THE DIVINE OFFICE
Christian
choral prayer for over a thousand years has taken the form of the Divine
Office, or the Liturgy of the Hours. This prayer is closely tied in with the
Eucharist. It often expands the meaning of the day's celebration, and it presupposes
that the community offers the Eucharist together daily or at least sometimes.
Choral
prayer is not just a personal prayer, or merely the prayer of your particular
fraternity. It is the Church's prayer, the prayer of Jesus Christ, head and
members. This conviction comes from faith when it is solidly based on the
Scriptures. It makes all the difference to our appreciation of the Liturgy of
the Hours when we realise whose prayer we are praying.
St
Augustine, commenting on Psalm 141, expresses the Church's understanding
of choral prayer: “Let Jesus Christ
stand out, this one chanter; let this man sing from the heart of each of us and
let each one of us be in this man. When each of you sings a verse, it is still this
one man who sings, since you are all one in Christ ... primarily, this one man
is speaking who reaches to the ends of the earth.”
Vatican
II's Constitution on the Liturgy,
n.83, shares the same insight: “Christ Jesus ... taking human nature,
introduced into this earthly exile that hymn which is sung throughout all ages
in the halls of heaven. He joins the entire community of mankind to himself,
associating it with his own singing of this canticle of divine praise.”
It
is worth all the effort and even discomfort when we appreciate that our
fraternity's Divine Office is the prayer of Jesus Christ who prays in us, or
rather, we pray in him and he pleads for the needs of the entire world. We
praise God with him and on behalf of all creation.
Creation
commits to us the interpretation of its silent worship. Creation’s adoration is
like the breathing of a great organ which can become vocal only through our
human voice.
We
Franciscans, both religious and secular, may often feel burdened by our
obligation to share in the prayer of the Church. If we are preoccupied with the
obligation, we need to change our mentality. We should comply with the
obligation, not to avoid feeling guilty, but in order to satisfy our inner
spiritual needs. The Prayer of the Church is meant for all the faithful, but it
is especially entrusted to priests and to us who belong to an Order, whether
religious or secular.
Prayerfulness
during choral prayer is determined by our personal efforts to recall the
presence of God when we come to pray. We have to leave our preoccupations in
good time for Divine Office; leave them physically and mentally.
It
is worthwhile to pause and reflect before we begin communal prayer. Let’s get
there a minute or two early. We can recollect ourselves with the help of a
favourite prayer, e.g., “We adore you, most holy Lord Jesus Christ ....”
It
also helps recollection if we all prepare our bookmarks before we begin.
Chasing pages during the prayer can be very distracting. The leader can
announce the page at changes of place in the breviary. He or she also chooses
the text when alternatives are offered.
Inevitably,
there will be elements of torture in our choral prayer. It is a severe
discipline of individualism. Perseverance with our fraternity members requires
patience and tolerance, and we are not outstanding these days in our practice
of either virtue. Maybe, this is why we talk so much about fraternity building.
We never needed it so much as now.
Since the Divine Office is a
choral prayer, we need to listen to the others, to keep in time and in harmony
of voice. Perhaps, we have never been corrected and are unaware of our
peculiarities in choir.
We
need to take time over our fraternity prayer. No use cramming an hour of the
Divine Office into some corner of spare time in a busy day, for example, in the
last five minutes before a meal. Hurrying destroys the spirit of prayer.
The
Divine Office is meant to be not merely an official community prayer but also
the inspiration for our mental prayer and activity. So, silent pauses should be
interspersed throughout. Kierkegaard remarked wryly that, “Silences are the
only scrap of Christianity we have left.”
The
General Instruction of 1970 on the Liturgy of the Hours points out: “According
as it is opportune and prudent, to echo the voice of the Holy Spirit in one's
heart and to join one's personal prayer more intimately to the Word of God and
the public prayer of the Church, it is in order to observe a period of silence
either after each psalm and antiphon, or after the... readings, or after the
responsory” (nn. 202, 203).
The
greater part of the divine office is taken up with the psalms. We may pray them
to express our own sentiments before God at the moment, or else to express the
needs of other members of the Church. In either case, we share intimately in
the sentiments and dispositions of Jesus Christ, who prayed the psalms in his
own earthly life and who continues to pray them in us and in all his members.
Carl
Schafer OFM
National
Assistant SFO -