Part I
Part II

So, a week ago I sallied forth to the airport, to begin a week of business travel; I was armed with Shorter Christian Prayer and the Discovering Prayer tutorial. My plan was to try to say Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Night Prayer, each day while I was gone, and then to continue if possible. I was scheduled to return home on Friday; in the event, I returned home on Thursday. It’s now Monday, and I’ve kept to my resolution. And so what? What’s the upshot? Has this experiment borne fruit?

Frankly, it’s very hard to say with any certainty. If I’m doing it right, the effects of a life of regular prayer are more likely to be noticed by others than by me. But here are my impressions.

I like it. I’ve been looking forward to these regular prayer times.

It’s efficient. That’s not a word one usually associates with prayer; but when I finish Morning Prayer, as I did a short while ago, I know that I’ve prayed and that I’ve heard the word of God. Given that I work a normal work week, and have the usual family obligations, this is a good thing.

I’ve been much more intentional about remembering the people for whom I need to pray. Both Morning and Evening Prayer have a time of intercession similar to that during the Mass, only better. At Mass, we’re given a very short time for our own intentions. When saying Morning Prayer privately, I have time to go through the whole list. There have been times in the past when I’ve tried to be very careful to pray for everyone, and it’s always become a burden in short order, precisely because I always spent too much time trying to be spontaneous. Day after day, this becomes an effort to find new ways to tell God in great detail things he already knows. Blech. The form of the intercessions is so much easier: it’s always more or less “For so-and-so, that such-and-such; Lord hear our prayer.” The response changes from Hour to Hour and day to day, but the rest need not. In essence, my personal intentions become a custom litany, and that’s neat.

Even on casual acquaintance, it’s clear that the psalms and prayers chosen for each Hour of each day of the year have been carefully selected. As one moves through the Hours and days, there’s a rhythm to it that I’m dimly beginning to see. And there’s definitely a peace to it. In the past, I’ve usually felt that the burden has been on me to pray well. With this, it’s less about me speaking to God and more about God speaking to me through the psalms, canticles, and readings. However you slice it, that’s got to be a good thing.

On the whole, my experience has been positive, and I plan to continue with the Hours at least through Lent. By that time it should be clear whether this is something for the long-term or not. (I’m rather expecting that it will be….)

One of the Episcopal Church’s besetting sins is the tendency to take a purely social-justice agenda, supported by purely human activism, and clothe it in religious-sounding words and phrases so that the Faithful think they are doing and supporting the work of God when all they are really doing is supporting a political platform. Sometimes the verbal gobbledegook gets so thick that it’s impossible to tell what the speaker means—if, indeed, he intends to mean anything in the first place.

One of our concerns before we became Catholic was that we’d be under Cardinal Archbishop Roger Mahoney, who is famous (infamous?) for being one of the most “progressive” bishops in the United States. Having spent far too long in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles under bishops who had (so far as we could tell) abandoned Christian orthodoxy in favor of social activism, we were in no mood to put ourselves under another such. We felt we’d be going from the frying pan to the fire.

Tonight I learned better.

January 22nd is the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. On that day, the March for Life will take place in Washington, D.C.; and today there were similar events in San Francisco and in Dallas. Today was also the day for the Diocese of Los Angeles’ annual “Respect Life” mass, which took place at 6 PM this evening. Not being in Dallas or San Francisco or Washington, D.C., Jane and I packed up our kids and took them down to the Cathedral for mass.

And during the homily, I heard our archbishop speak clearly and plainly about the evils of abortion; about the human dignity of the unborn; about the gains made during the past year; and about the overwhelming power of, not social action, not political action, but the overwhelming power of prayer to change hearts and minds and attitudes. I heard no weasel words, no gobbledegook, and no purely human message dressed in God-talk. Instead, I heard a Catholic bishop teaching his flock, in the charism of his office.

I’ve no doubt that Cardinal Mahoney has his faults and his failings. He may well provide his critics with plenty of grist for their mills. But tonight, at least, he spoke as a bishop should. God bless him and keep him.

Part I

This post is mostly about mechanics. I’ll have more to say about my actual experiences with the Hours later on.

I soon discovered that the prime difficulty of praying the Liturgy of the Hours or any part of it is that it really is different every day. There are some small bits that are identical from one day to the next, and the form of the prayer is always the same, but the precise psalms, canticles, antiphons, readings, and other prayers that fit into the slots change…and not in a simple way. First, there’s a basic four-week cycle of psalms, canticles, and readings; this is called the Psalter, and it repeats over and over again. Overlaid on this is the “Proper of Seasons”, which has alternate items for the different seasons of the liturgical year: Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. These also vary day by dat. And then there is the “Proper of Saints”, which has further alterations for the feasts, memorials, and solemnities of various saints. And since some of the feasts and solemnities of the year are not tied to the Gregorian Calendar—Easter being the prime example—it’s pretty much guaranteed that next year’s prayers won’t be exactly identical to this year’s.

Fortunately, there is a wide variety of help available. The Universalis web site makes the day’s prayers available on-line, if you don’t mind praying in front of a computer; I don’t like it that much, though. There’s a nifty magazine called Magnificat, which in addition to the mass readings for every day of the month also contains daily Morning, Evening, and Night prayers patterned after (though not identical to) those in the Liturgy of Hours, along with other content; if you’d like to try this kind of prayer, this is a simple way to get started (and might be sufficient for many people). I bought a copy at our local Catholic store, and found it be a neat publication; but being a purist I was a bit put off that it doesn’t offer the real Liturgy of the Hours. The important thing is to be praying, of course, and Magnificat is certainly easy to get started with.

If you want to pray the genuine Hours, and you don’t want to be getting them from the ‘Net, you need to buy a prayer book. There are a number of “official” LOTH books available; the main one is a four-book set entitled The Liturgy of the Hours, which has all of the hours, major and minor, in their complete and utter fullness. I have seen this set on-line for around $140; I’ve not actually looked through a copy.

One step down from this is a book called Christian Prayer, published by the Catholic Book Publishing Company. It’s a one-volume version that includes the complete text for Morning, Evening, and Night Prayer; the full set of hymns, with melody lines; a partial set of text for Day Prayer, which I’ve not yet looked at; and a partial set of text for the Office of Readings. I ordered a copy of this from Amazon a couple of weeks ago, and it arrived last week while I was on a business trip; I’ve been using it for Morning, Evening, and Night Prayer since I got home on Thursday and (with the exception of the Office of Readings, which is laid out in an extremely confusing way) I’ve found it easy to use, given the appropriate instruction (of which more anon).

As I say, I was on a business trip for a good bit of last week; and given that business trips involve a lot of time sitting in airports, and sitting on planes, and sitting in my hotel room I’ve found it useful over the last year to use them as “mini-retreats”. So I wanted something to take with me. I’d already ordered Christian Prayer, but I went down to our local Catholic Store and found a copy of Shorter Christian Prayer. This is a condensed version of Christian Prayer, smaller and much thinner, that is intended to be used while travelling. It includes Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, Night Prayer and hymns without melody lines, with a much abbreviated Proper of Saints. In retrospect, this was probably exactly the right book to start with, as it eliminates much of the potential confusion. Thursday, for example, was the memorial of St. Anthony the Abbot, the founder of monasticism; but SCP doesn’t include St. Anthony in its Proper of Saints so I didn’t need to sweat it.

As it happens, Monday was the first week day of “Ordinary Time”, which made knowing which prayers to pray very, very easy. You just start with Monday of “Week I” in the Psalter, and start going day by day. The only unusual day during the past week was Thursday, St. Anthony’s day, and given that I was using SCP that was moot anyway. In general, though, it’s useful to have some help. The Catholic Book Publishing Company also publishes a little pamphlet, the “St. Joseph Guide”, which indicates clearly which pages apply for each hour for each day of the year. There’s a edition of the Guide for each edition of the hours; my copy of Christian Prayer came with the appropriate guide for 2008. I haven’t need to use it much yet, but I’m sure it will come in handy in the long run.

As I say, CP came with the 2008 Guide; SCP did not. Everything that I’ve read on-line says that you’ll want to get this year’s Guide for whatever book you buy, which I think is true; but be aware that the book might come with this year’s Guide. Wait and see before buying another copy.

But wait! There’s more! Even with the Guide and SCP, the Hours are a bit of a do-it-yourself kit. The text for each day assumes you know how to do it, and abbreviates some parts of the “boilerplate” and leaves others out. You can tease out all of these little details (such as the fact that the “Glory to the Father” is said after each and every Psalm and Canticle, prior to repeating the Antiphon) if you study the front matter of the book diligently; but it would be very easy to be hopelessly lost. Again, fortunately, there is help, of two kinds.

First, as laypeople we aren’t required to say the Hours in any form, let alone in complete fidelity to the rubrics. It is good to be in prayer, and there’s nothing innately sinful about leaving portions of the Hours out, or making mistakes. If you’re anal-retentive, like me, you’ll want to do it just right—but in this context that might not always be a virtue. It’s the conversation with God that’s key, not dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s.

Second, there are tutorials available that walk you through the whole process. Red Neck Woman recommends a book called The Divine Office for Dodos, which unfortunately is out of print. Apparently you can find it used, and their website indicates that a new edition is due out this March. Alternatively, both Jen and I independently found a tutorial called “Discovering Prayer” which can be downloaded in PDF form from the Rosary Shop. I found it to be very helpful, and Seth Murray, who is both the author of the tutorial and the proprietor of the Rosary Shop, has been very kind about answering my further questions.

Bottom line: there is a significant learning curve to get started praying any of the hours, but there are resources to help with that; and after the first day of actually trying it, and with the intent not to sweat the small stuff, I found it to be quite easy and natural. But more of that in the next post.

Part III

There’s been a lot of interest in the Liturgy of the Hours around and about the blogosphere recently. Red Neck Woman has been praying the Liturgy of the Hours for some time; recently she wrote a detailed post about what they are and how to get started (start here, and follow the links. Jen of “Et Tu” has been looking into them, and this week has been engaging in “A Reckless Experiment In Prayer,” using the Liturgy of the Hours, in an attempt to bring some peace and structure into her life. She’s invested a lot of posts on this; probably the best thing to do is start at the bottom of her January archive and work your way up.

The Liturgy of the Hours is, more or less, the ancient daily prayer of the Church. It’s the prayer associated with the canonical hours you’ve probably encountered in some novel or other—Matins, Lauds, Vespers, Compline, and so forth—that literary monks are always going off to pray. And, indeed, they did. They still do. And so do nuns, and so, to my surprise, do all Catholic clergy. Lay people generally don’t, but some do, and indeed John Paul II specifically encouraged this. The clergy, however, are required to pray the Liturgy of the Hours (also known as the Divine Office) every day.

I’ve been an active Christian for all of my adult life, and one thing I’ve always had trouble with is finding time for daily prayer. There have been times in my life, times lasting a few weeks or months at most, when I’ve had a regular time set aside every day for prayer. None of them have worked in the long run; most of the time, I’ve made do with the occasional spot of prayer during the day, driving to work or in the shower or whenever it has occurred to me. This is better than nothing, but it isn’t all that intentional. And, looking back on it, the problem hasn’t really been finding the time; I can make time for prayer if I want to (I certainly wasted enough of it). The problem has been the popular Protestant emphasis on spontaneous prayer, something I imbibed from a variety of sources during my college years. If you pray every day, at the same time, about the same things, you’re naturally going to start using the same words. But that’s not spontaneous! And so prayer became a quest for novel ways to talk to God, and that became a horrible burden. And if I gave up on that, and kept using my own words then I got horribly bored with prayer, as i was using the same words every single day, and they weren’t that interesting. And so I’d go back to being spontaneous a few minutes at a time if, as, and when.

(Please note, I can’t blame this on being Episcopalian; unlike many Protestant denominations, Anglicans in general have no problem with “rote” prayers and liturgy, and my first exposure to the Divine Office was through the Morning and Evening Prayers in the Book of Common Prayer. More of that, perhaps, anon.)

One of the things that moved me closer to Rome over the last couple of years was the rediscovery of the prayers of my youth: the Our Father (not that I’d ever abandoned that one), the Act of Contrition, and the Hail Mary. Indeed, one of the oddest things about the last year is that I started to pray the Rosary on occasion, something I’d never done before. Over time, that became more frequent. And I discovered two things: first, spending time with Christ daily has a salutary effect on my life, and second, not having to find my own words not only prevented my prayer time from being a burden but freed my mind for contemplation. (Which, really, is what the Rosary is all about…but that would be another post.) And there was a thought that kept recurring: that I needed to spend more time with scripture.

Given the things I was hearing about it, I got curious enough about the Liturgy of the Hours to study up on it a bit. As I said earlier, it’s the ancient prayer of the church; and, it turns out, it’s almost entirely based on Holy Scripture. During each of the hours, one prays Psalms; canticles (psalm-like passages from other books of the Bible); other prayers; and readings from scripture. Moreover, the precise psalms, canticles, prayers, and readings vary from day to day, and from season to season, and are appropriate for the hour; Morning Prayer is qualitatively different than Evening Prayer, for example.

Interesting. Daily prayer; different every day; containing great dollops of scripture; designed for contemplation; and I don’t need to find my own words. Very interesting. I decided that I needed to look into it.

Part II