As you are aware, last Saturday we introduced Morning Prayer.  It is Father Bill’s desire that we have Morning Prayer prior to Saturday morning Eucharistic Services and daily Masses during Lent.

I will offer some background in the bulletin over the next several weeks on the Office of the Hours, part of which is Morning Prayer.

Prayer is to Love, and we can only love someone we know.  In prayer, we come to know God and love God in return.  The Office of the Hours gives us a daily diet of Scripture.  We are aware that prayer is meditation, the taking time to come to know God.  The Office of the Hours provides us with the means of meditation.

The desire to pray may not come from any one experience, but from a deep rooted yearning for God, a longing that is itself a gift of the Spirit.  Anyone who has tried to pray consistently knows that it is not as natural as breathing.  We need help in learning to pray, and the Office of the Hours (Divine Office) gives us this help.

The Basic Principle of the Office is to learn to pray by taking the prayers inspired by the Spirit and following the movement of the Spirit with mind and heart.

The Office of the Hours gives us the words of prayer:  Words inspired by the Spirit which are the words of Sacred Scripture.  The psalms, which make up the substance of the Office, express the whole gamut of human emotion in prayer.  The Office of the Hours is an enormous help in tackling the problem of discipline in prayer, because it provides a pattern that can easily be built into our daily habits.

We tend to live in a box, and the Office explodes that box and opens us to experience the whole Church praying the mind of Christ, praying for the world for which he suffered and died.  The Office of the Hours provides a pattern which helps to solve the most common difficulties in prayer.  It is rooted in the Scriptures, in the experience of Jesus, and in the life of his Church.

The Office of the Hours has its roots and its fundamental principle set firmly in the prayer of our Lord.  He learned to pray by following the prayers inspired by the Spirit and set before him in the daily liturgy of Israel.  Following Jewish custom, Jesus prayed three times a day:  Morning prayer at sunrise, afternoon prayer at the time of the evening sacrifice in the Temple in Jerusalem (3 p.m.), and evening prayer at nightfall.  These three hours of prayer were the daily habit of every devout Jew.  Prayer animated his whole ministry, prayer that was learned first of all from the liturgical tradition of Israel, in the three daily hours of prayer and in the Sabbath synagogue service.  That is the way the Church teaches us to pray.

Deacon Bill

The Divine Office is usually assumed to be the private prayer of clergy and religious.  Its roots are quite the opposite. In the early Church it was the prayer of the whole Christian community.  The reform of Vatican II is a deliberate attempt to recover those roots, as Pope Paul VI said: ‘This complete revision of the official prayer of the Church, taking into account both the oldest traditions and the needs of modern life, will, it is hoped, renew all Christian prayer and serve to nourish the spiritual life of the people of God.’

The principal times of prayer were at daybreak and sunset, what we now call Morning and Evening Prayer. By the fourth century daily Morning and Evening Prayer in the local cathedral had become a universal custom. The fact that both the clergy and laity were encouraged to attend daily Morning and Evening Prayer is seen in the Apostolic Constitutions, a manual of Church order written c. 380 AD.  These two hours of prayer were assumed to be obligatory for all Christians. If it was not possible for them to come together, they were to pray alone.
In the Western church by the 12th Century the Divine Office had become by and large private prayer, read in Latin from a book, the breviary, confined basically to priest and religious.

It was the example of the early Church, where the basic hours of Morning and Evening Prayer were the common prayer of the whole people of God, that was the inspiration for the reforms Vatican II made to the Divine Office. The purpose of the reform was to recover the essential traditions of daily prayer as practiced in the early Church, making Morning and Evening Prayer from the Office accessible to all Christians.  Some principles which guided the revision are as follows:

1. The needs of lay people are to the fore.  The Office has been composed so that ‘it is the prayer not only of the clergy but of the whole people of God, and religious and lay people…
   
2. The pattern of the Office is designed to fit the pattern of people’s daily lives by making Morning and Evening Prayer the most important ‘hours’ of the day.  Anyone who prays these hours prays the heart of the Office.
   
3. The weekly recitation of the Office is a four week cycle of psalms and Scripture canticles.

The roots of the Office and the reforms of Vatican II witness to the fact that Liturgy of the Hours is the prayer of the whole Church.

No other form of prayer is so rooted in the mysteries of salvation history as they are unfolded day by day in the Church’s annual cycle.  Through this constant diet of Sacred Scripture not only does God speak in his Word to us, not only do we contemplate over and over again the central mysteries of salvation, but our own lives are gradually attuned to this rhythm, and we meditate again and again on the history of Israel, recapitulated in Jesus, that is also the saga of our own spiritual odyssey.’

Deacon Bill

Over the past two weeks, I have presented an historical view of the Liturgy of the Hours.  In this week’s article, the format for Morning Prayer is presented.

Morning Prayer

1. Invitation to Prayer - the invitatory is the invitation to pray. It serves to focus our minds on what we are about to do.  It brings us into the presence of God, it helps us to set aside the concerns that crowd in at the beginning of the day, and it calls us to give our full attention to God.  It is like the warm-up that an athlete does before the actual event, a slow flexing of the spiritual muscles.

There are three parts to the invitatory:

First - the verse and the response: Lord open my lips. And my mouth will proclaim your praise.
Second - the invitatory, Psalm 94
Third - the antiphon, which changes each day and serves to focus our attention on either one theme of the invitatory psalm, or on the theme of the particular day in the Church’s liturgical calendar.

2. Hymn - the poetry of the hymn helps to move both mind and heart, drawing us into prayer, whether we are praying on our own or in community. In addition to the hymn set down for each day there are special hymns for the different seasons of the liturgical year

3. Morning prayer consists of three psalms - morning psalm which fits the beginning of the day; the second is a canticle, which comes from the Old Testament other than the Book of Psalms; third is another psalm, traditionally a psalm of praise.

When the Office is prayed in community, the community is divided into two groups. The first group says the first stanza, the second group says the next and so on.

At the end of the psalm, the Glory Be is said followed by the antiphon. A short pause before the leader says the next antiphon and the first line of the next psalm and so on.

The psalms are distributed over a four week cycle.  The praying of the psalms and canticles is one of the chief parts of the office.

4. Scripture Reading - the Readings have been chosen with the purpose of expressing succinctly an important biblical theme.  At Morning Prayer the reading is usually from the Old Testament. During the seasons of Lent, Easter, Advent and Christmas the readings present a selection of the major scripture passages on the central Christian mysteries.

5. Silence - the silence following the psalms and readings is an integral part of the prayer.  To pause, to be silent after each psalm, allows the word of God to germinate in us.  It gives us time to meditate on the word of God, and to listen to the voice of the Spirit in our hearts.

6. The Response - the short verse and response is another way of absorbing the word of God by putting into words a proper response to the Scripture reading.  The response is designed to turn the reading into prayer and contemplation.

7. Gospel Canticles - at Morning Prayer the Gospel canticle, the Benedictus, follows the scripture reading and response.  These canticles express praise and thanksgiving for our redemption.  The sign of the cross is made at the beginning of the canticles.

8. The Intercessions - in the morning the intercessions are designed to consecrate the day and our work to God.    We can add our specific prayers at any point in the intercessions. The intercessions were written at a time when ‘men’ and ‘man’ were understood to include the whole human race, male and female.

9. The Lord’s Prayer - the Lord’s Prayer has a place of honor at the end of the intercessions and it sums up the whole prayer. 

10. Concluding Prayer - a concluding prayer completes the Hour.  On Sundays and feast days, this concluding prayer is the same as the opening prayer at Mass.

11. Blessing

Deacon Bill