1

DIVINE OFFICE

The Spirit of Jesus in us prays to God the Father

2 The Divine Office is meant to be not merely an official community prayer but also the inspiration for our mental prayer and pastoral activity.

3 Choral prayer on retreat days, and occasionally in your meetings, serves a different purpose to quiet personal prayer and shared prayer, although opportunity should be given within it for both silent mental prayer and for spontaneous prayer shared aloud in the General Intercessions.

4 Choral prayer is prayer with your fraternity members; it is your fraternity's prayer. If it is neglected, then your communion of faith is weakened. Those individual members who maintain their spiritual reading and mental prayer, and even pray the Divine Office privately, can nourish their life of faith and apostolate, but the fraternity cannot function as one of Christian faith and mission unless the members pray also as a single fraternity.

5 Christian choral prayer for two 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 we offer the Eucharist together as a fraternity daily, or at least sometimes.

6 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.

7 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.

8 The Spirit of Jesus in us prays to the Father, adoring, thanking and praising God. This conviction comes from faith when it is solidly based on the Scriptures.

9 It makes all the difference to our appreciation of the Liturgy of the Hours when we realise whose prayer we are praying - the prayer of Jesus - and to whom - to God the Father, through Jesus, with Jesus and in Jesus, in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

10 St Augustine, commenting on Psalm 141 (142), p. [19] 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.”

11 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.”

12 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 with God the Father for the needs of the entire world. We praise God with him and on behalf of all creation.

13 Creation commits to us the interpretation of its silent worship. Creation’s adoration is like the breathing of a great pipe organ which can become vocal only through our human voice.

14 We have an excellent text in English for the Liturgy of the Hours. But it would not help our prayer-life if all we do is change over from one prayer book to another. The renewal of our personal dispositions has to accompany any external change. “Even the most desirable changes made on behalf of contemporary needs will fail of their purposes unless a renewal of spirit gives life to them” (Decree on the Appropriate Renewal of Religious Life, n. 20).

15 Not even the best available text guarantees that we will pray the Divine Office well. Prayerfulness during choral prayer is determined by our personal efforts to recall that we are living in the presence of God, especially when we come to pray. In him we live and move and have our being. We have to leave our preoccupations in good time for Divine Office; leave them physically and mentally.

16 It is worthwhile to pause and reflect before we begin communal prayer. We should get there a minute or two early. We can recollect ourselves with the help of a favourite prayer. E.g., St Francis’s own prayer that the friars pray when entering a church and before each hour of the Divine Office: “We adore you, most holy Lord Jesus Christ ....”

17 It also helps recollection if we all prepare our bookmarks before we begin. Chasing pages during the prayer can be very distracting, if not to ourselves certainly to others. The leader can announce the page at changes of place in the breviary. He or she also chooses the text when alternatives are offered.

18 The fraternity may decide to sing, chant on one note, or say the Divine Office, whatever suits us. No matter what we decide to do, recitation in choir will be irksome, and it always has been, either from dissonance of voices or lethargy of spirit.

19 The Franciscans have been praying the divine office in choir for nearly eight hundred years, and our chronicles yield some insights into the perennial problem. St Francis advised “that the clerics say the Office with devotion before God, not attending to melody of voice but to consonance of mind.” Chanting on one note was the Franciscan way of simplifying the monastic Gregorian chant. Now we recite it, to avoid the torture of chanting on one note. The emphasis is off melody of voice and on recollected prayer, but it does help if we attend also to melody of voice.

20 From the chronicles of Friar Junipero Serra, the Apostle of California, we read that a Valencian friar asked his Superior for permission to return to his room during matins. He said, “I'm not in a proper mood to recite the prayers.” The Guardian replied, “Brother, for God's sake remain in your place. I assure you that if all of us who are not in the proper mood for praying should leave the chapel, there would be no matins recited, and I would be the first to go” (Junipero Serra, A. Repplier, p. 154).

21 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.

22 Since the Divine Office is a choral prayer, we need to listen to the others, to keep in time with them and in harmony of voice. Perhaps, we have never been corrected and are unaware of our peculiarities in choir. Some religious communities have livened up their recreation occasionally by playing a taped recording of their choral prayer.

23 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 the day's timetable, for example, in the last five minutes before a meal. Hurrying destroys the spirit of prayer.

24 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). So, silent pauses should be interspersed throughout. Kierkegaard remarked wryly that, “Silences are the only scrap of Christianity we have left.”

25 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.

26 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. He directs his prayer and ours to God the Father.

27 St Augustine, commenting on Psalm 85, expresses it: "We pray to him in the form of God; he prays in the form of a slave, that is, ourselves. There he is the Creator; here he is in the creature.

28 He does not change, but takes the creature and transforms it into himself, making us one man, head and body, with himself.... we recite this prayer of the psalms in him and he recites it in us” (PL, 37, 1081).

29 The last word on the Divine Office was also our first word, that it is our fraternity prayer. We cannot emphasise too much how important it is for each of us to attend faithfully and to persevere with one another, because we need to experience ourselves praying as a fraternity.

30 We need one another's support in choral prayer more than in any other way of praying. It has a big effect, for worse or for better, on our life of faith, on our experience of union with the Risen Lord, and on our adoration of God the Father.