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Author Archives: wjduquette
Forbearance: A Meditation
I was pondering the Sorrowful Mysteries today, and had some reflections I thought were worth sharing.
Ever since Nicaea, the Church has held that Christ has two natures: He is fully human, and fully divine, at one and the same time. His two natures cannot be separated, but are nevertheless distinct. This is a difficult thing to keep in mind (he said with dry understatement). While knowing and believing that Jesus is God-Incarnate, Man Divine, I tend not to think about Jesus’ human side. But Jesus was a man like us in all things but sin. And that means He had a choice.
Jesus didn’t have to do it. The essence of His sacrifice—the thing that makes it a sacrifice—is that He had a choice. At any time during His passion, with but a word, or perhaps even a thought, He could have summoned the hosts of Heaven. He could not be forced to submit to the lash, the thorns, the mockery, the spitting, the slapping, the road to Calvary, the Cross, the nails, the spear; He chose to submit to these things. All the while He was suffering and bearing the pain and humiliation, He in his humanness must needs also force Himself to continue to do so. With every lash He must, of His own free will, choose to bear the next one. It was His choice.
We know that it wasn’t easy for Him. He spent the night in Gethsemane agonizing over the choice, and asking His Father that this cup might pass from His lips.
One of the early heresies held that Jesus had no Human nature, but was only Divine; the Passion was therefore easy for Him. The Church rejected this. Indeed, it seems to me (I hope I do not fall into heresy with this) that during His Passion, Jesus needed to be most fully Human, that his Divine self could give little or no aid. We know that on the Cross there came a moment when He felt utterly abandoned, and He cried out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”
What enabled Him to bear so much suffering, and to choose to let it continue for so many hours? If it wasn’t His Divinity, what could it be? So I asked myself. And the answer, of course, was Love. Jesus allowed the suffering to continue out of Love. Love for you and I; but also Love for the very men who were tormenting Him. He was God; He could easily have destroyed them with a word. But He loved them, and forgave them even as they killed Him.
And so, I thought…maybe in His Human suffering He had one Divine aid: He was able to Love us with the Father’s Love.
And then I thought…maybe not. Maybe Jesus had to do it all in His own strength, as you and I cannot do. Maybe for His sacrifice to have meaning, His Humaness was on its own. The words from the Cross seem to indicate this.
In that case, we were saved, in that time of suffering, by Jesus’ purely Human love, by His strength of will in the greatest of the virtues, Charity.
Jesus, being free from concupiscence, that tendency to sin from which all the rest of us suffer, was not thereby free from temptation, this we know. As He was free from sin, we can assume He had no vices. But it does not follow that in human terms his virtues were innate. Perhaps he had to cultivate them as the rest of us do…through constant practice.
Thirty-three years of practice.
Perhaps that’s the reason for the Lost Years, from His visit to the Temple when He was twelve until the beginning of His public ministry eighteen years later. Perhaps that’s how long it took, leading a perfect and holy life, to develop that charity, that heroic virtue, that would enable Him to bear the torments and humiliations of His Passion with patience, forbearance, and love.
Update: I’ve just read that St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, teaches that Jesus had all of the virtues in heroic measure from the instant of his conception. Me, I’m not going to argue with St. Thomas. Oh, well.
The Liturgy of the Hours for Laity
I just came across at neat post on the Liturgy of the Hours at a blog I’d not visited before, Perfect Joy. The author is, I gather, a member of the Franciscan laity. He’s noticed a lot of blogging about the Hours recently, much of it from laity who have had throuble praying the Hours, and he has some thoughts on why.
Big Bag o’ Books
Over the last year I’ve read quite a few books that I never got around to reviewing. Some had a bearing on my decision to return to the Catholic Church, and were omitted because I wasn’t ready to go public with that; others I simply never got to. I’d like to acknowledge these books, some of which I thoroughly enjoyed, but in most cases I don’t feel like I can give them a thorough review after so long. Consequently, and most unusually, I’ve decided to do one or two grand grab bag posts, and get ’em all out of the way with a few words each.
Hah! Words have a way of multiplying. So grab your popcorn; this might take a while.
The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher. Harry Dresden is more or less your basic hardboiled PI with a heart of gold…except that he’s not a PI. Instead, he’s a wizard-for-hire. He lives in Chicago in a basement apartment heated only by a wood-burning fireplace and keeps his milk cold in an old-fashion icebox, because electronics go wonky when he’s around. Sometimes he consults with the police department, but most of Chicago’s boys in blue think he’s a charlatan. From his point of view that’s OK—the world out there is scarier than most people imagine, and it’s his job to keep it that way. If the White Council doesn’t execute him first.
Sometimes a book will jump off of the shelf into my hands, and sometimes I’m desperately looking for something to read. But usually, I wait until I get two intersecting recommendations for a book or series by an author I’m not familiar with. In this case, I got the recommendations from Julie of Happy Catholic, and Ian of Benevolent Misanthropy (née Banana Oil). That’s a considerable angle of parallax, and so even though the first two books in the series (Storm Front and Fool Moon) didn’t grab me I soldiered on. There were some really good moments, and Ian had warned me that Butcher really hit his stride with the third. I read up through book 8 during my spate of travelling last year, and had a lot of fun with them.
Be warned; Dresden hangs out at the “Horror” end of the Dark Fantasy spectrum, so there’s a fair amount of gore and occasionally some rather outré sex (there are vampires involved, natch). The ninth book, White Night, is due out in paperback in a couple of days, and I am so there.
The Codex Alera, by Jim Butcher. Mr. Butcher’s been busy, and he’s also been working one of the more interesting fantasy series I’ve run into in a while. The series includes four books, at the moment: The Furies of Calderon, Academe’s Fury, Cursor’s Fury (just out in paperback) and Captain’s Fury (just out in hardback). I’ve enjoyed the first three—more than the Dresden books, truth-to-tell. The series takes place in the land of Alera, on a world densely populated by a variety of races, some human, some nearly human, and some not at all human. The folk of Alera are human, descendants of a sizeable quantity of Romans who were transported to this world by some means as yet undisclosed. Alera is also densely populated by elementals, colloquially known as “furies”; and virtually all Alerans have the ability to communicate with and command furies to a greater or lesser extent. Aleran society is roughly feudal; the noble families are precisely those which have shown a great capacity to command the furies. There’s an interesting political situation, an interesting backstory, interesting enemies, and some neat characters, and I’m quite curious to see where Butcher takes it next.
1812: The Rivers of War, by Eric Flint. This is the first book in yet another alternate history series: what if Sam Houston hadn’t gotten seriously wounded fighting the Creek Indians with Andrew Jackson…and went on to be more thoroughly involved in the War of 1812? Houston had ties to the Cherokee nation…perhaps, instead of the Trail of Tears, something different might have arisen…. I was hesitant to pick this up, being greatly annoyed with Flint over how long it was taking for the follow-on to 1634: The Galileo Affair to be released as a paperback, but eventually I did and enjoyed it considerably. The sequel, 1824: The Arkansas War, is now out in paperback; I have it but have not yet read it.
C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, by Victor Reppert. In Chapter 3 of Miracles, Lewis argues that the fact that we can reason shows that philosophical materialism is necessarily false: that if we were, in fact, the result of a mindless, purposeless system of physics and chemistry that scientific reasoning itself would be fundamentally flawed and not worthy of being believed.
I will not attempt to restate his argument here.
It is generally held, evidently, that Lewis was mistaken—that his argument was insufficient to prove his point. In this book, Reppert disagrees…and goes so far as to extend, strengthen and complete Lewis’ argument, making it even stronger. Or so the back cover blurb would indicate; once Reppert got down to brass tacks and began to lay out his argument, I was completely at sea and soon gave up reading.
C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, by Joseph Pearce. By the end of Lewis’s life, he was the highest of High Church Anglicans, and engaged in all sorts of practices, up to and including private confession, and believed all sorts of things, up to and including the notion of purgatory, that are more regularly associated with Roman Catholicism. Pearce asks the question: given that Lewis’ religious life was so Anglo-Catholic, why didn’t he take the next step and join the Roman Catholic Church? This is a very natural question, I might add, for those Roman Catholics who love and esteem Lewis deeply.
In the end, of course, the question is unanswerable, for Lewis evidently never gave any definitive answer. There is some evidence, I gather, that he contemplated making such a step but could never quite bring himself to it. While warning against simplistic answers to complex questions, Pearce traces it home primarily to Lewis’s youth as a member of the Church of Ireland. Lewis described his father as being fairly “high” in his churchmanship; but Pearce makes it clear that “high” for the Church of Ireland in that time and place was still remarkably “low” compared to, say, the Oxford Movement, and of course anti-Catholicism was in the air. (Lewis remarks somewhere about his friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien that it violated two pieces of advice he’d been given: never to trust a Catholic and never to trust a philologist.) If I recall correctly, the Church’s Marian doctrines were also a sticking point, though Pearce (again, if I recall correctly) also linked this back to Lewis’s childhood in some way. Pearce also suggests that Lewis’ espousal of “Mere Christianity” relates to his inability to come to terms with Rome: if Christian unity could not be found in Rome, it had to be found in something more general.
Bottom line? I dunno. Lewis has certainly had a greater influence on the progress and content of my faith than any other single writer, and for that I’m grateful. Pearce’s book? I found it interesting, but I guess that’s as far as I can go.
Six Frigates, by Ian W. Toll. This is book about the construction of the United States’ first six heavy frigates, the cornerstone of the American Navy and the key to winning the War of 1812. I don’t have much to say about it, but I spent quite a bit of my time during our last summer vacation reading it, which for a history book ought to be a pretty good recommendation, unless you prefer your history dry, pedantic, and in small doses. If you’ve any interest in history, and particularly in the Age of Sail, this is well-worth your time.
Adventures in Orthodoxy, by Fr. Dwight Longenecker. Fr. Longenecker, an American by birth, went to England, became Anglican, was ordained an Anglican priest, served for many years, and was then received into the Roman Catholic Church. He spent many years as a layman, during which he wrote this book; some while back he started a blog called Standing on My Head, and shortly thereafter was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. He’s currently serving as chaplain to a Catholic school in South Carolina. Not surprisingly, when I ran across this book last summer during one of my business trips (to Orlando, Florida, if I recall correctly) I snagged it and brought it home. And, I’m afraid, quite thoroughly failed to appreciate it. I don’t know why; it didn’t strike me as badly written, or dull, but it didn’t really grab me. I’m holding on to it, and I expect I’ll give it another try some day.
Secret Believers, by Brother Andrew and Al Janssen
This book, which is subtitled “What Happens When Muslims Believe in Christ”, was the “one” in a one-two punch. I picked it up yesterday, based on Julie’s recommendation; and then this morning I read The Hiding Place. Oh, man.
Brother Andrew is best known for his book God’s Smuggler, about his days of smuggling Bibles behind the Iron Curtain—which, it develops, he often did in company with Corrie ten Boom. Once the book was published, he perforce turned his attention to other parts of the world, including the Islamic world. This book is about the life of Christians in Muslim countries, both those of traditionally Christian families and those who convert from Islam. The latter are known as MBB’s, Muslim-Background Believers, and their life is extremely hard. They are mistrusted by other Christians; apparently it has been common for young Muslim men to pretend to convert, join a Christian church, marry a girl from a Christian family, and then return to Islam. In addition, if a Christian church is found to be aiding converts from Islam they will likely run into trouble. Sharia law prohibits any Muslim from leaving Islam, and those who try face massive persecution and probable martyrdom.
The stories in this book are both humbling and thought-provoking, but also heartening. Because of radio and the Internet, more people in the Islamic world are learning of Jesus and becoming Christians. They need our prayers, and our support; they, and those they will reach, are our best hope for getting out of this clash of civilizations without decades more bloodshed. You can find out more at SecretBelievers.org, which among other things has an RSS feed of news items involving the persecuted church around the world.
The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom
Read this mostly this morning; when I was done, I felt like I’d been to a funeral: tired, drained, empty, sore-eyed. I’ve rarely been so moved by a book.
Corrie ten Boom was a 50-year-old watch maker when Holland surrendered to the Nazis. With her sister Betsie and her aged father, she enabled I don’t know how many Jews to get to safety, finally hiding seven in her own home, which was the center of a large network. Eventually, of course, ten Booms were betrayed. Corrie and her sister were taken first to a prison, and after many months to a concentration camp, and then to a death camp in Holland, where Betsie died. Through it all Betsie counted it as pure joy to bring Christ to the suffering in all circumstances, counting her own sufferings as nothing and praying for her guards. Corrie found such radical forgiveness and rejoicing hard to accept, but after Betsie’s death found she could do nothing else. After the war she ministered to prison camp survivors in Holland…and to the Germans, in Germany. She spent the rest of her life spreading her sister’s—Christ’s—message.
That’s it, in a small, woefully inadequate nutshell. Read it for yourself.
The Liturgy of the Hours, Part III: So What?
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….)
God Bless Cardinal Mahoney
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.
The Liturgy of the Hours, Part II: The Mechanics
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.
The Liturgy of the Hours, Part I: Motivation
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.
The View from the Foothills 