The sixth hour carries the heaviest scriptural freight of the little hours. It was from the sixth hour, the synoptic Gospels record, that darkness covered the land while Christ hung on the cross, so midday prayer stands each day at the shadow of the crucifixion; and it was at the sixth hour, Acts recounts, that Peter went up on the housetop at Joppa to pray and saw the sheet let down from heaven, the vision that taught the church to call no person unclean. The early manuals cite both when they commend noon prayer, and the office's hymns hold both notes, the cross remembered and grace widening. To these the monastic centuries added an observation from experience.
Evagrius and the desert tradition diagnosed the noonday demon, the spirit of acedia that makes the sun seem to stand still, the cell unbearable and the life pointless, taking its name from the Greek psalter's destruction that wastes at noonday in Psalm 91. Sext is the liturgical answer: at the exact hour the tradition judged the soul weakest, it sets a small fixed duty, three psalms and a prayer, asking, in the words of its old collect themes, for fervour when the heat is greatest. The spirituality is unheroic and precise, and modern writers on work and attention have found the little hour freshly relevant: a noon pause, imposed from outside the mood of the moment, built against the hour when meaning most easily drains from the day.