Most men who find themselves thinking seriously about monastic life spend a lot of time imagining what the day-to-day looks like. The imagination tends to run in one of two directions: either a kind of timeless, luminous quiet — all candlelight and chant — or something closer to austere endurance, a life stripped of everything ordinary and warm.
Neither is quite right.
What follows is the actual daily schedule at St. Peter’s Abbey — the real horarium, the real work, the real rhythm of a weekday and a Sunday. Not an idealized version. The point is to give you something concrete enough to evaluate honestly, because honest evaluation is what discernment of your Monastic vocation requires.
The Shape of the Day
The organizing principle of Benedictine life is ora et labora — prayer and work. Those two words sound simple, but they describe something specific: a day in which prayer doesn’t bracket ordinary life but runs through it. The Divine Office is prayed at fixed hours throughout the day, and everything else — meals, work, rest, community — takes its shape around those hours.
This rhythm has been the backbone of Benedictine communities for fifteen centuries. What follows is how it plays out on a specific day in Muenster, Saskatchewan.
Monday Through Saturday
6:00 AM — Rising
The day begins before most of the world is awake. Rising at the same hour each morning is itself a practice — not a hardship to be managed but a form of stability, a daily recommitment to the life you’ve chosen. There are no negotiations with the alarm.
6:20 AM — Lauds
Within twenty minutes of rising, the community gathers in the abbey church for Lauds, the ancient morning prayer of the Church. The psalms have been prayed at dawn by monks and religious for millennia. In the early morning quiet of a prairie monastery, that continuity is palpable. Lauds is brief — it doesn’t linger — but it sets the tone for everything that follows.
7:00 AM — Mass
The Eucharist follows morning prayer rather than replacing it. This sequence matters: the day begins in the Office and moves toward the Mass, rather than treating the Mass as the solitary act of piety from which the rest of the day departs. The liturgy is the structure, not the interruption.
8:00 AM — Breakfast
The first communal meal of the day. Meals at St. Peter’s are eaten together. The rhythm of gathering at table — the same faces, the same hour, day after day — is part of how community is built and maintained. It’s ordinary in the best sense of the word.
9:00 AM — Work or Study
The first work period covers a range of activities depending on the monk and the season. Farming, building and grounds maintenance, administrative work, cleaning, study, and reading all fall within this block. Different monks contribute differently, according to their gifts, their formation, and the community’s current needs. This is ora et labora made concrete: the work is real work, done in service of the community and offered to God.
10:00 AM — Coffee Break
Worth naming plainly. Monastic life is not without ordinary human moments — and this one happens twice a day. The community gathers informally. Conversation happens. On a cold Saskatchewan morning in February, this break has its own particular value.
12:00 PM — Mid-day Praise
A brief pause at midday to return to prayer before lunch. The work morning doesn’t run uninterrupted to the meal — the Office intervenes, deliberately, as a reminder of what the work is for. Mid-day Praise is short, but its placement in the day is intentional.
12:15 PM — Lunch
The midday meal, taken together, each monk takes their food in “Statio” or Station within the community. Lunch is eaten in silence while the reader reads from the book selected for the benefit of the monks.
1:00 PM — Work
The afternoon work period follows the same pattern as the morning — farming, maintenance, administration, cleaning, study, reading — shaped by what the community needs and what the individual monk is assigned to.
3:00 PM — Coffee Break
The second informal gathering of the day. Across the liturgical year and across Saskatchewan’s dramatic seasonal shifts, this time looks the same in July as it does in November. The rhythm holds.
5:35 PM — Vespers
Evening prayer — one of the two hinge hours of the Divine Office, alongside Lauds. The workday closes not by simply stopping but by returning, once more, to the psalms. Vespers marks the transition from the active hours of the day to its quieter close.
6:00 PM — Supper
The evening meal, again taken together. By this point in the day, the community has prayed together four times, worked alongside one another for hours, and shared two previous meals. The texture of supper is different from breakfast — the day is behind everyone, not ahead.
6:30 PM — Recreation
Unstructured community time. Conversation, reading, doing Jigsaw puzzles, whatever the evening permits. This hour deserves more attention than it usually gets in descriptions of monastic life. It’s where brotherhood is built outside of formal structure — not through programming but through the ordinary proximity of people who have chosen to live their lives together.
7:30 PM — Vigils
The final prayer of the day. The community gathers once more before the grand silence of night. Vigils closes the day as Lauds opened it — in the abbey church, with the psalms, together. The day that began in prayer ends in prayer.
Sunday — A Different Rhythm
Sunday has a noticeably different quality. The morning is slower, the Mass is later and more communal, and the absence of the morning work period gives the day a more spacious feel. It is, in the most straightforward sense, a day of rest within the weekly cycle.
7:00 AM — Rising (an hour later than weekdays)
7:30 AM — Lauds
8:00 AM — Breakfast
10:00 AM — Mass
The Sunday Mass is later, more solemn, and more communal in character than the weekday celebration. For a Benedictine community, Sunday Mass carries particular weight — it is the weekly renewal of the entire community’s central act.
11:45 AM — Mid-day Praise
12:00 PM — Lunch
During lunch on Sundays the monks may talk as there is no reading that day.
3:00 PM — Coffee Break
5:35 PM — Vespers
6:00 PM — Supper
6:30 PM — Recreation
7:30 PM — Vigils
What Sunday doesn’t have is a work period. That absence is meaningful. The rhythm of a distinct Sabbath within the week isn’t incidental — it’s built into the structure of life deliberately, a weekly reminder that the work serves the prayer, not the other way around.
What This Rhythm Does Over Time
A schedule like this does something to a person, given enough time.
Stability replaces ambition as the organizing principle of the day. You’re not building toward something or moving on to the next thing — you’re returning, again and again, to the same hours, the same church, the same community. That repetition isn’t monotony. It’s formation.
The repeated return to prayer throughout the day changes the experience of time. Time isn’t managed or optimized here. It’s offered. The hours of the Office mark not what you’ve accomplished but what you’ve brought to God.
And community — genuine community — is built through this kind of shared repetition. Not through retreat weekends or structured bonding experiences, but through the same faces at Lauds, the same voices at Vespers, the same table at supper, year after year. Brotherhood accumulates in the ordinary.
The schedule is demanding precisely because it asks for consistency rather than intensity. Anyone can sustain a burst of spiritual fervor. What Benedictine life asks for is the willingness to show up at 6:20 in the morning, every morning, for the rest of your life. That’s a different kind of commitment — and a different kind of gift.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there personal time built into the day? The recreation period from 6:30 to 7:20 PM provides unstructured time each evening. Work periods also allow for individual variation — monks engaged in study or reading have a degree of personal rhythm within the broader structure. Following Vigils during the Grand Silence monks have more personal time before they retire for the night but they must respect the silence.
Do monks ever leave the abbey grounds? Yes. While the monastery is home, monks do leave for legitimate purposes — parish ministry, medical appointments, community errands, and other needs. St. Peter’s Abbey is not a cloistered community in the strict sense.
Is silence observed during meals or at other times of day? During Lent the monks eat breakfast in silence. Silence is also observed during lunch Mon – Sat as previously mentioned. Also after Vigils silence is observed.
What happens if a monk is sick or unable to keep the schedule? “Care of the sick must rank above and before all else, so that they may truly be served as Christ” – RB Chapter 36. If a monk is sick they may stay in their room or be moved to the sick quarters if need be. Someone will be assigned to care for them if needed and they can attend Office, etc. as they may tolerate.
How does the daily schedule change across the liturgical seasons? During the year the schedule changes as the Superior deems it necessary.
The Best Way to Understand This Is to Live It
Reading a schedule can tell you what monastic life looks like. It can’t tell you what it feels like to pray Lauds in the dark on a January morning in Saskatchewan, or what the coffee break conversation sounds like after a morning of outdoor work in September, or what Vespers does to the end of a long day.
That’s what the Live-In experience is for. Approximately two weeks of living this rhythm alongside the monks — not observing it, but participating in it — provides more genuine clarity about whether this life is yours than any amount of reading can.
If you’ve read this schedule and found yourself drawn rather than deterred, that’s worth paying attention to.
Contact Brother Benedict van Ginkel, O.S.B., Sub Prior Email: vanginkelb@stpeters.sk.ca Phone: 306-682-1781
Or visit our Vocations page to learn more about the Live-In experience and the steps of formation at St. Peter’s Abbey.
