Praying with the Church: The Liturgy of the Hours

From www.liturgy.co.nz/ofthehours/resources.html

"O God, come to my assistance. Lord, make haste to help me. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit..."

The Liturgy of the Hours - also called the Divine Office, the Canonical Hours, or the Breviary - like so many Catholic practices, is drawn from Jewish tradition. In the Psalms, we find references to the practice of praying at different hours of the day and night: "In the morning my prayer comes before you" (Ps 88:13); "May the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice" (Ps 141:2); "At night His song is with me - a prayer to the God of my life" (Ps 42:8); "Evening, morning, and noon I cry out..." (Ps 55:17). The Psalms, the most ancient prayers of the Church, remain a central element of the Liturgy of the Hours to this day.

Traditionally, the Divine Office consisted of eight fixed "hours" of prayer: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. It was composed in the fifth century, and it development was more or less completed by the end of the sixth. The Church has of course made changes and additions to the Office over time, but its character remains largely unchanged. It is one of the most treasured prayers of the Church, and each day it gives hundreds of thousands of the faithful the opportunity to pray together in one voice.

Perhaps the reform of the Divine Office best known to us is the revision promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970 with his Apostolic Constitution Laudis Canticum. In this document, the Holy Father explains the reasons behind the reform, which were twofold: first, to encourage its use by more of the faithful, and second, to give the canonical hours a more logical relationship to the chronological hours to which they are assigned:

"The office has been drawn up and arranged in such a way that not only clergy but also religious and indeed laity may participate in it, since it is the prayer of the whole people of God. People of different callings and circumstances, with their individual needs, were kept in mind and a variety of ways of celebrating the office has been provided, by means of which the prayer can be adapted to suit the way of life and vocation of different groups dedicated to the liturgy of the hours.

"Since the liturgy of the hours is the means of sanctifying the day, the order of this prayer was revised so that in the circumstances of contemporary life the canonical hours could be more easily related to the chronological hours of the day."

Today, the Liturgy of the Hours consists of the recitation of the following prayers: the Office of Readings (formerly Matins), Morning Prayer (Lauds), Daytime Prayer - which consists of one or all of Midmorning, Midday, and Midafternoon Prayer (Terce, Sext, and None), Evening Prayer (Vespers), and Night Prayer (Compline). The "major hours" are the Office of Readings, Morning and Evening prayer. The recitation of Prime was eliminated by the Second Vatican Council, and in Laudis Canticum Pope Paul VI attributes this change to the aforementioned aim of making the canonical hours correspond more closely to the times at which they are prayed.

The great beauty of the Office lies in the unity that it makes tangible. As Pope Paul IV wrote so beautifully:

"Everyone shares in this prayer, which is proper to the one Body as it offers prayers that give expression to the voice of Christ's beloved Bride, to the hopes and desires of the whole Christian people, to supplications and petitions for the needs of all humanity.

"This prayer takes its unity from the heart of Christ, for our Redeemer desired 'that the life he had entered upon in his mortal body with supplications and with his sacrifice should continue without interruption through the ages in his Mystical Body, which is the Church.' Because of this, the prayer of the Church is at the same time 'the very prayer that Christ himself, together with his Body, addresses to the Father.' As we celebrate the office, therefore, we must recognize our own voices echoing in Christ, his voice echoing in us."

If you're interested in praying the Liturgy of the Hours, you can find guides to praying it online, or use the guide provided with your breviary, should you choose to purchase one. The four-volume set is expensive ($145), but it contains all the canonical hours, while the single volume, Christian Prayer ($36), contains only Morning and Evening Prayer for the year. My four-volume set was a gift from two friends of mine, and now I can't imagine living without it!

If you don't have money for a breviary, or you're still waiting for yours to come in the mail (or if you've misplaced your breviary, as I often do), you can find the Hours for each day online (free!) at Universalis.

"May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and bring us to everlasting life. Amen."

The Attractiveness of the Church

The Catholic Church has a magnetic quality; it may attract or repel, but its presentation of the Gospel will not allow one to be merely neutral, unless one is made of plastic. She is viewed with wonder by everyone-those opposed to her can't believe she's made it this long; we who are thankful for her are amazed at her great beauty after all this time. She attracts and keeps people as diverse as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi, as G.K. Chesterton and Stephen Colbert. As a convert, the Church amazes me with her great wealth of tradition and wisdom. The prevalence of lapsed Catholics has also amazed me. While it is certainly true that the lapsed protestant is not an endangered species, a conversation with several friends of mine about topics as diverse as Walker Percy, confirmation saints (mine is St. Francis), and the Church shed much light for me on the mindset of a few of our brethren or, in this case, cistern.

I was most amazed by their love of tradition. In my mind, this is the most noticeable difference between the Catholic Church and the protestant churches-while doctrine and the Real Presence of the Eucharist cannot be minimized, one immediately notices that the Church has been around for a while. One realizes that the other churches, at least in their genesis, were defined by how they differed from the Catholic Church. My friends recognized this; one's exact phrasing of the tradition was, "it's like a secret code." Coming from a protestant background, where tradition is most noticeable in the wonderful old hymn selection, I was surprised that those who are not active in the Church still recognized it and found it attractive. If I may borrow a thought from Walker Percy, an ex-Catholic novelist who writes a book about being a communist in Columbia owes more to his novel writing from his upbringing than he does from all of the Marxist claptrap he quotes. Similarly, the Church's sense of tradition gets into the blood, and it is there indelibly whether you like it or not. Apparently lots of people like it.

The admiration of St. Francis didn't surprise me; oftentimes people remember his love of the world and forget his love of Christ. However, admiration of St. Francis guided Chesterton to the Church, and there is no reason to believe that " ad Jesus per Francis" won't become a description of more of our lives. It is the same with the admiration of Walker Percy, who I've always thought is accessible to anyone, including people who think like my friend.

The Church has an impact on those blessed to know her. If anything, it shows that the last thing the Church should do is sell her tradition in a doomed attempt for "relevancy." The fact that the Church makes such an positive and pervasive impact on those of us who are not practicing shows that there truly is something behind the Church and her traditions. That person is Christ; how else would the traditions of the Church be so tenacious?