Phyllis Tickle Responds
What is the overall theory of the structure of the daily office?...i.e., is it meant to reflect a structured conversation with God (greeting, hear God talk, response, etc.) or something else?
This is a very good question, for it goes right to the heart of what the offices are. Not only are the hours in fixed-hour prayer "fixed," but so also is the format and so too, in large measure, is the content.
Fixed-hour prayer is not a conversation with God as we usually think of that term. Rather, the observing of fixed-hour prayer is a gift of the Creator to the creature. It allows us to enter into intimate and safe contact with Our Father for the purposes of praise and thanksgiving, as well as those of petition for the health of our souls and of the Church.
The hours for the offices are fixed or set so that all Christians who are observing the prayers within a particular time zone come together, as if in an enormous, but beautiful throne room, to join company with one another in greeting and worshipping God as would a choir of angels or holy singers. And as with such a choir, the words of the anthem flow best when they flow in the unison of both timing and wording. Fixed-hour prayer is thereby not only made into a great gift to God, but it also becomes a communion of the saints horizontally within time and across a time zone.
Then there is another factor that comes into play....namely that as the observants in any given time zone complete an office, they in effect pass it on to the observant prayers waiting in the next time zone. Within another fifty or fifty-five minutes, those waiting pray-ers will pick up the same prayers and readings and psalms, raising them again in chorus to God. The result is what St. Paul called "a constant cascade of prayer before the throne of God," one that quite literally encircles the globe endlessly, rotating around the earth even as the earth herself turns.
In addition to the setness of the times of observation, the content of each office each day is also "fixed" to some greater or lesser extent. First and most obvious, the words used are never those of the individual pray-er. That is, fixed-hour prayer is not the place where private petitions are offered (though many Christians find that they will occasionally step outside the flow of the office to offer a private prayer or raise up a need of great urgency.) Private prayer is offered by the faithful at other times, instead, just as private worship, while it can certainly be offered in church, is usually offered when one is alone or in a small group.
The words of fixed-hour prayer are not private or personal because they are the exact same words and psalms that the faithful have offered from the beginning of our faith. By moving into and praying out from the words of the centuries, we join the communion of the saints longitudinally, or through the long channel of time. There is every reason to assume that Our Lord, as an orthodox Jew, observed fixed-hour prayer. We know from the Acts of the Apostles that the apostles certainly did. What fixed-hour prayer does, then, is allow us to slip into the river of faith that has coursed uninterrupted for millennia.
And beyond that, and last point on this question, the ordering or organization of the content of fixed-hour prayers is not subject to individual caprices either. Instead, the Church over the centuries has evolved a liturgical calendar and, to accompany it, a lectionary or schedule of readings and prayers that accord to each day and season of the Church's year. Most of us who are Protestants are sensitive to the fact that there are certain sections of scripture that should be read at Easter or at Christmas. What we are less sensitive to is the rich subtleties, for example, of the harvest psalms or of Spring's rogation prayers (asking for the blessing of the earth as summer approaches) or of the prophetic psalms that come on March the 25th (nine months before Christmas, when Mary was humbling herself before the angel and submitting in order to bear the Child Who would pierce her own soul), etc., etc. What fixed-hour prayer does--or what the manuals and breviaries by which one observes fixed-hour prayer do--is quietly draw the observer into the mystery of the story as it repeats itself year after year after year until at last creation shall be done.
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