Monthly Archives: April 2008

Three Months with the Liturgy of the Hours

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Actually, it’s been almost three-and-a-half months; I started praying the Liturgy of the Hours in mid-January, and it’s now nearly the end of April. For the beginning of this project, see the series of posts that begins here.

I don’t really have a lot to say, except that I’m still praying Morning and Evening Prayer, Night Prayer, and most days the Office of Readings as well. Many such projects start out well, with the enthusiasm born of novelty, and then lapse as the novelty fades. This has not been the case, so far. The Divine Office just plain works for me; it helps me to pray when I feel dry, and it’s even more rewarding when I don’t. God is faithful, and the Divine Office helps me to be faithful in response. This is very cool!

The one resource I’d like to add to those I mentioned in the series of posts linked above is John Brook’s The School of Prayer, which does a better of job of explaining why it is that praying the Liturgy of the Hours is a worthwhile thing to do. In a nutshell, it’s because it teaches us to pray, using the prayers—the psalms—which the Lord himself gave us. But Brook goes into more detail than that; he also has a detailed commentary on every psalm in Morning and Evening Prayer. Highly recommended.

Society vs. People

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I used to tell people, “There’s no such thing as Society. There’s only People.” Most of them, especially the more liberal, would look at me really funny. It’s an overstatement, but I think it’s mostly true. And what I mean by it is, the only real way to change society is to change the hearts and minds of individual people. There are lots of ways to do that, but when you’re thinking in terms of Society most of those ways begin to look like a sledgehammer…or, maybe, a pile-driver. It’s hard to be subtle when you’re dealing with people as a mass of population. If you want to be subtle, you need to work with each individual heart, each individual mind. Of course, it’s almost impossible to do that when you’re dealing with People as a mass of population. Hence the constant temptation to try to engineer Society.

Over at Amy Welborn’s place, she quotes somebody named Angelo Matera, who said (in a much longer excerpt) “This is the spiritual method of the lay movements, not the political method used by Catholic pressure groups.” It occurred to me, on reading this, that this “political method” is based on a subtle fallacy: that the “powers that be” are a ring in the nose of the body politic, and if you manipulate them properly you can steer the body politic in the direction you want it to go. There’s some truth to this, in the political arena; but it doesn’t work very well as a form of social engineering. Just because you’ve got the leaders going the way you want them to, doesn’t mean that the rank-and-file are going to buy into it. And this is even more true in the world of the Catholic Church, where the Magisterium doesn’t answer to the voters in any American sense.

On the other hand, the Christian faith is precisely the thing that can change hearts and minds across society, because it changes them one heart and mind at a time. More to the point, Christ asks each of us to change our own heart, our own mind—to allow Him to change them for us. Christianity is attractive, not coercive. We witness to others through our lives; we call out to others to come drink of the living water and never thirst again. They, then, can choose to change their own hearts and minds, with Christ’s help.

The bottom line is this: if you really want to change the world, don’t bother with the political process. Let Christ lead you into service. Serve those He leads you to. Let Him use you to lead others into service.

Follow Christ and the World (and the Church!) can take care of itself.