Sext

The sixth hour carries the heaviest scriptural freight of the little hours. It was from the sixth hour, the synoptic Gospels record, that darkness covered the land while Christ hung on the cross, so midday prayer stands each day at the shadow of the crucifixion; and it was at the sixth hour, Acts recounts, that Peter went up on the housetop at Joppa to pray and saw the sheet let down from heaven, the vision that taught the church to call no person unclean. The early manuals cite both when they commend noon prayer, and the office's hymns hold both notes, the cross remembered and grace widening. To these the monastic centuries added an observation from experience.

Evagrius and the desert tradition diagnosed the noonday demon, the spirit of acedia that makes the sun seem to stand still, the cell unbearable and the life pointless, taking its name from the Greek psalter's destruction that wastes at noonday in Psalm 91. Sext is the liturgical answer: at the exact hour the tradition judged the soul weakest, it sets a small fixed duty, three psalms and a prayer, asking, in the words of its old collect themes, for fervour when the heat is greatest. The spirituality is unheroic and precise, and modern writers on work and attention have found the little hour freshly relevant: a noon pause, imposed from outside the mood of the moment, built against the hour when meaning most easily drains from the day.

Fixed midday prayer is one of the points where the great traditions visibly rhyme. The Christian Sext, the Jewish Mincha in its earliest permissible window, and the Islamic Dhuhr all set worship at or after the sun's zenith, each with its own reasoning, and the family resemblance is no accident: all descend from a world that told time by the sun and understood the day's turning point as a religious moment.

Within Christianity the hour's fortunes have tracked the office's general history. The medieval West prayed Sext in choir and chapter; the breviary made it a few private minutes; and the 1971 Liturgy of the Hours, facing the reality of modern schedules, created a single Midday Prayer that may be prayed as Terce, Sext or None according to the actual time, keeping the threefold division for communities that maintain it. The Byzantine Horologion keeps the Sixth Hour with its psalms and its troparion of the crucifixion, prayed in monasteries daily and in parishes chiefly in Lent, when the hours are read publicly.

The Anglican tradition, having folded the little hours into Morning and Evening Prayer at the Reformation, recovered a midday office in its modern books, and contemporary ecumenical communities, Taize most visibly, have made short midday prayer one of their signatures. The persistence is telling: of all the hours, midday is the one the working world can most nearly keep, a fact the tradition grasped eighteen centuries ago and modern rules of life keep rediscovering.