This semester was not my first foray into praying the liturgy of the hours.  Over the past seven years or so, since I was introduced to the Hours by a housemate, I have prayed them sporadically.   This semester I took two approaches to daily prayer.  For the three weeks, I prayed out of the daily prayer periodical Give Us This Day.  It was a challenge to discipline myself to put aside time in the morning and evening, but I enjoyed the accessibility of this prayer booklet and the contemporary / social justice focused commentaries.  At the end of the month, when I had prayed through the periodical with prayers based on the liturgy of the hours, I decided to switch to using the divine office web resources.  The Universalis website was easy to use and I could link to it from my Laudate prayer app on my tablet computer.  The language of the prayers were drawn from a different translation than I have been accustomed to using, so after two or three weeks, I switched to the www.divineoffice.org.  This website was a bit distracting with the adds, but on a few occasions I was able to listen to the hours read to me as I drove or performed evening chores.  I appreciated being able to pray the Magnificat and Benedictus in more familiar language, since I have not yet managed to memorize them.  

            Unfortunately around the end of February, my commitment flagged significantly.  I went from praying at least once, if not twice a day, to only a few times a week.  I had tried to pray more than I could commit to over a longer period of time.   At the same time I got busy with work, kids got sick, and I began to feel less accountable to pray in solidarity with others.  Missing prayer for several days was discouraging and it became hard to start back up again using the website.  Had I spent money on an app, where I could pray without the internet, or sprung for a monthly subscription to Give Us This Day or Magnificat, of which I have copious back issues, I believe I would have felt a greater obligation to keep up with the daily prayer.  As it stands, over the past two months, I have managed to recollect most evenings with an examination of conscience and have occasionally returned to the evening prayer online.  Quite predictably I have also lost the sense of attentiveness to Creation and Creator that I had cultivated over the preceding two months.  Over the period where I prayed regularly, I can say that I can became more sensitive to the presence of the Spirit on a daily basis, while over the past two months it has
            I would definitely like to resume regular daily in the form of the hours or another similar format.  I had never thought of it as a public form of prayer before, but it is neat to feel in solidarity with the broader church in my “personal” prayer.  But I wonder if being in solidarity with an immediate, personal community would not provide even a stronger sense of responsibility.  I am resolved to recommence this discipline at a moderate, hopefully sustainable rate.  Over the long haul, I am certain that daily meditation is one of the marks of the mature spirituality of the saints and mystics. 

Daily Prayer

Before this class I had little understanding of the liturgy of the hours. I had heard of vespers but associated it only with monasteries.  Learning about the hours was another glimpse into the breadth of what the Catholic Church has to offer.   I began the semester praying lauds and compline as those are the times that I am most used to praying and typically the quietest times of the day.  I used the Laudate app on my phone and tablet to quickly pull up the appropriate prayers. 

I  journaled the following:

1/21/2015  I have been saying the Liturgy of the hours twice a day since we began school 2 weeks ago.  It is difficult to get used to since it is a lot of reading.  I am used to praying in my own words.  Today was the first day that I felt “moved”.  Perhaps because I was sitting in the sunroom and it is easy to be in God’s presence there.  The sunlight filtering in, birds singing, squirrels running about.  Or maybe it was the Psalms of praise that spoke to me today. Psalm 62(63), the canticle of Daniel (3) all creatures bless the Lord, Psalm 149 (sing a new song to the Lord), Canticle Benedictus (The Messiah and his forerunner), the Responsory   The Lord will help her, His loving presence will be with her, He dwells in her, she will not falter (Having this in the feminine form did make it much more personal.) Anyway it left me uplifted and joyful.

I continued praying Lauds and Compline until the end of lent but beyond an occasional moment of connection, like the one mentioned above, I did not feel that this form of prayer spoke to me throughout the day.  On the advice of a friend I read Macrina Wiederkehr’s book Seven Sacred Pauses which is a book based on the theme of the hours.  I found the collections of more contemporary prayers, poetry and antiphons honoring the monastic tradition of the hours to be more moving and transferable to daily life.  In it she discusses the importance of pauses throughout the day.  “Breathe in the spirit of the hour; breathe in gratitude and compassion for yourself; breathe out love and encouragement for your co-workers, friends, family members….If you learn the art of pausing, your work will prosper and be blessed” (20).  It was this simple exercise that I found I could take into the day with and use while at work to honor the day, to bless and  be blessed.  At any moment during the day I could pause, turn my heart to God and  breathe without having to stop to look up the appropriate prayer.  I could bless the day, praise God and bless those in my day with this simple pause. 

I also reverted back to using Sacred Space in the morning,an Irish Jesuit site that uses Ignatian spirituality to guide you through the a prayerful reading of the daily gospel.    Having gone through the 19^th Annotation last year, I found this familiar framework to be a good way to start the day and it gave me food for thought and opportunity to take what I experienced through the reading into my day.

 

Praying with the Liturgy of the Hours at the beginning of the day definitely gets me off to a good start.  Listening to the Liturgy of the Hours on divineoffice.org is my preferred way of praying with them. Though I do not always pray it every day, on the days when I know I am going to be particularly challenged, I find that starting the day with the Hours helps me to focus on living a life that is true to my faith walk.  In listening to the Psalms there is always something that inspires, challenges, or comforts me.  And, being a cantor, the psalms draw me to the songs I sing at Mass which are filled with verses from Psalms.  Sometimes, I will just stop there in my “hour” of prayer and spend that time singing the Psalm and letting it penetrate my heart. 

The writings from the fathers, doctors, and saints of the church in the Office of Readings are of particular interest to me and something that I look forward to hearing.  Besides being very interesting, these readings are very relatable to my own experiences in life and offer guidance and lessons that I can ponder and emulate.  

In doing the Hours, I am cognizant of the fact that religious communities and people all over the world are praying them with me.  I feel connected to the "body of Christ" in a very special way. But, the most important thing about the Hours is that it connects me to God ALL during the day.  It is a reminder that God is with me, accompanying me in every circumstance and moment of my day.  And, even on those days when I cannot stop to listen to them, I think about them and just thinking about praying them connects me to God and leads me to short prayers of my own; as St. Ignatius would say, anything that leads us to prayer is “all good.”   I often tell my directees to just “taste” the Liturgy of the Hours, “do what you can when you can.”  I have found that once they get the taste, most people are drawn in. 

picture credit: olme.org

These are Written - The Lockwoods

 The animation we saw in class this week pertaining to reconciliation and anointing of the sick
Check out the Full of Eyes YouTube Channel for more of this kind.

Reconciliation - A Sacrament Necessary for Our Growth

Reconciliation – the Sacrament that creates controversy among my friends because several – both Catholic and Protestant – do not understand why we must confess our sins to a priest. After all, as they say we can always confess to God. In the Sacrosanctum Concilium, Vatican II attempts to clarify the purpose of Reconciliation by revising the rites and formulas so that they “clearly express the nature and effects of this Sacrament” (141). Clearly this to me meant that Reconciliation was important enough to the bishops at the time of Vatican II that they wanted to figure out a way to help Catholics better understand the meaning and significance of this Sacrament. As I had written about and we learned about earlier, Reconciliation had been a hot topic of debate since the Reformation; Martin Luther actually counted it as a Sacrament, whereas other Reformists disagreed.

A major reason why priests have the authority to forgive sins is because as I had learned about not only in this course, but also as a teacher of Religion, that priests are able to act in the person of Christ. In the Gospels, there is evidence that the Apostles witnessed Jesus claiming the authority to forgive while the letters of St. Paul write more about Reconciliation as part of the heart of Jesus’s ministry. When Jesus died and then rose again from the dead He was able to forgive us, and He alone has the power to forgive (Cooke and Macy 110).  Therefore, if we went alone with the evidence in the Bible, then because Jesus gave the Apostles the first authority as priests, then they could also forgive people’s sins. However, a major problem was the Penance itself.

Early on, the Penance had been public – if a person was deemed to be forgive then he or she would have a very strict penance such as temporary excommunication or fasting before the person was solemnly and publicly reconciled with the Church. It would not be until later when the idea of private confession and penance ritual – which first stemmed from Ireland – really came to be more common in Europe (Cooke and Macy 112).  I prefer the private confession and penance because for me, the hope with Penance is that we grow in our faith while being held accountable for our sins. When we are excluded from Communion, even after confessing, for some people, that may not help them truly grow in their faith – in some cases they may feel more alienated. It is why when I go to confession I find priests who I know can give a penance that is directly related to how I am feeling or what I am going through. Penances can range from reading the Book of Job to simply saying the Liturgy of the Hours for a week. This penance is effective because people are able to show the community that they are truly sorry and show real evidence for growth (Cooke and Macy 114).

Reconciliation is a Sacrament that I personally hold dear because we are able to really hold ourselves accountable and grow in our faith. While we should talk to God anyways in our prayers and apologize to Him, as I have learned in class as well as from retreats and my ministry, Reconciliation helps us be accountable. When we are able to understand the purpose of Reconciliation – that we may ultimately grow to be better children of God – we understand Jesus’s role in this Sacrament.

I’ve posted in this blog about my father’s insistence on weekly confession when I was a child and how it distorted my image of a loving God into a God who was a judgmental tyrant. Like iamtheclay, who stated in her post that she had not gone to confession in a long time, I stayed away from the sacrament of reconciliation for many years, twenty-two years in fact.  But, unlike iamtheclay, in my “coming home” to reconciliation I had a transforming spiritual experience. 

I decided to go to confession when my sister-in-law was diagnosed with colon cancer, hoping to bargain with God – I didn’t know any better at the time.  But, I was doing it for her.  When I told the priest how long it had been since my last confession he got a huge grin on his face and said to me, “Welcome home!  God loves you SO much!”  I was startled by his words, a wave of heat seemed to wash over my body from my head to my toes and back up again.  The words seemed to hang in the air “God loves you.”  With each sin I confessed, the priest’s grin grew wider.  I considered that he may not be altogether there if you know what I mean.  After I received the blessing of absolution he was so kind, assuring me of God’s love and joy that I was there (like the father in the prodigal son).  He asked if I needed anything; if he, the church, or our church community could help me in any way.  I felt so humble, so loved, and so sinless for the first time in a long time.  A burden had been lifted that I hadn’t even known I was carrying.  I went there for my sister-in-law but God meant it for me.  Reconciliation on that day was redeeming grace for me and my life was forever changed.  I wholeheartedly agree with Cooke and Macy’s claim that “Every time we participate in a ritual of reconciliation, we learn the Christian world is one of constant forgiveness: forgiveness by God, forgiveness by and of the community, and forgiveness of and by ourselves” (116).  After my confession I truly felt loved, not only by God, but by the church and my faith community.  As Cooke and Macy point out, “by the community accepting their forgiveness, they can believe God has forgiven them and, by doing something to show their sincerity, hopefully, they can eventually forgive themselves” (114).

For me, reconciliation is a place where I am accepted and loved as I am, a place of “continual conversion and renewal” (Johnson, 283), a place where I can lay my burdens down without the fear of rejection.

 

photo credit:  cof-interspiritual-mindfulness.blogspot.