This edition of FWTS will be a little different.
I have wanted to pray the Liturgy of the Hours (LOTH) for quite a while now. I had made it a point of praying the Evening Prayer, or Vespers, througout Lent. Once Lent was over, my commitment to praying even this hour went south. I’ve always considered picking up the books “Christian Prayer,” or “Shorter Christian Prayer,” but always managed to convince myself that I wouldn’t keep it up, or that it wasn’t worth the effort.
Some of my desire to pray the hours comes from the movie Into Great Silence, and listening to the Night Prayer of the Cistercian Monks of Stift Heiligenkreuz. One can hear it in their chanting, and in their words. The LOTH is timeless; its our continuous (ceaseless) cycle of praise and worship to God. Somewhere in the world at this moment, a priest or religious is reciting one of the hours of the Liturgy. More, this is a cycle has seen the rise of kings, the fall of nations, and has faithfully marked the hours of each days, for hundreds of years. Its potency and power are remarkable.
Of course, praying the LOTH has always been assigned to religious and priests. Vatican II changed this by encouraging the lay faithful to pray the hours. Catholic publishers have made it much easier for lay faithful to pray the hours, not only by having the breviary in the vernacular, but by making it widely available to the lay faithful through the books mentioned above, as well as in the full four-volume set.
So it was little surprise to me when, while wandering through my local Catholic bookstore this past Monday, I found myself looking through the breviary (yet again). Finally, I just decided to pick up the volume for this part of liturgical time (Ordinary time). Once picking up a St. Joseph’s guide to praying the hours (namely, it gives page numbers for all the different prayers), I was off and away. So far, in the week I’ve spent with the breviary I have managed to keep up with most of the hours-Morning Prayer, the Office of Readings, Evening Prayer, and Night Prayer. I’ve even added Daytime Prayer.
Praying the liturgy has proven to be very helpful. In fact, I began today with quite a bit of annoyance, which I found was nearly gone by the time I was finished reading the Office of Readings. This makes sense; the LOTH is the office prayer of the Church (the only liturgy we can really conduct by ourselves, in fact). to summarize with Thomas Merton, who isn’t a saint but should be (in a long quote, but it really summarizes the power of the Liturgy of the Hours):
“I did not even reflect how the Breviary, the Canonical Office, was the most powerful and effective prayer I could possibly have chosen, since it is the prayer of the whole Church, and concentrates in itself all the power of the Church’s impetration, centered around the infinitely mighty Sacrifice of the Mass-the jewel of which the rest of the Liturgy is the setting: the soul which is the life of the whole Liturgy and of all the Sacramentals.”
“But yet I would be able, after not so many months, to realize what was there, in the peace and the strength that were growing in me through my constant immersion in this tremendous, unending cycle of prayer, ever renewing its vitality, its inexhaustible sweet energies, from hour to hours, from season to season in its returning round. And I, drawn into that atmosphere, into that deep, vast universal movement of vitalizing prayer, which is Christ praying in men to His Father, could not help but begin at last to live, and to know that I was alive.
Posted by T. Ambrose Nazianzus 
