How (and Why) to Pray the Liturgy of the Hours (#004)

[Music] welcome back to the burro shire podcast we are filming live here in Orlando Florida I'm Brendon Vaught one of the co-hosts and joining me is my best friend father Blake Britton father Blake always good to be with you good to see you as well man today we are going to discuss one of our mutually favorite topics and that is the Liturgy of the hours we're gonna talk about how to pray the liturgy two hours and why to do it this has been I think for both of us a life changing discipline to pray these prayers each day before we get into the nitty-gritty of how to do it and why to do it let's maybe start off with just a basic overview of what this whole thing is so first a few terms that we're gonna talk about a lot here Liturgy of the hours that's kind of the main term and you've got to be super careful when you're texting with your friends like father Blake and I because sometimes L oth will autocorrect to lotr which is Lord of the Rings and these are two totally different but probably related things so this is a low pH both just as except detects don't both great forms of spiritual reading either through the hours or Lord of the Rings but we're talking about liturgy the hours also known as the Divine Office and it gets a little confusing because one of the parts of the liturgy the ours is called the office so the terms are a bit confusing but liturgy the hours Divine Office it's basically a series of of prayers of an ordered pattern series of prayers that you pray multiple times a day and these are prayed by Catholics all over the world they're contained in a book or a series of books called the breviary I'm holding up mine right here let me see if I can get on the camera you'll recognize the briefer usually it often looks like a Bible because it'll have golden gilded pages but they don't have all these ribbons that's kind of like the defining mark of of a bravery and we'll get into those here in a second but now that we've got our terms down liturgy hours aka the Divine Office those prayers are found in a book or a series of books called the bravery father Blake what is the liturgy of the hours give us a little more depth into it yeah so we read in the Old Testament how says from the rising of the Sun to its setting may the name of the Lord be praised and of course the Jewish people and they also get this from the songs and it says pray seven times a day the Jewish people would integrate specifically the Psalms what they call the Samedi so you know how we have like a melody that means singing a certain kind of tune well you also have something called the Samedi which is saying a particular set of Psalms well the Jewish people started praying Psalm ADIZ particular set of Psalms throughout the entire day on a regular basis and so the Catholic Church taking that ancient and beautiful Jewish practice continued and obedience this mandate from the Lord to pray from the rising of the Sun to its setting so technically the literature the hours is the second highest form of liturgy in the life of the church so you have the Holy Mass the sacrifice the Holy Mass that is the top of the top that is as we will discuss Abner's oh man later podcast that is the source and summit of the life of Mother Church however right after that you have the liturgy the hours you have this saying of the Psalms that is shared universally throughout the church specifically by those who are attained or consecrated persons so for myself as a priest I'm bound by canon law to pray the loads of the hours those who are consecrated monks or nuns or religious sisters and brothers are also bound to save the lives of the hours and what's really cool is that they're being said constantly all around the world so right now in China or right now in India or right now in Africa all around the world people are saying to lurch of the hours and you say them in different times of the day so you have a morning set you have a mid-afternoon set you have an evening set and then a nighttime set that you say now later you're also encouraged to pray this and we'll speak more about that when we talk about the Second Vatican Council later on in this podcast but it's a way for us to really tap into it's a way for us to really get engaged with the constant prayer of Mother Church throughout the world and so the constant prayer of Mother Church primarily is the sacrifice of the mass we is also happening constantly around planet Earth but then secondarily flowing out of this adoration of Christ in the Holy Eucharist and the sacrifice of the Holy Mass is this prayer of the Psalms these zombies these constant recitations of these texts from the Old Testament this psalmody by the way these collection of prayers were the bread and butter of the Church Fathers of the medieval Saints you read people like Bonaventure or Bernard of Clairvaux their love for the Samedi is profound and it continues to be later on especially during the post written tie-in saints so Charles Borromeo Philip Neri leading all the way up to contemporary time period with the reform of the lives of the hours of the Roman briefly that took place after vatican ii st. john paul ii it was infamous for delaying and being late to activities because he would stop to pray his bravery so if he was on his way to go visit a hospital for example in africa and on the way it passed the the clock hit 3:00 p.m. he would say i can't go see them right now we have to stop and pray the ledge of the hours and he would stop and he would pray the lords of the hours he was faithful to that commitment so very much is part of the essential character as well of those who are consecrated or ordained to continue the praise and adoration of christ well just to give people a little flavor for what the Liturgy of the hours is like while you're praying it so typically it contains a mixture of short prayers of excerpts from the Psalms usually you'll pray anywhere from 1 to 3 short excerpts maybe composing one or two Psalms as a whole there's almost always a short scripture reading so you get a little bit of scripture sometimes from the Old Testament sometimes from a New Testament epistle you always pray these canticles which either come from the mouth of our Blessed Mother or the canticle of Zechariah and then it usually closes with intercessions where you're praying for others around the church praying for yourself praying for the Holy Fathers and tensions and then it always includes an our Father as well so it's kind of to me one of the best single comprehensive types of Prayer because you get a little sampling of everything you know I know yeah when you and I were having some conversations about my own prayer life and I was kind of lamenting the fact that I was very jumpity I would jump from you know maybe doing Lexie Oh Davina for a few weeks - I was on a plan to read the Bible through the whole year and I did that for six or seven months and then you know I was trying to pray the Psalms or maybe try to do contemplative prayer and jumping from form to form the form and not really landing on anything that that was really drawing me in and then that's when you recommended to me the liturgy of the hours and for some of the reasons we're gonna discuss here in a bit about why it's a premiere form of Prayer but for this one in particular that it kind of brings all of those types of prayers together into one form it's kind of like a buffet of styles of Prayer if you will yeah and the beauty of it is that it's already structured so there's a lot of people in their spiritual life who ask and I get this all the time as a priest father what can I do to deepen my spiritual life well the premier thing that we can do to deepen our spiritual life is to pray with the church so not to capitalize individual prayer as much as joining in the great course of song if you will that's chanted that song that's proclaimed to the heavenly father by the Bride of Christ Mother Church throughout history and one of the ways that that is done again outside of the Holy Mass which is the greatest is the lives of the hours this is a way that we can tap into in a very structured defined beautiful way the lifeblood of Mother Church and her constant praise of Christ talk about what we mean when we call this the Liturgy of the hours you mentioned earlier that it's the second most important liturgy the first being the sacrifice of the mass because I think for most people when they think liturgy that's just synonymous with the mass like what right what other type of liturgy do you mean so what do we mean a say Liturgy of the hours yeah so the word Liturgy again another topic or another podcast would be just what does the liturgy as a whole what does that mean so when I say liturgy I don't spit I don't mean just a particular set of rubrics or a particular set of practices or a functions right so when I say that we're literally I don't mean just the mass liturgy in the end is the constant praise and worship that's being given to the father through the son by the grace of the Holy Spirit so this unity this this great symphony of love and adoration that's being exchanged between the Trinity constantly and that also has been shared with us by merit of Christ being fully human and fully divine so this is why Christ he says I must ascend to the Father in order to send you the spirit when he ascends when his flesh enters that perfect communion with the heavenly Father in the Blessed Trinity now our flesh by merit of Christ's flesh has the capacity to share in the divine life and this of course becomes the wellspring of the sacraments specifically Eucharist and baptism so when I say liturgy what I mean is to share in that Trinitarian to share in that great divine symphony of love that's constantly happening between the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit and is shared by grace with Mother Church and there are many ways by which to share in that Divine Liturgy the premiere of which is the mass and now also is littered to the hours so when I say lurch the hours or when the church rather says allure Jewish what they mean is the way in which we hourly tap into that divine liturgy so this this is a way that throughout our day in the morning the midday afternoon and at nighttime these are ways that we could tap into just in a very temporal concrete way we can tap into the beauty of the constant praise that's being offered by God and it's just an amazing way for us to be to share in that and so as I said there's a morning time there's a mid-afternoon time which is composed of three different kinds of prayers so you have tourists sext and none so pretty much this is like a mid-morning a midday in a mid-afternoon prayer the mid-afternoon when typically takes place at 3 p.m. to commemorate the death of Christ and then you have your evening prayer which happens anytime after 4 p.m. sort of like our vigil masses can happen after 4 p.m. and then finally have a night prayer which is what you say before you go to bed so all these prayers together make what is called the Liturgy of the hours they sanctify our entire day and make all of our day revolve around praising Christ now in centuries past the literature the hours was kind of in the domain of priests and religious it was presumed really that lay people wouldn't go that far we talked about this in our episode on the called the holiness that for a long period of the church's history unfortunately lay people just weren't urged to pursue the depths of sanctity the way that consecrated religious and and priests were but then something shifted in a major way at Vatican 2 and the Second Vatican Council and its document the liturgy specifically commends the liturgy of the hours to all people talk a little bit about that yes this is one of the landmark movements of the Second Vatican Council that I think is very under highlighted so unfortunately Vatican 2 has been sort of weighed down by a lot of these unnecessary untrue and ill placed sentiments from either this sort of extreme liberal understanding of the counselor this extreme conservative reaction of that council again another topic that we can discuss at a later time but because that a lot of the amazing things that Vatican 2 gave us is under emphasized or completely unreal eyes and I would say that this is one of them so if you read the document on the Sacred Liturgy chapter 4 which is on the Divine Office aka the verge of the ours paragraph 100 it specifically says the following pastors of souls should see to it that the chief hours meaning of the leaders of the hours so we have their LODs which is morning prayer and Vespers which would be evening prayer are celebrated in common in the church on Sundays and the more solemn feast and the laity to are encouraged to recite the Divine Office either with the priests or among themselves or even individually so what you have here is the Second Vatican Council which is convened by the grace of the Holy Spirit so this is the Lord Himself speaking through the council inviting laity to make this form a prayer their preferred form of personal prayer that our personal prayer life from the font of the Eucharist and flow out of that into the wellspring of the lives of the hours and then around that of course you can build particular devotions such as the rosary the Divine Mercy chaplet all these amazing devotions but those the two main ways that the mother church prays is by the mass the large of the hours and so in this document Vatican 2 is explicitly encouraging the laity to make the urge of the hours part of their daily prayer life that excerpt that you just read from sacra suntanned Concilium the document from Vatican 2 and the liturgy calls to mind for me recent much-discussed book the benedict option by Rod Dreher and rod officially was a Catholic he left and became Eastern Orthodox but they have some of the liturgical practices in prayers and in this new Orthodox Church that rod is a part of they are uber committed to the Liturgy of the hours of their version of it and the the discipline is such that it's expected that all of the parishioners of his parish come to the church on Saturday evening to pray Vespers evening prayer as a community and the discipline is expected so much that basically if you don't come on Saturday night you're kind of not welcome or not expected to come for the liturgy on Sunday it's interconnected with the sacrifice of the mass and I could help but read that and think man I wish I wish more parishes would would make that demand of us would would take prayer that seriously particularly a communal prayer particularly the liturgy of the hours in a communal prayer and say look this is this is part of what we do like to be a member of this yeah church means to pray together in a communal way well you see that that's exactly what Vatican two is talking about the Second Vatican Council is very clear here Patras of souls should see to it that's not like it would be nice that they did this this is a pastor responsibility to make sure that the chief hours are prayed on those especially really daily would be great but especially during those great solemn feasts Sunday which is always a solemn feast and of course feast for example of st. Joseph's solemnity of the church the Annunciation Slim's you the church the fee state of the mother of God that's a solemnity of the church so on these days when there would be high feast that that would always be a company to buy Vespers by the lives of the hours so really the way that it would look like patent practically and we do this here at our parish thank God at st. Mary is that if there's a major feasts the evening before we will host chanted Vespers so we have our music director and we also have our organist come and then our choir always does an amazing job and they chant back and forth these beautiful tones and the laity sharing that and usually myself or father Ivan will preside and we enter in with incense it's just a beautiful beautiful encounter of Prayer and the people here love it I mean once they were exposed to it they're like can we do this all the time it's and so we try to do that frequently so any time that we have a parish event for example during the Lenten season when we have parish missions our parish mission always begins with chanted solemn Vespers and then from Vespers we go into the mission so this is a way that we tie our mission into the universal prayer of the church so this mission is not just st. Mary Catholic Church and school mission rather this mission is part of the wider community of mother church's desire to sanctify her people I think we should we should clarify too that when we're talking about integrating liturgy the hours into a parish or adding it on as a commitment or a discipline we're not talking about like just adding on extra burdens to people that already fright like I'm over committed that this is a gift from the church that will improve your spiritual life in dramatic ways you know like when when I first discovered it when you first helped guide me through it I remember feeling almost a little bit cheated that you know my first 10 years as a Catholic nobody had ever commended de Liturgy the hours to me encouraged me to pray it suggested it for whatever reason maybe they thought it was only in the domain of priests or maybe they thought it wasn't a great form of Prayer maybe they thought it requires too much of you because you're praying at set hours multiple times during the day but as soon as I got unto I thought gosh what a gift I've been given and one that I've been missing and I wish more people would find out about this so that's part of the reason why we're doing this episode as well yeah the Holy Spirit knows what he's doing he knows his people and he knows what's best for them and so when he asked for something to be done especially through an ecumenical council we should trust that that he really knows what he's doing you know and so when he when the Holy Spirit speaks through this council and encourages the laity to pray and to share in this lifeblood of the church that's something that he knows will help enrich the overall spiritual lives of the faithful and I've seen this and your family of course Brandon but I've also seen another families as well who have integrated the lives of the hours into their daily lives and now their children are praying it and now their wives are praying with them or their husbands are praying it with them now even sometimes their neighbors will come over and they'll join them for village the hours they're creating small communities that are now tapping into the universal prayer of Mother Church it's so profound and this is one of the great visions of the Second Vatican Council to have these our daresay almost a monastic kind of experiences taking place in the average Catholic home that we're forming amidst the nucleus which is the domestic church the family we're forming this mystical sense of prayer and unity with the universal church and so it is my hope as a priest and you know that I'm a huge promoter of the lives of the hours of the Divine Office and everyone that asked me about their prayer life that's the first thing I suggest to them I've never had any one regret it they all say father this is amazing one of my great missions is a priest one of my personal sort of soap boxes if you will is to get people praying that there's the hours on the regular basis it will transform your spiritual life there's no other way to put it all right well for the rest of this discussion I'd like to do a few things with you father Blake so one is to talk a little bit about our own personal experiences of how we first got in to praying the Liturgy hours how we discovered in what it was like second I'd like to look at some of the major objections that you'll encounter to the liturgy the hours and I don't just mean from the outside I mean when you first start praying the Liturgy hours you're gonna run into some of these stumbling blocks and so I want us to talk through them a little bit and then finally we'll close with a bunch of practical tips on how to get in to it hat you know how do you start praying it where should you start what resources will help you get better at it so let's maybe follow that that rubric so first of all let's let's start with you first so when did you first start praying literacy hours what was your experience like wonderful so like many Catholics I was not introduced to there's the hours for most of my life so I was not something I was raised with unfortunately and not even in my teenage in high school years I became acquainted with a meaning I knew of his existence when I was a high schooler because I started watching EWTN and stuff like that you know so I learned about it but I really didn't pray it I didn't start until I entered seminary and before I entered seminary there's a group of Franciscan friars who I had befriended they were local here in the Diocese of Orlando at San Pedro Center a wonderful group of men and they knew I was going to seminary so they bought me a very nice for volume set of the verge of the hours the same exact set that you have actually Brandon and they told me they said I I know this you don't know what this is right now they said but this will be the basis of your prayer life and one of them in particular looked at me and he said promise me that when you become a priest I will see these pages are already worn and it was beautiful because on the day of my ordination some of those Franciscans were there and I was able to share with them the fact that here's my briefly and the pages were very worn because I had not gone a day in 10 years without praying it this is probably a good time for me to interject and tell my little story about my bravery and the worn pages that one time father Blake came over and we're praying lose the hours together and my book looked not not this volume again there's four volumes so it's one of the other three volumes the pages were all wrinkled the cover was like all bent and man it looked like I'd been praying for 30 years on this book but then I explained to him what actually happened was Gilbert our little toddler had taken my bravery and dunked it in the toilet so after it had dried off it looked it looked pretty well born it looked like I was a pretty serious devotee of the Liturgy of the hours I mean some priests would come by and envy that man I this layman is just praying this unbelievably so so yeah so my were warned not through the waters of the toilet bowl but mines are worn through years and years of prayer but um really so I got introduced to it in the seminary and I'll be honest with you it was a pain it really was a pain and it will probably be for some of our listeners and viewers as well when they first start start trying to pray it because the ribbons are confusing you're trying to figure out when do I say what how do I say what and then of course you get feast days and that's even more you're like oh my goodness so it's one of those things like we mentioned in our Catholic intellectual podcast is one of those things that we have to be willing to suffer a little bit to be devoted to that patience with in order to learn it but once you learn it it's streamlined so I was fortunate enough to learn it within the context of a community which was the seminary community my freshman year in seminary so I entered seminary right at the age of 18 and so I was very young and so I went through a nine-year formation process my freshman year I prayed it sort of spottily but then my sophomore year in seminary for Lent my Lenten promise was that I was going to start praying all the hours alerts the hours there are seven hours but as diocesan priests were asked to pray five of them on a regular basis so I said I will pray these five from this point forward I will never miss a single one again starting my sophomore year at seminary and I can honestly say now that I have since then not missed a single day of those hours and it has just become one of the most essential aspects of my spiritual life outside of the celebration of the Holy Mass and so even now as a priest the first thing that I think about when I wake up in the morning is a when am i celebrating Mass and during my holy hour be when am i praying later to the hours those are the two hinges around which my spiritual life revolves and if I don't have those well then you know how can I possibly be a good and holy priest so that was my own experience Liturgy of the hours for me I just couldn't imagine not not having them they're part of my life they're an integral part of my life so that's for me now what about you Brandon well yeah I mean I've already shared a little bit about how I got into it it was through our friendship that I first discovered them and through your great encouragement that I've been devoted to it I think I first started dabbling with it a couple years ago but then it's been about six months now that I've been as resolute as you that I'm gonna pray every hour of every day no matter if I'm traveling the matter if I'm sick and I think what's really stuck out to me is ya you go through that first maybe month or two period of confusion and questioning whether this is really having a positive impact on my spiritual life maybe I should try other forms of Prayer all those types of things we're gonna talk about some of those objections here in a moment but I think what's really stuck out to me is the last thing you mentioned that it's become the ordering principle of my day like before that the ordering principles of my day were based around the time of mass so our family goes to daily Mass well okay that's set in stone so I know I kinda have to arrange things around that and then to be brutally honest around food like breakfast lunch and dinner those are my organizing principles those come first and kind of everything fits around those three meals but what the liturgy hours forced me to do is to say no no no it can't be food it can't be these other temporal things around what your day revolves like the mass obviously yes but then now you have these anchors at each of the major hours of the day where you say I am going to be praying at those times and just to be clear to everybody the the five major hours we've been talking about you pray them in general periods of time like morning prayer could be prayed anytime in the morning so we're not saying it's like a monastic type of life where at 9:00 o'clock when the bell rings you have to pray at the prayer at that exact moment so there's some flexibility but the the overall thing I'm trying to emphasize is that now you have these organizing principles that are non-negotiable I am going to be praying at these hours of the day and everything else has to fit around it if I'm if I'm going on you know a road trip if I'm going to visit a friend okay I need to figure out am I going to pray before am I gonna pray after do I need to bring my bravery with me or gly be able to have it on the way back that that principle has radically transformed my life because you can't help but be be changed and having prayer be the fulcrum which your day revolves there's just a natural change that takes place in your soul when prayer becomes the driving principle around which everything else revolves yeah yeah be beyond a shadow of a doubt because then what's central of course is Christ so when prayer specifically the prayer of the church and to emphasize again this is this is a higher objectively a higher level than individual personal prayer because it is the prayer of the church it's the prayer that Christ has given us through Mother Church this is a way that our subjectivity our individual prayer is inserted into a higher domain of prayer by sharing in the universal adoration of Christ through his mystical body and so when our lives revolve around this form of prayer then what is revolving around is Jesus Christ Himself Lord all the hours of my life are yours all of them before my meals before my friendships before my profession for my job everything is yours Christ Jesus and this is a way that I'm concentrating my entire day to you into your glory alright well let's turn now to some of the objections and these objections are not just abstract these are personal objections that I've had I've know I had these objections internally when I first started praying the Liturgy of the hours and then I know I've voiced them to you so you and I have talked about them a lot and again I think they're pretty typical of beginners first getting into the Liturgy of the hours so first of all the divine office is too much rote prayer you'll hear this from a lot of people especially those who aren't as familiar with formal style prayers you know I was in the boat myself as a convert from evangelicalism and evangelicalism like you know it's all about you and Jesus it's all about personal prayer personal relationship with Jesus any type of scripted prayers or scripted formulaic ordered ways of praying was off-putting it seemed dry and empty and not as not as heartwarming as just me talking and listening to the Lord personally so what would you say somebody who said you know it's too scripted it's too rote yeah so for the purpose of routine in the life of the church is always unity unity so it's not uniformity in the sense of trying to make its tell or stagnant but rather it's unity to make it vibrant and to make it life-giving and so the first way that I would rebuttal that particular accusation is that there must be forms of rote routine prayer universally established by Mother Church through the grace of the Spirit in order to ensure a principle of unity that every single Christian on planet earth every single Catholic I should say every single Catholic on planet Earth has the ability to say the same exact words and to be united through language to thought and through deed in the Holy Mass and in the Liturgy of the hours so there's number one is that this is a principle of unity number two would be that of course if we're going to be a Christian that means to be like Christ that means to live the Christ at Ashley means to live in the very life of Christ not even just to be like him but actually be in him to share in his life the loads of the hours as I said came from the Jewish people that they prayed on a regular basis these different liturgies including Jesus Christ Jesus Christ is a devout Jew he loved the sombody's and do not doubt that he prayed them on a regular basis this is the way that he also joined and in vibed the love of his people the chosen people of Israel to glorify Yahweh to glorify the Heavenly Father so impress the hours you're also sharing in a very explicit prayer that Christ Himself shared in and then finally there is something to be said about routine developing within the heart discipline so prayer is not a sporadic reality prayer is like a well-honed sword it pierces deeply it's it's oriented towards a someone and so there is a tendency sometimes unfortunately for our prayer life to be sporadic and that's why I can never really go deep if you're trying to drill a hole and you just drill a little bit of a hole here and then a little bit of all there a little bit well then you're gonna have just a bunch of potholes all over the place but if you're trying to drill a well like to actually find water what you have to do is get a drill bit and being a consecrated space and a consecrated honed focus for a consecrated amount of time and from there you're able to actually reach the wellspring you're actually able to dive deeply and so there is something quite valuable to routine prayer especially routine prayer that's discerned by the church and sharing in that so that like a well honed blade our prayer lies can really pierce deeply into mysticism I found that a lot of my Catholic friends who I would identify as as like ready to leap into the Liturgy of the hours they're they're well formed they have a past history of the deep prayer life you know they're they're ready to take this on they they would make this complaint and not realize that the same objection could apply to the mass itself in a prayer like the Rosary where you're literally praying the same prayer over and over but and both of those other cases they love the familiarity and order of the mass they love the repetition of the Rosary and the benefits that flow from it I think all those same things apply to the Liturgy of the hours and in that and in that case honestly the Lord's the hours is much less repetition right is there are four volumes with four different you know arrangements and sets of Psalms and readings and prayers so it's a little more dynamic if you will and I don't mean dynamic in the theological sense yeah but there's more variety and allure to the hours then you would have in the Rosary or something like that something else I've learned only through experience is that although the Liturgy of the hours prescribes the times of day when you're supposed to pray these various types of prayers it does not prescribe how long you take to pray them and so because of that you can stop at any point and engage in contemplative prayer if you just read the scripture reading takes some time to do Lexi Oh Davina and and discuss it with the Lord personally so there's nothing there's nothing contradictory between formal wrote prayer and personal prayer you can we have both of them seamlessly together and as a matter of fact what you'll see is that that wrote prayer of the church meaning that routine deeply contemplated prayer that's developed over 2,000 years this is 2,000 years worth of wisdom and prayer life put into single kind of text that will then start informing your subjective prayer experience so what you I think what you're gonna start realizing is that the way you pray is more mature in the way you pray is a little bit more focused at least that's what it did for me so as whereas before I would sort of talk to Jesus from my heart and there was nothing wrong with that it was very authentic and very true when I started praying later to the hours when I started doing the office of readings which is a part of the lodge the hours that goes through readings to Scripture as well as readings of the ancient church fathers when I started reading these different texts and praying with them I noticed that my spiritual language and my spiritual vocabulary my spiritual intelligence if you will and again intelligence is not smartness I mean this ability to really understand what's happening in my spiritual life it increased drastically and now even the way that I speak to Christ has deepened because it's been formed not by my ego but it's been formed by Mother Church and by her adoration of Christ alright let's move to a second objection and I think this one is almost universal when people start praying the Liturgy of the hours the main core of the Liturgy of the hours as we've been discussing is the Samedi the Psalms you're praying large chunks of the Psalms and if you've read any of the Psalms you know that they cover the full gamut of human emotion and human response to God there's there's anger there's praise there's excitement there's begging there's long and there's there's every human experience on display right so on any given day when you're praying the liturgy the hours you might open your book and the prescribed prayers for the day are just totally out of sync with what you're experiencing like you're you're begging God to free you from your enemies that have cornered you down and have pinned you and wins God gonna show up and a lot of people find that and read it and say it just doesn't connect with me I'm not getting anything out of this I can't relate to it what do you say to that so on two levels first and foremost remember it's the prayer of the church and the reality of it is all of us are trying to conquer the enemy of sin so the Psalms are always relatable to us on the larger level of the Christian experience so although maybe I have a beautiful life in my life really isn't having any difficulties of struggles right now but yet the psalmody is saying I walk amidst the valley of death and I struggle my enemies surround me like dogs that are walking about you're thinking uh actually like I have a good job and like a really great wife and awesome kids like I'm fine well yeah maybe maybe in that regards but are we fine insofar as our struggle with sin or we find insofar as Mother Church and where she suffers throughout the world are we fine where our brothers and sisters in Africa are starving for food our brothers and sisters in China are being persecuted and killed for their Catholic faith I'm part of that - it's not about a personal relationship with Jesus only but rather I've been integrated to my baptism into a wider community into a body the body of Christ and that body is experiencing multiple realities simultaneously which means that I too AM experienced in them when my brother sister in Africa starves I starve my brother's sister in China is persecuted and killed for the Catholic faith so am i Jesus does this as well whatever you do to the least of my people that you doing to me Saul Saul why do you persecute me so when you're praying in these Psalms even though they may not be immediately relatable insofar as your direct personal life they most certainly are relatable insofar as you petitioning on behalf of the church universal to the Heavenly Father and you you being the voice of the broken you being the voice of the persecuted and some of the Psalms you being the voice of the victorious of the joyful of the upright of the righteous but then secondly never allow the enemy to tempt you to stop praying because you do not feel at that moment it is immediately beneficial so this is one of the main tactics of the enemy that I just feel like this prayer is a waste of time um you know even sometimes we feel that way at mass like I'm going to Mass and I really don't get anything out of the homily the music is blah you know so I go to because I have to receive Communion but really it's it's a waste of time is it is it really I mean the the enemy is very good at lying to us and making us believe that these beautiful substantial enriching realities are actually non beneficial at all but we know that anywhere that Christ is is beneficial that just sitting in the presence that Blessed Sacrament even if we don't do anything is beneficial because Christ in the Eucharist is formulas praying though there's the hours even if we don't immediately feel connected to it or we feel something coming out of it that doesn't mean it's a waste of time because in the end religiosity is holiness is not a sentiment but it's an activity it's something that's being formed in us by Christ and so our faithfulness day in and day out to these loads of the hours even when we're not personally feeling fed by them it doesn't mean that we aren't actually being fed by them even if our sentimentality doesn't match with that super helpful and I'd add to your great explanation of praying these prayers in community with Catholics all over the world so even though I might not be feeling this sentiment others are and by praying it I'm expressing solidarity with them I'm softening my heart to their trials and tribulations in addition to that one other tip I receive I can't remember whether I got this from you or from one of the books I've been reading that if you approach the Psalms especially but the entire leader to the hours but the Psalms especially from the perspective of Christ that it's Christ praying these prayers of lament its Christ on the cross lamenting his enemies cornering him and you know all this stuff that now you're uniting your prayer to the prayer of Christ to the Father it's not just me and Jesus I'm participating in the whole Trinitarian dynamic of Karen love yes and that's also the theology for the Holy Mass as we know lives of the hours flows from the Holy Mass but the mass is not primarily for the people is or of the people the mass primarily is Christ's saving action to the Father of which thank God we are mercifully incorporated and that's and then through communion we're allowed to share the benefits of that reconciliation that Christ has given to the Father but in the end the primary thing that's happening in the mass is not my action as an individual but as Christ action in which he's incorporating me through the work of the priest and through the sacrifice itself alright so if you have some other objections challenges as you get started please send them to us leave them in the comments and we'd love to help you out too to get momentum and get going on these prayers but I thought maybe for the last several minutes we have here father Blake let's go through some really practical tips some of these things are things you've shared with me some of them I've picked up from others online and from books but I have a handful of them so I'll go through them and we'll get your comments here along the way so first of all I highly recommend reading a good book about the Liturgy of the hours so this podcast is a good precursor I think we've given you you know some basic background information on what it is why you should do it that kind of stuff but you really need to understand how each of the hours works what to expect all that kind of stuff and there's a bunch of good books out there I've I've sampled many of them but the two that I found especially helpful for laypeople are first of all a book by Daria sake it's called the everyday Catholics guide to the Liturgy of the hours and then second this one's new book it just came out a month or so ago by father Timothy Gallagher one of the great spiritual writers in America and it's titled a layman's guide to literature the hours how the prayers of the church can change your life and and both of those books approach the topic from similar angles so pick which one you want we'll have links to them below but I highly highly recommend before going out and getting the whole series of bravery's and committing I'm gonna tomorrow I'm gonna start diving right in give yourself a little buffer and learn a little bit more about the rhythm and the background before diving in you think that's a good advice very much so a father Gallagher in particular it's just one of the Masters of just Ignatian spirituality in general and I've had the privilege of meeting and speaking with him several times a very holy holy priest and just really he's able to make he's able to make these things accessible to someone who may not be as entrenched in theology as entrenched in the tradition he makes it very understandable so I have not had the privilege of reading that one book that you were speaking about of course I know of it I just haven't had the chance to read it yet but the ones by Gallagher are superb and so I've had a chance to read those and they're they're very well written and they're they're great they're great for teaching you have discern spirits as well as there's the hours okay second tip now father bleak and I might differ here a little bit because technology is coming into play but when you're first starting out with the Liturgy the hours and I'm speaking from experience here the books can be really complicated to get a handle on so I mentioned before here's my book so you see there's 1 2 3 4 5 ribbons usually almost every time you pray to the liturgy as you're flipping through the book at least once twice on feast days you could be flipping three four or five times it can be awfully hard to figure out which prayers and which Psalms and which ant defines and all that stuff to pray and so what I found when I was first starting out is a much easier way in is to use a breather II app on your phone there's a bunch of them the one I use is called I bravery you got to be a little careful because some of the apps don't use like the official approved translations of the prayers and of the Bible but I bravery has the same exact content that's in the officially approved book so I recommend that one the best part of it is you open it up you tap morning prayer or evening prayer and it's just the stream of the prayer so you just read it and pray it there's no ribbons there's no flipping it just delivers it all right to you so I recommend it for the for the ease of it but also before you go and invest a decent amount of money and buying the actual print books a member there's four books in this set there they're kind of expensive I think like a hundred bucks 150 bucks before you do that maybe start out with the phone get used to it make sure you're committed to praying it and then you can kind of graduate to the books I'm curious to hear father Blake if you you usually don't like mixing prayer and Technology so I'm curious to hear what you'd say well this most certainly is part of a much larger philosophical discussion and in disagreement you know of course I I sympathize with that do things in progressions so I'm when it comes to sacred texts and prayers I am a huge believer that having a specified book is really important and again there are deeper full of South Koreans for that between the what's the logic what's the the tailless the proper end of this particular reality well for an iPhone it's it could be multiplicity so you know yeah many many things but for a book it's it's just prayer that philosophical thing to the side it's an important one we'll talk about that later yes we can debate on that later in sort of technology and its role and and but uh ironically as we do this through we do this podcast through technology but um but all joking aside absolutely I mean I do this also the laity who are asked me how to pray urge the hours I let them know please start with the phone so I always give them the I Bri free app first and I asked them you know go through get used to the rhythm of it get devoted to it on a regular basis and then from there we can talk about buying the book and for buying the books you can do the four volume set or you can also do something called Christian prayer which is an abridged version of the four volume set so let's say that maybe you're not feeling called to do all five hours a day like some of us feel call to or like priests are bound to but you do feel called to do just morning prayer and evening prayer well Christian prayer has just a morning prayer and evening prayer and it has it for all the four volumes so you could just buy that and it's a single volume set so there are multiple options for you for integrating according to where you're feeling called by the spirit there are multiple ways that you can integrate this prayer of the church into your daily life I think correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the Magnificat publication contain some sort of abridged version of morning and evening prayer it does it's it's Magnificat fantastic magnificent I wouldn't say I want to suggest it for regularly to the hours because it's a very abridged version so I would definitely suggest go ahead and investing once you get used to the iPhone and doing the well iPhone or Android it's all available on both but once you get used to I bravery then to just go ahead and get a Christian prayer for volume set so I wouldn't depend to having on magnificat for those things okay so those are the first two recommendations first get just buy a good book that gives you a little more information on what to do how to do it second maybe download the app or you can even find it online I bravery has a website which you can go on for free and find the prayers there but then third this was obviously to me is find someone to guide you through and so for me that was father Blake who when we met had been praying it for several years for you it might be a local priest unfortunately topic for another day not all priests prayed the Liturgy of the hours regularly which is sad but if you have a priest that you know you're pretty confident does pray them ask him if he could take a few minutes and and help walk you through it or maybe there's a local seminary in most seminarians now thank God are required correct me if I'm wrong to pray it is their seminary as preparation for when they become priests and are bound to pray it so find a priest find the seminary and if you strike out in both of those areas you can go onto YouTube YouTube has I did a little bit of research a number of good videos on how to pray the Liturgy of the hours the best ones are anywhere from like half an hour to an hour that's about the the set amount of time you should probably prepare for to really understand how to pray each of the hours but maybe set aside half an hour 60 minutes and find a good YouTube video and and walk through it I'm curious I haven't asked you did how did did somebody walk you through it or did you just start learning it on your own how'd that comes out it was a school of hard knocks Brandon I mean dude I you know I was in seminary and they just sort of threw me into it now we we had to pray it every single day in common so I just sort of tough my way through it and learned eventually through habit because we did it day in and day out seven days a week I learned how to put all the ribbons and stuff so it is it would have been absolutely wonderful that someone walk with me and teach me the way that I sort of showed you how to do it but so for me I did not have that that luxury I just again I was thrown to the Wolves so to speak thrown into the into the fire and had to learn it and maybe that's why it's so engrained in my heart but I would encourage that the other thing is to that I would say to our lay brothers and sisters who are listening if you can't find a priest or a seminary to pray these with then most certainly I would encourage that you form small communities to pray them with amongst yourselves so even if you just find one that one other layman or woman that you can sit down and pray this with if you could find two or three people and I think that at your parish you do something like that with a group of men do you not yeah we do now every Wednesday night we get together for evening prayer and then we're trying to scatter it around I've noticed a lot of Catholics at various parishes anytime there's a parish event like you said a mission or like maybe a talk or something like that let's add on one of the the hours and pray it together yeah so I think that's a good a good thing that we could sort of do even impromptu on an irregular basis to just get together and start praying these but the main thing is just to start praying them and again there there will be outstanding spiritual benefits to praying the urge of the hours all right and then one more tip here this is a good one that father Blake gave me is recognize that some of the hours are more important than others some of the hours are longer or shorter than others and and some are easier or harder than others so take note of that and then use that information as you sort of break your way into it so for example night prayer is typically the shortest and the easiest so night prayer which my wife and I we pray right before we go to bed it's the last thing we do it takes maybe five to ten minutes tops and the great part about it is in the breve rebook and this will be true in the printed form and the app online it's the same cycle of seven prayers one for each day of the week that just repeats so every Monday you're doing the same prayer every Tuesday during the same prayer so you're going through the same cycle there's no flipping no ribbons it's just on a couple of pages of text you just read it straight through and pray it together so if you want to just get started like today start praying night prayer take five to 10 minutes a night and do that from their father Blake you've told me that the two you recommend after that which are kind of the main pillars of the whole thing our morning prayer and evening prayer is that right right correct correct so yes so morning prayer and evening prayer are what we call the hinge hours if you will so these are the two really important hours of the bravery's so you have lots which is this morning adoration of Christ this morning prayer and then you have Vespers so Vespers is the evening but by the way it really things were a little sidenote you know how you say bat like the animal bat in Latin is this pretty Leone that means little lion of the night you know little lion of the evening this Vespa that's we're gonna word vest for from but yeah so the morning prayer in Vespers is would be the two hinge hours so from night prayer I would definitely suggest to graduate if you will up to those two hinge hours all right well I think we'll probably put a bow on it there we've given you guys a lot of information about why and how to pray the Liturgy of the hours but I can't emphasize enough as a layperson how much this has transformed my spiritual life and all the spiritual benefits and fruit that have flowed from it we could do a whole nother episode of story after story about ways it's it's shaped my own life and I'm Blake I'm sure I know that that's true for the last decade of your own life isn't it oh yeah absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt so maybe let's close with this question that I'll ask you Father Blake someone comes to you never heard of liturgy hours and they just want maybe a couple sentence answer why should I start praying the Liturgy of the hours yeah to plug into the prayer and life of Mother Church more deeply and that's a very this sort of a one-sentence answer this is the way this is the premier way outside of Holy Mass that we can share actively and participate actively in the life of Mother Church adoring with and through and in Christ so that would be my number one suggestion for them excellent well thanks all of you for watching this episode of the burro share podcast I want to mention again we'll have links to all the books and resources and videos that we've mentioned below this episode and then also you'll find a comment box below it so any follow-up questions you have any guidance you need on how to dive in and get started any challenges you face along the way we we'd love to chat with you so be sure to visit burro Shire podcast.com that's the website will you'll find this episode and all past episodes and we'll see you for the next episode here on the burro shire podcast thanks for watching absolutely see you later [Music]

Channel: The Burrowshire Podcast

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Length: 53min 26sec (3206 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2020