s hard to recall what event you are headed to on any given day. Yet we need these gatherings for we are people who need “a time to weep and a time to laugh.”
Inevitably, goodbyes also occur when families move to new locations as jobs and family situations change. We plant, then we uproot over and over again through our lives.
How do we bring a day, a season, a gathering to a good end, a closing that wraps us up in a blanket of blessing and helps us keep on bantering with God?
Entering the Holy Quiet of Evening Prayer
When I was in elementary school, I attended an overnight summer camp. Days were filled with activities for active bodies and spirits: arts and crafts, swimming in the lake, canoeing down nearby rivers, and hiking up thickly forested mountainsides. Evenings included skits and scavenger hunts. Sunday evenings, though, were reserved for Vespers.
As the sun set, we’d walk in hushed whispers to the campfire ring. Our camp counselors strummed guitars and banjos, leading us in simple hymns and songs. Prayers, interspersed with scriptures and short vignettes, created a church in the woods at the end of a summer day. We’d sit on logs for what felt like hours, singing, listening, hallowing the day and hollowing out a way to say good night to God and to one another. Then, in silence, we’d tiptoe back to our cabins and sleep. “A time to be silent and a time to speak.”
The sacred quiet invited rest.
I don’t recall the very first time I experienced Compline. It’s a short, ten-minute-or-less prayer structure found in the Book of Common Prayer. It’s only become more of a weekly rhythm since we moved to Savannah, where our local Anglican church offers candlelight Compline. I’ve gone in person a time or two. Now I attend online. I’ve loved this simple quiet weekly church service that has a rhythm of saying goodnight to God.
On Sunday evenings, the singers gather at the sanctuary’s front door, walk slowly through the candle-lit sanctuary, and climb a flight of stairs to the choir loft. My body slows as I watch them move to the flicker of the flame.
The organist sounds a few notes. The soft cadence of voices pierces the silence.
These are not the triumphal choirs of Sunday morning. This last service of the day reminds me of a lullaby, meant to hush out the noise of the day and to tuck us into a restful night.
At our church, the whole service lasts thirty minutes, a way to end the day with thankfulness, confession, prayers, and song. Psalms (Psalms 4, 31, 91, or 134), passages of Scripture, The Lord’s prayer, a Collect , the Nunc Dimitttis, Simeon’s song in Luke 2:29-32, and a song chanted or sung, offered in the quiet atmosphere, help commit us to God’s care.
As the singers process out in silence, as the candles flicker, so do my eyelids. I am ready to rest, settled by words that invite stillness to cover me.
Resting in the Peace Between
I enjoy the predawn hours before the lights of the world come on, and all is hushed. My morning rhythms remain steadfast and predictable. However, endings and closure hold significance, too. I’m always discovering how the quiet of Compline’s brief, profound prayers folds me into peace as the light fades and I close my eyes.
The waiting room is quiet now, emptied of its bustle before the first rounds of surgery. A few grandparents fidget and speak in hushed voices as they wait for their family members to emerge from surgery. I’m still the only person on the ultrasound waiting area side, grateful for the morning quiet to read through the Psalms and pray for my family members scattered far and wide.
Bob will finish up in about two hours, and we will emerge into the fullness of the world. While he rests, I’ll savor time with directees who love talking with God. There are still cinnamon sticks, cloves, and lemon slices to add to a pot on the stove. A few bills need paying, and the laundry baskets need tending before this day ends… the activities for this day wrapped up. Then I’ll open the Book of Common Prayer before I nod off and exchange goodnights with God.
Have you ever prayed the Compline nightly as a goodnight to God?
For me, especially amid the comings and goings of May’s bustling time of year, I love Compline’s simplicity, beauty, and brevity. It invites my body, mind, and spirit to turn off the day and enter a good night’s rest under the watchful care of God’s blanket of love. It’s an intentional end, a closure that holds hopes and heavy moments, all within the mystery of night’s approach.
If the month of May, or any month for that matter, finds you frazzled, uncover its beauty.
The opening prayer says:
The Lord Almighty grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end. Amen.
The closing prayer says:
Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.
Between them, consider this infusion of images from one of the Collects from Compline:
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.
At day’s end, in our homes, we can dip into Compline’s holy hush as a lullaby for our souls. It offers the comfort of a blanket and a stuffed animal, something that settles the soul and gives us all a way to say Goodnight to God as we turn off the lights and rest, knowing He watches over us in all the night hours ahead.
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- What holds you as you close each day?
- What might it be like to enter Compline as your farewell to the day?
- What would you like to say to God as you say goodnight to Him this evening?
