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Reading about the interior life is not the same as living it. (Neither is writing about it.) ’nuff said.

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The Rosary is not just a prayer, it’s a meditation on the life of Christ. Similarly, the Liturgy of the Hours is not just a set of prayers; it is also fruit for meditation.

First, (as I seem to keep saying) the Divine Office is based around the Psalms. I hadn’t really gotten to know the Psalms all that well before I started praying the Office; they are poetry (which is usually not to my taste) (which is a sad commentary on my taste), and poetry needs to be lived with. The Psalms speak of the history of the Israelites and their relationship with God; they are the hymns used in the Temple; they are prayers Jesus would have used growing up, and prayers that (through his mystical body) He uses today. More than that; it is said that the New Testament is hidden in the Old Testament; the Psalms have much to teach us about Jesus.

And then, each Hour on each day has its own ancillary prayers; and Morning and Evening Prayer include detailed intercessions that can help keep us on track, praying for the Church and our brothers and sisters in faith.

And then, the Divine Office leads us through the liturgical year. There are special prayers for the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter that take us day by day through each season. It becomes much easier to see how everything fits together once you’ve lived through it with the help of the Divine Office for a few years.

And then, the Divine Office leads us through the calendar of saints. Each saint in the calendar has his own proper prayer; some even have their own selection of Psalms and related prayers. This helps us to remember our own particular favorites, but also introduces us to saints we might never have heard of otherwise. Each one has something to teach us.

I’ve been praying the Divine Office since the spring of 2007. I began with excitement and confusion, especially confusion; and that’s OK. Eventually I learned how to use the printed breviaries properly, and how to know which prayers to use on which days; and then came the iBreviary app, which is what I use now. Some of the Psalms have become old friends. Some days the Liturgy is exciting; most days, it’s a bit of a chore. Some days it’s a real slog. But it means that three times a day, every day, I’m spending time with God.

I’ve spent three posts on the Divine Office, not because I think everybody will want to dive into them—prayer styles differ—but because they’ve worked for me, and because it’s a large topic. These days I’m a Lay Dominican; and praying the Hours is part of the promise I made when I became a Lay Dominican. But I was praying them for several years before that, and promising to continue seems a little like promising to continue eating every day.

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I’m going to step away from the Divine Office for a moment, and talk about something else.

The interior life is a life of learning to love and be loved by God. After all, we are supposed to love Him with all of our heart and soul and mind and strength. This makes the interior life sound kind of selfish: like it’s all me and God, and other people can go hang. Nothing could be further from the truth: in order to grow in the love of God, you have to grow in the love of those around you. More precisely: one of the ways in which we can best love God is by loving His people.

I’ve heard it said that we are like reservoirs for God’s love. God fills us up…but once we are full, the only way to receive more is by passing His love on to others: by going out of our way to love and serve them sacrificially, as Christ loves us sacrificially.

It’s not uncommon these days for people to focus on works of service to the exclusion of the interior life. This is a grave mistake; our whole reason for being here is to learn to love God. But it’s an equally grave mistake to think we can learn to love God without learning to love our fellows. The interior life should overflow in exterior service; and equally, service undertaken out of love of God is a great help to the interior life.

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Yesterday, I began talking about the Divine Office as a daily devotion. Today I want to go into some specifics.

Each day, the Divine Office consists of a number of distinct sets of prayers, the Hours. I usually pray three of them. I begin my day with Morning Prayer, also known as Lauds. After work, or sometimes after the kids go to bed, I will pray Evening Prayer, also known as Vespers. And just before going to bed, my wife and I will pray Night Prayer, also known as Compline.

The intriguing thing about the Divine Office is that it changes every day. There’s a four week cycle of psalms and canticles that you go through by default; and then there are particular psalms for particular feast days. In addition, there are other prayers and antiphons that change day by day.

All of this change is a good thing, because it means the Office is always new each day; and on the other hand over time all of the psalms become old friends. On the other hand, it means that getting started with the Divine Office is tricky. You need a book called a breviary, to begin with, and then you need to learn how to use it. In addition, there are websites and iPhone applications devoted to the Divine Office that will serve you the day’s prayers with no fuss.

The easiest Hour to start with is Night Prayer because it is the shortest and simplest. It operates on a seven-day cycle that repeats over and over again week after week; every Monday the prayers are the same as the previous Monday, and they are spelled out in full in one place in your breviary.

There are many on-line resources; my favorite at the moment is Daria Sockey’s blog Coffee and Canticles, which is all about the Divine Office. Alternatively, there may be a group at your parish that meets to say the office. At my parish, for example, there’s a group that meets for Morning Prayer right before the daily mass.

Next time, I’ll have a few things to say about my own experiences with the Divine Office.

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A few days ago I talked about the value of regular devotions to the interior life; and yesterday I talked about the Rosary. Today I’m going to talk about the Liturgy of the Hours, also known as the Divine Office.

The Divine Office is a set of prayers based around the Psalms. It is called the Hours because there are different prayers for different times of the day, and if you read the kind of fiction I do you’ll recognize the older names for some of the hours: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Nones, Vespers, and Compline.

It’s not quite correct to refer to the Divine Office as simply a devotion. A devotion is private prayer, while the Hours are a Liturgy, just like the Mass. The word “Liturgy” means a “public work”, and the Hours are part of the public work of the Church. When you pray the Liturgy of the Hours, you aren’t praying by yourself, even if you’re in your room with the door locked. You are praying with the monks in their monasteries and the sisters in the convents, with all of the secular clergy, and with the saints in heaven. More than this: a liturgy is a prayer of the whole Church, which is to say the Body of Christ. When you take part, you are praying with Christ Himself in His Intercessions with our Father in Heaven.

OK, that’s kind of scary. Let’s bring it down to earth a bit.

Even though the Hours aren’t simply a devotion, praying the Hours has all of the same advantages as any devotion: there’s a set of prayers to say, and a structure for saying them. You don’t need to be endlessly creative; the prayers are there for you. You know what to say, and you know when you’ve said them, and you can judge for yourself whether you paid attention to God or not.

(Don’t be dismayed if you have trouble paying attention to God. Remember that kitchen remodel! The real work is going on even while you’re floundering.)

The Divine Office is an enormous topic, so I’ll be spending another post or two on it.

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Last time I talked about how spontaneity fails, at least for me, as an approach to daily prayer. So what’s the alternative? If I’m not going to sit down and simply pray from my heart at the stated time, what am I going to do instead?

The answer is to cultivate a devotion: that is, a prayer that is meant to be said daily. Low-church Protestants sometimes have trouble with this kind of prayer; it smacks of “vain repetition”. But as I pointed out, trying to pray spontaneously every day led me to saying much the same thing every day anyway. Vain repetition isn’t simply reciting a pre-existing prayer; vain repetition is reciting the prayer without focussing on God, and expecting it to do any good.

Devotions have many advantages over spontaneous prayer, at least in this context. (As I said in the post linked above: if you feel moved to spontaneous prayer, springing from your heart, by all means go with it.) It’s hard for us to know how we’re doing in the interior life. Feelings are not a good guide. But when you’ve said a devotion, you know you’ve said it. You know you have devoted that time to God. That’s an objective fact, and doesn’t depend on feelings. Granted, you need to be trying to focus on God during that time, and if you’re like me you often won’t do that good a job of it. But again, choosing to focus on God is not a feeling, it’s an act of the will, and you can objectively ask, “Did I really try to focus on God, or was I going through the motions?”

Sometimes, going through the motions is all you can do. But even there, God knows that you could have done something else with that time; and He will honor that. He’ll be on the job while you are praying, even if you’re only half there.

The Catholic Church has oodles of devotions, most of which I’m not familiar with. The two that I have used most consistently are the Rosary and the Liturgy of the Hours (also known as the Divine Office). I’ll have more to say about them in future posts.