Why Praying In the Middle of the Night Used to Be Easy

The good ole Anglican Catholic Bryan Sherwood has a good post on praying the hours. See At Midnight, I Will Rise To Give You Thanks

This brings up a possibly interesting related point. That this was much easier to do in the old days before electricity .

I was watching something on the History Channel on human beings and being afraid of the night. A good bit of dealt with the time before we had all this artificial light.

They pointed out something I never realized. That sleep patterns were quite different then. People were not just going to be bed at 7 pm and sleep till dawn. They were breaking that sleep up. They would get up around midnight perhaps do some stuff around the house, chores in the barn, etc. Further it was quite normal to go visit your neighbors and Friends at 1 am in the morning!!

This is where we get a lot of our stories in that afraid of the night time theme. Because without streetlight this could be a dangerous enterprise if you were not careful as you could fall and hurt yourself among other things. After they did this they would sleep a couple of hours perhaps and

So I guess the vision I have always had of Monks yawning dragging themselves out of bed(Oh I wish I was in my bed in their weakest moments) at Matins might be incorrect.

So I suppose praying the night hours in the middle of the night (Matins) was sort of normal for Monks and Religious because they like everyone else was up.