The Liturgy of the Hours: Blessed Prayer of the Body of ChristA Primer Br.

Francis de Sales Johnston, OP Student Brother, Dominican House of Studies August, 2007
The collection of psalms found in Scripture, composed as it was under divine inspiration, has, from the very beginnings of the Church, shown a wonderful power of fostering devotion among Christians as they offer to God a continuous sacrifice of praise, the harvest of lips blessing his name. Following a custom already established in the Old Law, the psalms have played a conspicuous part in the sacred liturgy itself, and in the divine office. Thus was born what Basil calls the voice of the Church, that singing of psalms, which is the daughter of that hymn of praise . . . which goes up unceasingly before the throne of God and of the Lamb, and which teaches those especially charged with the duty of divine worship, as Athanasius says, the way to praise God, and the fitting words in which to bless him.1

The Liturgy of the Hours is a special form of prayer with deep roots in the twomillennium history of the Christian faith. It is the official prayer of the Catholic Church. The text consists primarily of the Psalms organized according to a particular pattern so as to cover the main portions of each day with prayer. As an introductory idea to this topic, consider the repeating refrain of Psalm 136: for his steadfast love endures for ever. This is being said of God. The God who created the universe is the same God who saved His people from slavery, brought them out of Egypt and gave them a land of their own. Through everything, His love never wavers. It is constant, enduring, steady, rock solid. When we pray the Liturgy of the Hours every day, we are imitating this steadfastness of God. Just as His love is constant and neverending, so too our prayer, which is a response to His love for us, has an ongoing and steady character. This article will be in two parts. In the first, I will discuss a few general points about all forms of prayer that apply in an important way to the Liturgy of the Hours. In the second, I will discuss reasons why the Liturgy of the Hours, in particular, is of great and unique value to the entire Church and to all Christians as individuals. This will provide, hopefully, a deeper understanding of the Liturgy of the Hours so that we can appreciate it more, and boost our motivation to take up the Liturgy of the Hours as our own. I. The Liturgy of the Hours is a form of prayer. And so everything that can be said of prayer generally, applies to the Liturgy of the Hours. Here are a few reminders of some general points about prayer. They help provide a larger spiritual context for our prayer that is always relevant. The necessity of grace. All prayer is a response to a relationship initiated by God Himself. By our own powers, mere creatures that we are, we do not have the ability to establish real communication with God. The chasm between the finite realm of creation and the infinite realm of the living God cannot be traversed by any creature on his own steam. Genuine interchange between man and God requires a divine act. And so this means that whenever we pray, in order that our prayer might be an act that truly reaches and touches God Himself, the grace of God must be present and active within us. We 1

cannot pray without grace. All prayer involves receptiveness to and cooperation with grace.2 An opportunity to exercise faith. Prayer is an act of faith. It is something done by those who believe. Faith is not like a lump of gold implanted in our bodies, inert and inactive until it is time to retrieve it and cash it in at the pearly gates. Faith, rather, is a living, active power given us by God, and it needs to be nurtured by our reason and will. When we engage in prayer, we are feeding our faith with spiritual food that helps it grow. A witness to ourselves and to the world. Even though America (especially as compared to Europe) is still considered a fairly religious land, todays American culture contains many elements that are in tension with Christian faith. There is a tendency, with our many comforts and distractions, to ignore or even deny the transcendent. The realm of God, of heaven, of life beyond death, can seem far distant as we go about our busy lives, almost like an old fairy tale that we dont really believe but still like to keep around for nostalgic reasons. Our challenge as people of faith in this complex world is to keep the reality of God, His love for us, and His plan for us present and realfirst, in our own hearts and minds, and second, in the conscience of our culture which is always in need of transformation. One important way to do this is by praying often. Every act of prayer, whether in private or in a group setting, is a testimony to the reality of God and His dominion over creation. It is a reminder to ourselves and the world around us that life is not only about what we can see and touch, but involves great realities that transcend the here and now. There is a divine providence holding creation in existence, giving it its direction and purpose, and guiding our life to its ultimate home. But part of this reality is that this plan includes our free cooperation. And for this, we must not forget the big picture, turning anew each day our faces toward the Lord, welcoming His grace into our lives. Regular prayer builds a God-receptive place firmly into the center of our lives. A remembrance of the Cross. Through the events of His passion, death, and resurrection, our Lord Jesus Christ redeemed the world. And His sacrifice made possible the reestablishment of a personal relationship between God and man that had become impossible due to sin. It is because we have the tremendous gift of the Holy Spirit within us, given at baptism, that we can pray as Christians. But this particular gift, the presence of the Holy Spirit living and dwelling within us, is a direct result of the Cross of Christ. The Cross conquered sin and death so that we could become adopted sons and daughters of God our Father. And so every time we pray, we are applying the salvation won by Christ. In prayer, we engage in an awesome act that remembers the Holy Cross, because it is only due to the graces unleashed by the Cross that we can pray as members of the Body of Christ. II. The Liturgy of the Hours, as the prayer of the Church, has many benefits that accrue to it specifically because it is the official liturgy of the Church. Following are some of the benefits which are unique to praying the Liturgy of the Hours. Jesus said pray always. Our Lord enjoined us to pray always.3 The Liturgy of the Hours is a response to this mandate given to us by Jesus. Because it is organized so that our prayer is dispersed at regular intervals over the course of each day, our entire day becomes transformed and sanctified by prayer. Although we can pray in other ways

throughout the day, the Liturgy of the Hours has built into it this trait of covering the breadth of the day with prayer. Benedictines refer to this idea as sanctifying time. The prayer of the Church. When we pray the Liturgy of the Hours, it is very significant to realize that we are participating in the prayer of the Church. The Church, as a whole, is a mystical body whose various members, though unique, are united together in the same faith. Because of this universal character, when we pray the Liturgy of the Hours we are not simply praying as a private individual; we are inserted formally into the great stream of prayer that is the continuing liturgy of the entire Church. At each office of the liturgy we are spiritually joined to the many souls all over the world offering the same prayers on the same day. We are also united by liturgical prayer with the entire company of saints who have gone before us, from the time of Christ on. For, beginning with the very first disciples of Jesus, Christians have gathered together at regular times of the day to pray certain Psalms according to an organized plan. This basic structure of communal prayer is essentially what we still do today in the Liturgy of the Hours. Sts. Jerome, Monica, and Augustine would recognize our prayers. And so, when we pray the liturgy, we become temporarily unrestricted by the ordinary limits of space and time, united in prayer with Christians both in the past and around the world. The prayer of the Church leaps the boundaries of time and space, enabling us to act while still here on earth already in an eternal-looking mode. An extension of the Mass. The source and summitthe font and pinnacleof all liturgy (and indeed all spiritual life) is the holy sacrifice of the Mass.4 All the grace that comes into the world through the liturgy has its origin in the Eucharistic sacrifice. Because the liturgy is the official prayer of the universal Church it has a special relationship to its source. Every act of liturgical prayer takes the powerful graces of each days Mass and extends it out over the span of the day. The Liturgy of the Hours, then, is a way of cooperating with God in spreading the infinite treasure of the spiritual goods of the Mass out into the world of the time and space that we live in through the course of the day. And so, through liturgical prayer, we serve as instruments used by God to distribute the graces unleashed by the Mass out to the whole world. Writing the New Covenant on our hearts. There is a very poignant image in the Old Testament whereby God encapsulates and points ahead to what He will do in the future for His people by making a New Covenant with them: He will write the law upon their hearts.5 This looks ahead to what would be done in Christ. Through the sacrificial death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, the New Covenant has been enacted, and through this covenant, the Holy Spirit has been poured into our hearts enabling us to live according to the new law of grace. It is possible now for our lives to be transformed from within in a way that was not possible under the Old Covenant. In other words, in Christ we are given a new heart. In Gods plan, we are initially given a new spiritual heart at baptism. But this is not the end of the story. As a loving father, God takes this new heart of ours and with our cooperation constantly forms and shapes it throughout our lives, making us more and more perfectmore and more holy (for as Catholics, we understand that God does not merely want to save us in a minimal fashion, but wants us to become genuinely a new creationradiant with the love of Christ within us). There are various ways that this new heart is continually formed within us. These include receiving the sacraments, performing acts of charity, and prayer. Liturgical prayer fits into this divine plan as one of the ways

by which our Father in heaven heals our hearts and transforms them from hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. We might consider that as we pray the Liturgy of the Hours, especially in that it uses mostly Sacred Scripture which is the Word of God, God can use His Word as we pray to write the New Covenant more deeply in us. He gradually inscribes into us more of His holy character and life. An opportunity to practice humility. Praying the Liturgy of the Hours is a great exercise of humility. Whenever we pray we should do so in a humble way.6 Now, it is good to pray spontaneously from the heart using our own words; we should do this often. However, if the entirety of our prayer life were to consist only of private prayer originating from within ourselves, we would lack something important that liturgical prayer provides. Self-centered as we all tend to be, we can develop a habit such that our prayer becomes yet another area of life which is self-enclosed, concerned only with our own little world. Liturgical prayer counteracts this. The words do not originate within ourselves; they come to us from the outside. It is not much of a challenge to our selfabsorption to pray our own words exclusively. But to pray the words of another, embracing them as our own, requires humility. Thus, liturgical prayer is a way to escape the narrowness of our own interior world, allowing the prayer of the Church to give us an expanded spiritual vision that we would doubtless never develop if left only to our own personal resources. Another way to capture this benefit of liturgical prayer is to call to mind the spiritual openness and smallness of young children. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger described one of the positive effects of liturgy as a rediscovery of true childhood. In liturgical prayer, he said, we enter into a childlike openness to a greatness still to come.7 Young children are extremely open to the influence of others, most especially their parents. When we take on the prayer of the Church as our own we receive it as from our mother, and by this remind ourselves that we are all children at the feet of our heavenly Father open, as an eager child, to receive the many graces that we need. An enhancement of the experience of unity in prayer. After I became Catholic (I am a convert from mainstream Protestantism), and before becoming a Dominican, I participated in a prayer group of young adult lay Catholics who met on Friday nights to pray. Part of our prayer time included spontaneous vocal prayer. I noticed that during this portion of our prayer time, certain individuals tended to have more to say than others. The result was that when it was time for spontaneous intercessions, our group prayer tended to be dominated by the concerns of the same few people. Others were quieter, rarely offering spontaneous prayer when there was opportunity to do so. Now, it is good to pray with others in a spontaneous way, and I do not mean to discourage this practice. (Nor do I mean to suggest it is necessary for someone to offer spontaneous vocal prayer if he does not wish to.) However, if this is the only sort of prayer that we offer when we pray as a group, the natural tendency will be that only certain peoples concerns (usually the same people) will be made explicit. In contrast to this, when we pray the Liturgy of the Hours in a group setting everyone participates equally. No single persons thoughts will be predominate. All are praying the same words. And because the words being prayed come from the Church, the members of the group are united in their common stance of being receptive to a higher source; they are equal in this way. So, liturgical prayer, because no particular individual sticks out, is a deeply egalitarian form of prayer

and serves well to intensify a local prayer communitys sense of spiritual unity as they pray. A reminder that our final home is a community. When, by Gods grace, we are brought home to live forever in the presence of the Holy Trinity, our experience of eternal life will not be solitary; we will be present as a family of brothers and sisters who are aware of, know, and love one another, even as we are individually enthralled by the joy of being in the presence of God. Human beings are made for relationship with other persons. This reality will continue in heaven. The inherently communal nature of the Liturgy of the Hours reminds us of the social character of heavenly lifethat Gods plan is to shape us into a heavenly family. Even when we pray alone, liturgical prayer is not a solitary act. Since all liturgy is the prayer of the whole Church (see above), it is always a communal endeavor done in union with the whole Church. Especially in todays excessively individualistic American culture it is good to increase our awareness of the communion of saints and to yearn to be one of their membersa family worshipping before the heavenly throne. Revelation 5:11-14 paints a symbolic image of the inherently communal nature of heavenly worship (and not only humans, but the angels as well will all worship God together in a unified chorus of praise!). Perhaps this will encourage us to be more eager to live a life of charity for others here now in this life. Every moment that we live in charity for our fellow man, by Gods grace, has positive eternal ramifications. An expanded language to speak to God. If we pray regularly and we use only our own private words to pray, at some point we find ourselves running out of new things to say. This is not bad in itself (for God knows our nature), but it can be experienced as a limitation to our prayer. When our prayer includes the Liturgy of the Hours as well as our own words, we have a whole world of religious thoughts and images to make use of that we would never have conceived of on our own. This is another way in which the liturgy can draw us out of ourselves, opening up our hearts and minds to a wider experience of the spiritual realm.8 A participation in the Cross. A principle of the Christian spiritual life is that in order to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, we must deny ourselves (insofar as our will is opposed to the divine will), take up our cross, and follow Him.9 There are many opportunities to take up the cross and deny ourselvessome are more extraordinary (and usually infrequent); others more ordinary (and more frequent). Praying the Liturgy of the Hours on a regular basis offers a hidden (though not to God) and ordinary way to deny ourselves for the benefit of others. There are at least two ways in which this is the case. First, the nature of liturgical prayer of its being given to us from an outside source (the Church) rather than originating from within our own private thoughts, requires us to temporarily put aside our own particular issuesto place our own personal spiritual movements gently into the backgroundin order to make room for the prayer of the Church. This may seem a small thing, and perhaps it is. But when done on a regular basis from day to day, it develops in us a habit of generous self-denial. For every time we pick up the Liturgy of the Hours, we deny following what our own will would spontaneously pray at that particular moment in order to choose the prayer of the Church. This helps us to become less self-absorbed in our prayer.

The second way pertains to the emotional discontinuity that we sometimes experience with liturgical prayer. Some of the Psalms have emotional language and seem to be trying to evoke particular emotions. (These may be emotions of joy, or, sadness and suffering.) How do we embrace a Psalm fully when the emotion being expressed is contrary to what we are personally feeling at that time? Perhaps you are having a great daythe kids told you they loved you this morning and at work you just got a promotion yet in prayer you encounter words such as, Spent and utterly crushed, I cry aloud in anguish of heart (Ps 38)! Here is another opening to practice generous self-denial for the benefit of others. Even though we may not always be able to personally identify with the emotion of a particular Psalm (though sometimes we can), there is always someone in the Body of Christ who can. Someone is suffering somewhere. And when we pray words expressing anguish and woe we should strive again to temporarily place aside our own disposition at that moment (not deny it; but simply let it recede from having first place in our attention), and identify spiritually with those for whom those words are very deeply and personally felt. In other words, we can ask the Holy Spirit to help us empathize with those for whom these words genuinely and personally apply. And in this way when there is a contrast between our personal feelings and the words of the liturgy, we make not our own emotions, but those of others our priority as we pray. This is an anonymous, hidden act of charitychoosing to turn from self for the time being, in order to identify with the suffering members of the Body of Christ. Over time, this is a way in which the liturgy can expand our hearts to have more room for others. And so also, this is a small way in which we participate in the suffering of Christ on the Cross, who suffered in union with all who suffer. He did not distance Himself from those in sorrow and woe. And in imitation of Him, neither do we. Gaining a healthy distance from our culture. As Christians we are called to participate in the renewal of all things in Christ. However, to do this with the greatest effectiveness, we need to be able to step back from our culture from time to time and gaze upon it from a distance. It is possible to be so enmeshed in the particular concerns of our culture that we are unable to see the forest for the trees. This hinders our ability to assess the ailments of our culture accuratelyand this, in turn, makes us less able to determine the best course for a cure. By praying the Liturgy of the Hours regularly, we have a spiritual realm into which we enter daily that is both similar to and yet also quite different from the immediate issues of our daily life. It is a spiritual landscape in which we live and move and pray, in addition to the ordinary landscape of our lives. And over time this gives us a greatly expanded perspective from which to view the world and especially our particular culture. It is a place within that gives us another set of lenses through which to see things that we otherwise would not seeor would see less accurately. Another way to speak of this is to say that the liturgy helps us gain a healthy spiritual detachment from the worldthe sort of detachment which makes us more useful instruments in the hands of God to heal and transform the world. Cardinal Ratzinger put it this way: Worship gives us a share in heavens mode of existence, in the world of God, and allows light to fall from that divine world into ours.10 An avenue of participation in the eternally significant. As human beings, by nature, we desire to participate in something bigger than ourselves. God has planted in us a hunger to be involved in matters of real and lasting significance. We seem to have an

intuition that a life that is not involved in things of great and enduring importance is beneath the true dignity of the human person. Man has a hidden, yet dimly discernable vocation to some great thing. And he wants to know that he is on that path even now. How can this be satisfied? By participating in the liturgythe prayer of the Churchwe are stepping into a realm of truly eternal significance. For even though we are usually not aware of how God uses our prayers for the good of others (which helps us grow in humility), we can be confident in faith that indeed He does so. Christian prayer enters into the redemption of the world won by Christ on the Cross; it has eternal consequences. God invites our small prayers to have a role in Christs act of salvation. What could have more significance than this? The Liturgy of the Hours, especially, by its close attachment to the sacrifice of the Mass and by its status as the prayer of the Church, participates in a special way in the salvation and sanctification of the world. It is intimately united to the self-sacrificial gift of Christ offered in love. Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that one of the things the liturgy does is to give us a liberation from finitude.11 And so through the liturgy, we participate in something much bigger than ourselvesindeed, in something of infinite and eternal dimensions.

To be sure I am not misunderstood, I want to emphasize that it is most definitely not bad to pray in ways other than using the Liturgy of the Hours. We certainly should pray in other ways, and this includes using our own words in a manner totally transparent and sincere before the Lord in spontaneous, heartfelt, personal prayer. But I do want to suggest that our payer is lacking something of great value if we do not pray at all using the liturgy of the Church. For with the Liturgy of the Hours, we have a form of prayer by which we can pray always; be united with the all the members of the Church across the bounds of space and time; help extend the graces of the Mass out through the day; welcome Gods writing the New Covenant more deeply on our hearts; practice humble self-giving; deepen our unity with others with whom we pray; remind ourselves that heaven is the life of a family, begun even now; expand the language we use to talk to God; share in the Cross of Christ; grow in healthy detachment from our worldly culture; and, participate in the eternally significant act of Christs salvation and sanctification of all mankind. All these benefits, and more, are available to us as gifts from our loving Father when we embrace the Liturgy of the Hours. May we strive to incorporate some portion of this great prayer of the Church as a regular feature of our daily walk with God as we pray humbly in response to the loving gift of His saving grace.

Saint Pius X, apostolic constitution Divino afflatu, in The Liturgy of the Hours, IV (Catholic Book Publishing, 1975), August 21 Proper of Saints (Memorial for Pius X, Pope). 2 Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), no. 2573. 3 Lk 18:1; cf. Rom 12:12; Col 4:2; 1Thes 5:17. 4 CCC, no. 1324. 5 Jer 31:31-34; cf. Ezek 36:26-7. 6 Lk 18:9-14. 7 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, (Ignatius Press, 2000), 14. 8 CCC, no. 2587. 9 Mk 8:34 10 Ratzinger, 21. 11 Ibid., 30.