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One of the hardest things to do in the interior life is to persevere: to keep going, to keep praying every day, especially when, for some reason, we miss a day.  It’s only natural.  If you’re learning to play an instrument, and you don’t practice, you don’t want to face your instructor; and if you continue not to practice, you’ll soon not be taking lessons.

But the fact is, you’re sometimes going to miss a day.  Sometimes you’ll just not feel like it, and you’ll go with that; other times you’ll honestly forget; other times something will come up that fills up the time you had available.

This morning, for example.  I was a little under the weather yesterday, and so I really needed my sleep; and I woke up about 4 AM, and when that happens I usually have trouble getting back to sleep.  Now, my alarm goes off at 5:45, so that I have time to pray Morning Prayer; and then I wake up the rest of the family at 6:15.

This morning, I not only got back to sleep, but I woke up at 6:15.  The alarm was going, but it’s a clock radio, and the volume had been turned down all the way.  I hadn’t heard it.  Instead, I woke up at the last possible minute I could get up without inconveniencing my family, having gotten the maximum possible amount of sleep.

Me, I call this a blessing.

But it meant that I didn’t have time to pray this morning.  This happens, and in this case it’s not that I forgot, or that I chose not to.  Sometimes it is.

The important thing, regardless of why you miss a prayer time, is to let it go.  Forget it.  Don’t let it make you feel guilty.  It happened; it’s past.  Instead, be sure to pray next time.  When you think of God, remember that He’s calling you, and respond.  The interior life is beginning, and beginning again.

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The interior life is just like anything else that you begin with excitement and enthusiasm: the excitement and enthusiasm wear off, and you end up with dryness. You don’t want to sit down and pray; when you do, it seems meaningless and pointless and boring and no fun. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the dryness will come and go.

There are two reasons for this, one human and one divine.

The human reason is what Uncle Screwtape called “the law of undulation”. In any human endeavour, your energy levels go up and down. When you’re feeling energetic, the activity is easy; at other times, you just don’t have as much energy for it. And then, if you’ve got some reason to be tired or sick or exhausted, it’s just so much worse. It’s the same thing that applies to housework, say. Prayer is a human activity, and subject to all of the same circumstances as any other human activity.

The divine reason is that prayer isn’t wholly a human activity; God plays a role, too. Sometimes He makes His presence felt; that’s called “consolation,” and it’s delightful when it happens.

Now, the interior life is about learning to love God with all your mind, soul, heart and strength, i.e., more than anything else, and then to love all other things in due proportion. And here’s the thing: the consolation God grants is not God. It is heady, delightful, intoxicating, and so we naturally want more of it; and it is all too easy to learn to love consolation more than God who grants it. We must learn to love God with our wills rather than with our feelings.

And so God grants us dryness, times when we can choose to love Him even though our feelings rebel. In short, as annoying as it is, dryness is a good thing.

(You might have heard of the Dark Night of the Soul and the Dark Night of the Senses. I’m talking about something much more basic, something that you’ll almost certainly experience on a regular basis. All I have to say about the Dark Nights is that I don’t understand them well enough to say anything worth listening to.)

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Several months ago, I discovered that the Catholic church around the corner from where I work has a presence chapel that’s always open during the work day. This is unusual in my area; most of the churches in my area are locked unless there’s a Mass or other service in progress. The chapel has one of those tabernacles with a little door on the front, so that the Blessed Sacrament can easily be exposed for Eucharistic Adoration.

Since then I’ve gotten in the habit of stopping by there on my way home several times a week. Some days I only stay long enough to say Evening Prayer, and maybe finish my daily rosary. Other days, I’ll stop and sit a spell. I especially like it when the tabernacle is open, but whether it is or not, He is there.

Personally, I’ve never been all that comfortable using a visual focus during prayer; I’m simply too aware that what I’m looking at is just an image, and not the real thing. But during Eucharistic Adoration, it’s all different. Yes, I see a wafer of unleavened bread; it looks much less like Jesus than the corpus on the crucifix does. But it isn’t bread; it’s my Lord. Being in His presence makes me happy. And even when the tabernacle is closed, and I can’t see Him, I know that He’s there. I can look at the tabernacle and know that He’s within, just as I can look at the semblance of bread and know that it’s Him.

There are two particularly glorious things about being in the Presence outside of Mass. The first is that there’s a grace and a peace there that really does pass understanding. I don’t see it working, but over the weeks I can see that it really does make a difference in my life. The second is, being in the Presence is compatible with almost any other form of devotion. Sitting in the chapel, I can gaze at my Lord; I can listen; I can say the rosary or the Divine Office; I can pray spontaneously (and do); I can tell Him about my day; I can do spiritual reading; I can just sit.

Sure, I can do all of those things elsewhere, just as I can call Jane on the phone or send her a text when I’m away from home. But it’s nicer to be home.

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It’s tempting to think of the interior life as something that takes place entirely within your mind and heart, but as I pointed out last week, it ’tain’t so. We are not souls who happen to be stuck in bodies for a while; we are human beings, a composite of body and soul, and whatever we do, we do with our whole beings. There’s always been a tendency within Christianity to forget this, and act as though the soul is really what we are; this is called angelism, and it’s simply a mistake. More than that, Christ came in the body, and sanctified the body; and Catholicism always and everywhere emphasizes this incarnational aspect of the Christian religion.

So when we pray, we mustn’t neglect to pray with our bodies as well as our minds and hearts. Kneeling in prayer is an obvious way to do this; another way, when praying an existing prayer like the Rosary or the Liturgy of the Hours, is to say the words out loud.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this is sometimes inconvenient. I’ve been known to pray the Rosary or Morning Pray on airplanes and in airports, and when I do that I keep my mouth shut. I can’t very well go into my closet, as Jesus tells us to do, but I can at least not draw attention to myself. And even at home, if I get up early to pray Morning Prayer, it might be rude to pray it out loud.

But fortunately, there’s a middle ground: say the words silently, under your breath, but really say them. Move your lips. This felt odd to me at first, but I soon got used to it. While doing it I’m really praying with my body; and there are two additional advantages. First, if you read the prayers silently to yourself, all in your head, it can be easy to skim them; moving your lips slows me down and helps me to pay attention. Second, if someone walks in while you are praying and sees you moving your lips while looking at your iPad, they can easily guess that you’re praying rather than reading a novel or playing solitaire, and they will leave you alone until you finish. At least, that’s how it works at my house.

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Usually in this series I’ve talked about things that have worked for me; today I’m going to talk about something that I wish worked better for me.

My spiritual director told me of a man—I think he was a Benedictine, but I really don’t remember—who spent an hour with God every morning. Sometimes he talked to God for five minutes, and listened to God for fifty-five minutes; other days he talked for fifty-five minutes and listened for five. It depended on how much he had to say. But that last five minutes was sacred: he always listened for at least five minutes. My spiritual director told me that I should do something similar: whenever I prayed, I should spend at least a little while just listening.

The thing is, just listening is hard. Knowing whether I’m just listening is hard. If I try to sit quietly, and focus on God, and not think anything, and I start free-associating, and it occurs to me that I need to pray for so-and-so or about such-and-such, is that listening? Can I assume that God is guiding my free-associations? Or, since praying for so-and-so is undoubtedly a good thing to do, is He simply redeeming my free-associations?

It’s clear that God sometimes speaks to people audibly, and it’s equally clear that this isn’t the usual way. So I have to assume that God speaks to me through scripture, through my reading, and through my own thoughts, especially the random ones that just seem to pop up. In that sense, responding to God when He reminds you that He’s there is a kind of listening.

This is an area where I feel very much at sea; and yet it’s very important.

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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.