Monasteries have ancient rhythms. Daily fixed-hour prayer has been one of the most prominent features of monastic life since its beginning. The "hours" noted in the Gospels, the first, third, and sixth, refer to specific times of prayer in ancient Judaism. Further, St. Luke in the Acts of the Disciples refers to the disciples going to the Temple to pray at set times, showing the integration of this tradition into the beginning rituals of Christianity.
Although the current Roman Breviary contains only Morning, Evening, and Night Prayer (Lauds, Vespers, and Compline), I have set my phone alarm with a Church Bell ringtone to toll at the "little hours" of the day: 9:00am, noon, 3:00pm and 6:00pm. At noon and six I recite the Angelus, the prayers commemorating the Annunciation. Three is the Hour of Mercy, when Jesus died, and nine is a reminder to me to offer my workday to God.
Communal fixed-hour prayer "is the sanctification of time." In different words: we are told that we are the Church, one body, with Jesus as our head. That means all of us, those who are alive now, those who lived before us, those who will live after us. When any two or more of us are praying together, saying the same prayers, in a mysterious way we who are inside Time connect the body with Him our head who is in Eternity, and we bring our "time" into that "sacred Now."
When our children were little we always recited certain family prayers together: grace before sitting down to dinner; the "Our Father" followed by "God bless. . ." with a fixed litany of people starting with immediate family members and extending out to godparents, ending with "and God bless EVERYbody." But as the kids enter high school our schedules, including bedtimes, diverge and I found we very seldom prayed together. So now I try to bring my whole family together at night to recite Compline, "bedtime prayers," before the first person goes off to bed, nowadays usually me!
No comments:
Post a Comment