Jorge Barrios, Wikimedia Commons

Both previously, Daniel and the Psalmist pray three times a day: morning, noon, and evening. And this isn’t just an Old Testament thing. When you read Acts, the apostles follow the same basic pattern. It’s always told as incidental to the stories, but regulated prayer is a common backdrop:

“Now Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour” (Acts 3.1).

“The next day, as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the housetop about the sixth hour to pray” (Acts 10.9).

Even the centurion Cornelius, “an upright and God-fearing man” gets in on the action: “I was praying in my house at the ninth hour” (Acts 10.1-3, 22, 30).

The ancients marked time starting at dawn, which is roughly 6 a.m., making the sixth hour about noon and the ninth about 3 p.m. To this day these two particular hours of prayer are called by their Latin names of sext and nonce, following the ancient numbering.

Because of these passages and others, such as Psalms 119 in which the Psalmist speaks of praising God seven times daily, including midnight (and see Acts 16.25 for an NT example), the church has from its beginning encouraged “praying the hours.” Take this passage from The Apostolic Tradition, which is usually attributed to Hippolytus of Rome:

Every faithful man and woman, when they have risen from sleep in the morning, before they touch any work at all, should wash their hands and pray to God…. And if indeed you are in the house, pray at the third hour [about 9 a.m.] and praise God. But if you are elsewhere and the occasion comes about, pray in your heart to God. For at that hour Christ was displayed nailed to the tree…. Pray likewise at the time of the sixth hour. For as Christ was fixed on the wood of the cross that day was divided, and a great darkness descended. Therefore you should pray a powerful prayer at that hour…. And they should pray at the ninth hour also a great prayer and give great praise…. For at that hour Christ, pierced in the side, poured forth water and blood and lit up the rest of that day and brought it so to the evening. Hence, in beginning to sleep, he made it the beginning of another day which fulfilled the image of the resurrection. Pray also before your body rests on the bed. Rising around midnight wash your hands with water, and pray…. Do not be dilatory about praying…. For this reason it is necessary to pray at this hour, for those elders who handed on the tradition taught us to do so because at that hour all creation is still for a moment to praise the Lord.

That’s a pretty demanding schedule. But I think that’s the point. Hippolytus knows that people are really bad — I’m really bad — at keeping Christ in mind. He says, “he who prays in the church [in the morning hours] will be able to pass by the wickedness of the day…. If you are faithful to act thus [praying the hours], you shall not undergo temptation, nor will you perish, for you shall have Christ always in mind.”

So there’s real value in being this disciplined. In fact, it’s probably crucial to our sanctification. Disciples of Christ are marked by discipline. We only progress in holiness to the extent we make it a priority. That this is hard goes without saying. But that it appears from both the scriptures and the history of the church as necessary and beneficial is just as obvious.

Mosaic detail, Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kiev, Wikimedia Commons.

“Unfortunately, my own guardian angel did not prevent my injury,” he said. The angel didn’t fall down on the job. He was “certainly following superior orders.” The upbeat pope added, “Perhaps the Lord wanted to teach me more patience and humility, give me more time for prayer and meditation.”

I’ve not really thought much about guardian angels since I was a kid, but I’ve been thinking a lot about them lately — probably why the pope story stuck out for me.

In my prayers each day I recite Psalm 91, which says this about guardian angels:

Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place –
the Most High, who is my refuge –
no evil shall be allowed to befall you,
no plague come near your tent.
For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways.
On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.

They may not have borne up the pope in his recent tumble but, like he said, they were “following superior orders.” From various passages in scripture it’s clear that angels are sent by God to help accomplish his purposes in our lives. Here’s another example from the Psalms, the thirty-fourth:

This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him
and saved him out of all his troubles.
The angel of the Lord encamps
around those who fear him, and delivers them.

Angels feature in several Old Testament accounts. Take the story in Genesis 24 when Abraham sends his steward to fetch a wife for Isaac. Abraham tells him “The Lord … will send his angel before you, and you shall take a wife for my son….” And this one from Exodus 23, God speaking: “Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared. Pay careful attention to him and obey his voice; do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression, for my name is in him. But if you carefully obey his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.”

The angels’ role in protection is again seen in the Gospels, when Jesus pulls a child to him to settle a dispute among the disciples about who was greatest in the kingdom of heaven. “See that you do not despise one of these little ones,” he says. “For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 18).

The church fathers also talk about angels. In the sixth of his Miscellanies, Clement of Alexandria, who was born in 153 AD, mentions “regiments of angels … distributed over the nations and cities,” adding that some are “perchance … assigned to individuals.” Gregory of Neocaesarea, born in 205, spoke of “those beings who are not seen, but yet are more godlike, and who have a special care for men.” Riffing on the theme of the angel guiding and directing God’s people, as in Exodus 23, Gregory mentions that his angel “sustains, and instructs, and conducts me….” And Basil, more than a hundred years after Gregory, speaks in his book On The Spirit about angels being “set over men as tutors and guardians.”

Reading ancient Christian texts like these can also help trace the source of popular modern ideas — like the idea that we all have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Maybe the earliest example of this idea is from the second century book, The Shepherd of Hermas, which was regarded for a long time by some as scripture. It says, “there are two angels with a man, one of righteousness and the other of iniquity.”

John Cassian, born in 360, echoes the thought. “For Holy Scripture bears witness that two angels, a good and a bad one, cling to each one of us,” he says. For the good, Cassian cites the above passages from Matthew and Psalm 34 and alludes to the story from Acts when Peter was imprisoned by Herod, rescued, and came to stand at the gate of Mary’s house. The other disciples were convinced of his death. Herod had, after all, just killed James. So when the servant girl answered and came to tell the others that Peter was standing at the door, they replied: “It is his angel!” As for the angel on the other shoulder, Cassian cites Hermas, Satan’s tempting of Job, as well as Psalm 109, which he reads as a reference to Judas: “And let the devil stand at his right hand” (some translations say “accuser”).

I want do do a lot more reading on this subject, but for now my main takeaway is that God has not left us alone. Not only is he everywhere present, but his servants and messengers are with us too. So maybe the pope’s fall happened so he could have more time for meditation and prayer, like he said — and so that others of us could be reminded that there really still are, as Paul Simon put it, angels in the architecture.