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