Phyllis Tickle Responds
For people new to faith, the use of The Divine Hours may well be their introduction to daily prayer as a discipline. How would you suggest spinning off from the format of The Divine Hours to expand the more personal or private practice of prayer? Are the ours in any particular ways designed for this?
The absorbing thing about this question is that it highlights--almost innocently--the
changes that have occurred over the centuries in Christian prayer in
general, as well as in the observing of the hours in particular, changes
most of us have forgotten to remember. This question brought me
up short, in other words; and I am grateful.
In the beginning--all good stories begin that way, but this one happens
to be true--in the beginning, first the apostles and then the disciples
and then the earliest Christians were Jews. They were, to be even more
specific, good, observant Jews from good, observant backgrounds. Because
of that, they practiced, and were always with others who practiced,
fixed-hour prayer as naturally and routinely as they ate meals, and in much
the same way. Both the prayers and the meals were routinized and assumed. Both
were often domestic in locale, just as they were often corporate or
extra-domestic. Both
were assumed to be as requisite to life as they were natural. It would
never have occurred to St. Peter, for instance, to not observe the prayers
or eat, any more than it would have ever occurred to him to not eat
or observe the prayers.
I don't know the ancient Hebrew words for "snack" or "treat" or "pick-me-up." In
fact, I don't even know whether such a concept existed in 1st century
life. If
it did, however, then the analogy with eating could be extended to
say that much private prayer in those days--that which was individual in
its wording as well as its concerns--could be seen as like a "pick-me-up" or "snack," that
is, as a way of adding additional nourishment to the soul of the pray-er. We
know as well that Our Lord, for instance, sometimes took his disciples
aside to pray privately as a group, a feast of communion that must have seemed
to them more like a banquet than a meal. We know as well that He went
alone at times to prayer that was so all-engulfing, so wrenching, that
any analogy with food would be impertinent, save only to say that each
was as natural a part of His life as was the other.
In the first few centuries of the Church's life, fixed-hour prayer gradually
was forced by an incipient illiteracy into a corporate or congregational
setting simply because only the priests could still read the words
of the ancient prayers, texts, and psalms. Shortly thereafter, the
civil disorder and
political upheaval of a declining Rome forced Christian priests into
the protection of monasteries and retreats at a great remove from the city;
and the observing of the prayers, by default, went with them. For centuries,
then, while the monks chanted the offices within their choirs, the folk
turned to the prayers that they made up out of their own needs and
understanding. Private
prayer became individual in content and most usually in practice, the
strong exception being that the family altar held for centuries. There,
young and old alike might pray individual prayers of their own making, but
they prayed them together and thereby, albeit to a lesser extent, maintained
the communion of the saints in prayer. The family altar had another
advantage as well. Like the fixed-hour prayers lay Christians had
lost for a time, the family devotions of the Christian home empowered the
young to pray. It gave them praying as a natural part of life and offered
them role models of adults as pray-ers.
We all know what happened after that. The home altar began to decline
and eventually fell into near dis-use. The notion that prayer was as
meals were--routine, natural, nourishing--gave way to some kind of
gradual assumption that prayer was a duty, or an act to be consciously pursued
with religious
intention and will, or -- unfortunately --something to be used as a
tool in painful situations, or --worst of all --as a crutch used by
the weak and/or desparate to get through bad times. In sum, prayer
ceased to be either natural or assumed, save in moments of dire distress.
Given all this long lead-in or introduction, I suppose I should have
an equally long answer to the question I have promised to engage, but I
don't. I suspect, in fact, there isn't a long answer, only a very
simple one. I imagine the truth is that the 20 th and 21st centuries'
return, especially across Western Christianity, to fixed-hour prayer
is simply the soul's way of telling us it's time to eat again. Keeping
the hours is a routine and therefore becomes routine. It becomes an
unconscious rhythm that encourages the spiritually anorexic to sit
awhile and feed. And as keeping the hours becomes as much a part of
the day's rhythms as are any other forms of eating, so too it makes us familiar
again with the space that is prayer. It familiarizes us with the feel
of prayer in our souls, with the taste of it in our hearts, with the refreshment
of it in our bodies; and we remember.
Is there anything in The Divine Hours geared toward increasing the practice
of personal or private prayer? Yes, everything...every refrain, every
psalm, every text, every office, every hour, every developing habit,
every increase in easiness, every memories of what happens there, everything. Thus
it was in the beginning and now is again. Let us pray God it will always
be.
Phyllis Tickle
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