Twelve: The Hour of Compline

Every evening for nearly two hundred years, the chaplains of Cotterstock’s collegiate gathered in the chancel just across the wall from where I now live, to sing Compline. The last office of the day. The candles. The darkness pressing at the windows. Fifteen voices finding each other in the stone.

Then they slept. All of them, in a common dormitory, without division. And in the morning they began again.

I don’t follow their liturgy. But I have learned something from them nonetheless — something that many traditions know and that our busy, productivity-obsessed world has almost entirely forgotten.

What if the way I end things matters as much as the way I begin them?

Not just days — but conversations, relationships, chapters of a life. What if there is an art to the ending, and I have never quite been taught it?

In the Navajo tradition, the evening blessing way speaks of walking in beauty — hózhó — returning to balance and harmony as the light fades. In Jewish practice, Shabbat is not an absence but a presence — a bride arriving, a queen welcomed, rest as the holiest act of the week. Across many traditions, the great feminine wisdom has always known this: that ending, rest, and darkness are not the enemy of the sacred. They are part of its breath.

What would it mean to end my day with intention — not with a list of what I failed to do, but with a quiet, deliberate placing-down of everything I carried?

What am I still carrying from today that was never mine to keep overnight?

What would I sound like, if I let myself sing the small song of this one ordinary day — not perfectly, but truly?

What would it feel like to simply lie down, and let the darkness be kind?

I live beside a chancel that has held more endings than anyone can count. I don’t worship there. But I am grateful it exists — that across the wall, eight centuries of people found their way to the end of the day and lay down together in the dark without division. And I have come to understand, in the long schooling of this ground, that the darkness they lay down into was not an absence. It was the same sacred life, wearing its night form. Holding them, as it holds all things — from the inside, as its own expression, without ever having let go.

Endings, it turns out, are not the opposite of sacred. They may be the most sacred thing of all.

This is where I live. This is what I am learning. You are welcome here.