Seven Times a Day: Prayer as Humane Practice

One of the things that shows up again and again in early devotional books is instruction that feels, at first glance, almost excessive.

“…und bett das gebet ze vii malen ain tag… also an den vii tagen…”
(“…and pray the prayer seven times in one day… and so across the seven days…”)

Say this prayer seven times.
Do this (described action) for seven days.
Add seven Ave Marias.
Repeat it again tomorrow.

And again.

If you’ve never spent time with this kind of prayerbook material, it can feel like a kind of spiritual overkill. Surely once would do? Doesn’t sincerity matter more than counting?

But the more time I spend with these books, the more I think that repetition is not the excess. It’s the point.

In one section I’ve been working through recently, the instructions are precise and insistent: the prayer is to be performed multiple times a day, across a structured sequence of days, with additional prayers layered in. It is not simply said – it is kept in mind as active practice. Maintained. Carried forward.

“wer dis nachgeschriben gebett ain gantzes iar spricht…”
(“whoever says this written prayer for a whole year…”)

What’s going on here is not just devotion. It’s a kind of sacred timekeeping. Repetition, in this context, does something very particular: it organizes the day. It creates a rhythm that the body can learn: Stand. Kneel. Speak. Repeat. Rinse and repeat tomorrow.

“…sprich vii ave maria stend und knüw…”
(“…say seven Ave Maria, standing and kneeling…”)

These actions sculpt reliability, less by adding than by uncovering. (I’m thinking here of Michelangelo, releasing the sculpture from the stone.) Coming back to the same kind of prayer hones the inner person in an act of “social becoming,” crafting a prayer-centered persona which is the reader’s presumed ideal.

This matters because late medieval devotion – especially outside strictly regulated liturgical settings – has a problem to solve. How do you ensure that prayer actually happens? Not once, not in a moment of crisis, but consistently, over time?

Repetition is one answer. It’s the medieval equivalent of habit-stacking.

Not because people are forgetful (though they are), and not because God needs reminding (He does not), but because *practice needs structure*. A prayer said once is an event. A prayer said seven times a day becomes a habit. A prayer repeated across days becomes part of the fabric of life.

There’s also a sonic dimension to this that I don’t think we pay enough attention to. A single utterance disappears almost as soon as it is spoken. But repetition accumulates. It lingers. It fills space – not just physically, but socially. If multiple people are engaged in similar cycles of prayer, the result is not isolated sound, but patterned sound.

You start to get something like a devotional soundscape.

And that soundscape? Not grand or monumental. It’s small-scale, iterative, almost backgrounded. But it is persistent. It marks time as surely as bells do – just on a different register.

Repetition also does something else: it redistributes effort. If a single, perfectly attentive prayer is hard to sustain (and it is), then repetition allows for fluctuation. Some iterations will be distracted. Some will be rushed. Some will “land.” The concern is real; the scribe-compiler repeatedly reminds the reader that attitude matters:

“…ob mit andacht…”
(“…if [it is done] with devotion…”)

Attention and devotion can wax and wane; structured prayer – cycles of repetition – absorbs that variation so the cumulative effort preserves the necessary attitude.

I find this to be a very humane system. It doesn’t require perfection. It only requires return.

And then there’s the number itself: seven. Seven days. Seven repetitions. Seven Ave Maria.

This is not arbitrary, of course. It resonates with biblical time (creation, completion), with liturgical cycles, with long-standing symbolic structures. But in practice, it also functions as a manageable unit. Neither endless nor trivial. Just enough to feel like something has been properly fulfilled.

Enough to count.

“…so wirstu erhört und erlöst uff aller dinen not…”
(“…then you will be heard and released from all your need…”)

So when we see these instructions – repeat this prayer seven times a day, for seven days – it’s tempting to read them as quantitative, even mechanical.

But I’m increasingly convinced that what’s at stake here is not quantity, but persistence.

These repeated forms take something inherently fleeting – spoken prayer – and embed it within a set of temporal and bodily structures that allow it to endure: across the day, across the week, across the community that performs it.

These forms do so not by heightening a single utterance, but by distributing it.

Repetition, in sum, is not excess. It is a technology for making prayer last.

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WORKS CITED

All prayer excerpts come from VLB Hs 17, the Thalbach Sister’s Prayerbook, fols. 142-149. This section contains a prayer for sorrow and worry; the prayer "Stand auf"; a Prayer of St Bernard; the Prayer “In gotes namen”; a wonky version of the Golden Crown Prayer; a prayer in four sections to ULF (Mary) to be said on Fridays; a morning greeting to the ULF; and a prayer to Christ, O her jesu christe des ůbersten vatters sun.

Smooth or Spiky? November’s Sound Samples (12/2/24)

A cylinder ("smooth") and a spiky call-out box ("spiky")

As I have sought to be more intentional in my listening (and as my ear is gradually coming back online from that oh-so-long otitis media), I spent some time gathering samples of sound that struck me in particular ways. 

I’ll start with the sounds 

Example 1: Rain, in the middle of the night, in a tent:

 

Example 2: NYC, with honking cars and the murmur of the VERY crowded street:

Example 3: NYC, the background "swoosh" of street noise:

Example 4: LIRR (Long Island Rail) and its clackety clackety:

Example 5: Bird babbles on suburban Long Island:

What is interesting to me is the different emotional import of the various sounds. Rain is entirely soothing (except for the fact that it woke me up!); the randomness of it is restful, and quickly lulled me back to sleep. (It helped that the waterproofing worked!)

The NYC background noise of example 3, on the other hand, has much the same pattern of noise, with a relatively steady state of largely indistinguishable noises -- that city mix of traffic, the building being worked on, the walking noisy crowd, and so on. But the volume of that "swoosh" of noise is read by my viscera as a threat; the sheer volume (running at 70-90 decibels) is a pressure on my soul. Given my 'druthers, I'd rather listen to Example 2, the same ambient noise but with the disruptive honking of an aggressive cab. Why? I suppose it is partly because the spike in sound "fits" with my ground-level assessment of the city. It's at that level of "having a reason" for discomfort -- one can complain about the taxi, but it's harder to justify complaining about background sound -- even if it's nearly overwhelming.

The clacking railroad is back toward the comfortable zone of neutral noises; the cyclic nature of its sound is part of storytelling, after all: I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. Repetition is soothing, when it has a shape. Perhaps that puts the "swoosh" of street noise into context; being shapeless, there's nothing to listen for, just the inevitability of having to listen to the noises in an ongoing, unending way.

And then there's the recording of the bird babbles. These are happy birds (and some random squirrel tussling with a bush, click click), and they aren't particularly loud. There's an up and down to their individual calls, but they layer up as a mass of simultaneity. In music, it would be relatively dissonant; read as nature noises it fits into a category of the familiar. It's soothing, even if the assemblage is about as complicated as that of the city noises, with everyone talking at once.

The sounds we encounter at random shape us in ways we often don’t always consciously realize. They thread their way through our emotions and perceptive habits with their textures, patterns, and (especially) volumes. Reflecting on November's sound samples, I've been struck by the tangible interplay of smoothness and spikiness, and especially by how their combinations "read differently" depending on context. Repetition can soothe or grate depending on the narrative we assign it; randomness too can comfort or unsettle. Context lets us transform noise into music (sound organized in time) or cacophony (random unpleasantness), drawing on our emotions to do so. This is why the music sounds in clubs or restaurants can excite some patrons and utterly annoy others; they are placed differently within the internal narrative each listener brings to the moment.

This exercise in intentional listening has reminded me that soundscapes are as much about how we listen as about the sounds themselves. Rain becomes restful because I associate it with shelter and safety; honking cabs feel less intrusive than the city’s unrelenting roar because they narrate a story I can respond to. Even the chaos of bird babbles draws me in, not for its order, but for its vibrant vitality. (That dad’s a birder brings those sounds special meaning, and that’s relevant too!)

Sound, whether smooth or spiky, asks us to tune in—to its rhythms, to the silences (sometimes) interspersed within, and to the ways it resonates within us, both in a physical sense of vibrating WITH the train, and in an emotive sense of what memory/memories it pokes into recollection. Each sound carries its own emotional baggage; in listening carefully, we not only hear the world more clearly but perhaps hear our own inner thoughts as well.