The last few weeks I’ve been praying the Night Office most evenings before I go to bed. Also known as Compline, it is the last monastic office of the day, and the signal in contemplative communities for the overnight silence, the “Great Silence”, in which the entire community refrains from speech, usually until after breakfast the following morning. It is normally to be broken only in real emergency.
There’s something magical about that silence. The knowledge that an entire community of people are living and breathing softly through the night: some in physical or spiritual pain, some flaming with joy, some content, some simply oblivious, but all journeying together. I’ve always suspected that for those whose relationships with certain others are marked by friction, the Great Silence is a blessed respite from the daily effort to get along. Probably a great deal easier to feel kinship with someone when their irritating habits are shrouded in silence…
Compline is a poetic office, containing psalms of thanksgiving and praise, and the beautiful Nunc Dimittis: the Canticle of Simeon (LK 2:29-32) with its antiphon. Recently, though, what has stood out for me is something simpler, the final blessing:
The Lord grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end. Amen.
Allowing those words to enfold me, it seems as if those two things really are all I need. To be at peace and to be at least ready for a perfect end, whenever it might come. A peaceful night and a perfect end.
Good night.
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