Tag: liturgy

• The Easy Way to Pray the Liturgy of the Hours

  I believe that anyone who is serious about embracing the Christian contemplative path needs some form of sustainable daily prayer. For most of Christian history, this has meant using a breviary — a prayer book which contains prayer “services” or offices for praying throughout the day. Such collections of prayers are known as The Liturgy of the Hours or The Daily Office or The Divine Office.

  The Liturgy of the Hours is the structure of prayer that nearly all Christian monasteries follow. There are different liturgies for different traditions within Christianity (Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican) and for different religious communities within the various churches (Benedictine, Cistercian, Carmelite, and so forth). In our day, even some Protestant, Reformed, and Evangelical versions of the Liturgy of the Hours has been published, which is remarkable since many of the faith communities in the evangelical world tend to avoid formal types of prayer.

  But the Daily Office is a practical way to pray — even for people who don’t like to pray out of a book. Why? For the same reason that musicians collect sheet music of songs. Yes, maybe they would rather play “from heart” or memory, but musicians understand that to grow as musicians, they need to learn a variety of different tunes, songs, melodies, styles of playing — and it just makes more sense to rely on written music to expand one’s musical repertoire.

  Likewise, people who pray seriously (and regularly) might soon discover that, if they rely only on their own experience and their own vocabulary when praying, sooner or later their prayer all starts to sound the same. But if they turn to the great literature of prayer: the psalms, the canticles, great hymns, and written prayers composed and collected from throughout the ages — then over time, their “prayer lexicon” expands, and they develop a deeper and more nuanced voice for prayer.

  Among other things, daily prayer books like The Liturgy of the Hours teach us how to pray.

  

  “What Do I Do With All These Ribbons?”

  I recommend investing some money into one or more versions of the Divine Office. At the end of this post I list links to several of my personal favorite prayer books. Some are single volume collections of prayers, others run up to four volumes — the entire set consisting of almost 8000 pages of prayers! These books are designed to be used multiple times every day, day in and day out, year in and year out. Prayers are organized by the season of the year (Lent, Easter, Advent, Christmas, and so forth), with special prayers for days that commemorate key events in the life of Christ, or memorials for the lives of great saints and martyrs.

  Which means — when we pray the Liturgy faithfully, day in and day out, it not only teaches us how to pray, but it also forms us in the knowledge and memory of the Christian faith.

  But there’s a catch.

  Every year, the calendar of the Christian year changes slightly. Sure, Christmas is always on December 25 and the feast of St. Teresa of Ávila is always on October 15. But Easter varies from year to year, calculated based on the first full moon after the spring equinox. The date of Easter determines the dates of other key dates — Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Pentecost being some of the big ones. And finally, since the alignment of days on the calendar and days of the week shift each year (this year February 11 is a Monday, next year it will fall on a Tuesday), there is always a shift in what prayers need to be prayed on which particular day.

  So how is that managed?

  Traditionally, breviaries (prayer books) include certain prayers that are prayed daily or almost daily (such as the Canticle of Zechariah and the Canticle of Mary, known respectively as the Benedictus and the Magnificat), others that are prayed in a rotation (such as the 150 Psalms, which are prayed over a two-week or four-week cycle) and then of course various prayers that are only prayed on rare occasions, usually linked to a particular saint’s day or feast day of the church year). There’s no way to organize all these prayers — so the prayer books rely on a series of colored ribbons that function as bookmarks. Each day before you begin praying, you mark the pages of the Psalms, canticles and prayers that you will be using. That way, when you are actually praying, you can quickly turn from page to page to find just the specific prayers you need for that particular day.

  If it sounds like a lot of bother — that’s because it is.

  People who pray regularly get the hang of using the ribbons. But for many people, the learning curve is cumbersome. They want to be praying, for heaven’s sake — not fooling around with ribbons in a book!

  Fortunately, for those of us who are ribbon-challenged, technology has come to our rescue.

  Apps for Daily Prayer

  Several smartphone/tablet apps have been published that make praying the Liturgy of the Hours almost foolproof. You simply have to open the app, make sure it is set on the current day, and then find the particular prayers you want to prayer — Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, or several of the other “offices” of the day.

  Most of these apps are available free or for a minimal cost. Some may have a subscription service — particularly with audio files. Yes, thanks to smartphone technology, you can listen to the Liturgy of the Day in addition to (or instead of) merely reading the prayers. Definitely a blessing for people who are visually impaired.

  My personal favorite is iBreviary but I also like Universalis. Both of these apps feature the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours in English. If you are an Episcopalian or simply prefer Anglican liturgy, you can use an app called The Daily Office from Mission St. Clare (these links all take you to the Apple/iTunes App Store; but the Catholic apps can also be downloaded through Google Play and Amazon if your phone isn’t an iPhone).

  Once you’ve installed the app, then you’re ready to pray. Make it a habit! Praying the Liturgy (in part or in its entirety) is not meant to replace silent prayer practices like centering prayer or the Jesus Prayer, or for that matter Lectio Divina. And of course, praying is never meant to replace being a compassionate or loving person. On the contrary — pray the Daily Office as a way to open your heart, so that the Holy Spirit can direct you into the heart of love.

  Prefer Books to Apps? Here’s a Few to Get You Started

  • The Liturgy of the Hours — the current official Roman Catholic daily office. Very traditional, gendered language, but poetic and deeply devotional. Available in several four-volume editions; this link takes you to the least expensive version.
  • The Prayer Book Office — the daily liturgy from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. I guess most Episcopalians just use the Prayer Book, as this edition is now out of print — and used copies are expensive.
  • Benedictine Daily Prayer: A Short Breviary — a lovely one-volume prayer book edited by Benedictine monks. One of a number of liturgies based on the usage of a particular monastic community.
  • The Saint Helena Breviary — an inclusive language liturgy as used by the Episcopal Order of Saint Helena. A gorgeous book, and as a bonus — several of the canticles included are drawn from the writing of Julian of Norwich!
  • Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals — this resource comes from the neo-monastic community of ecumenical Christians seeking to revive monastic spirituality in new ways for our time. This liturgy has a strong emphasis on social justice.
  • Celtic Daily Prayer: Book One and Book Two — a two-volume breviary from the Northumbria Community in England, based on the spirituality of the Celtic Church.

  Happy praying, my friends!

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  February 11, 2019

  Daily Office, Divine Office, liturgy, Liturgy of the Hours, Prayer

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• If Mystical Christianity is Shamanistic, then the Divine Office is the Drum

  For years, I have thought that one of the best ways to understand Christian spirituality is by the study of shamanistic forms of spirituality and religion, typically found among indigenous cultures the world over.

  Wikipedia defines shamanism as “reaching altered states of consciousness in order to perceive and interact with what [shamans] believe to be a spirit world and channel these transcendental energies into this world.”

  Altered states of consciousness? From Jesus’s transfiguration to Paul’s vision of the “third heaven” all the way down to Thomas Merton’s streetcorner epiphany, shifts in human knowing and seeing have always been a part of mature, contemplative Christianity.

  “The spirit world” for Christian mystics doesn’t involve power animals or trance states, but it does engage with angels (and demons) — and often does imply that the mystic can bring such “transcendental” (angelic) energies into earthly life.

  Jesus’s forty days in the desert? Shamanistically speaking, it was his initiation; his vision quest. His death and resurrection? Dying and rebirth is a common archetypal passage in many shamanistic cultures.

  Like shamans, Jesus was a healer, a prophet, and a visionary.

  Following Christ, many of the great mystics — from Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart, to Teresa of Ávila and Hildegard of Bingen — seem to have embodied the same kind of “non-ordinary” consciousness and capacity for entering into magical/imaginal dimensions of consciousness, similar to what has been found among indigenous healers and soothsayers the world over.

  In his wonderful books The Priest In Community and Ministry and Imagination, the Episcopalian theologian Urban T. Holmes suggested that the archetype of “the shaman” is one of the most meaningful ways of understanding the spirituality of the priesthood.

  I’ll see him his shamanistic priesthood and up the ante: I would suggest that shamanism is not only the key to priestly ministry, but indeed the key to baptismal ministry.

  All the baptized — all those called into the body of Christ through the ministry of the sacraments — are called to be “walkers between the worlds.” We are called to be ambassadors to the spirit realm. We are called to bring the grace of God — mediated to us by the angels — to each other, here on earth.

  Thinking Poetically, Metaphorically

  I know some people, many people, may struggle to see what I’m describing here. How could Christ — or the mystics — be compared to shamans? They didn’t engage in magical practices like soul retrieval or divination; they didn’t rely on entheogens like peyote or ayahuasca to facilitate their visionary experiences. Nor did they engage with power animals as their spirit totems or guides.

  But when I compare Christian mysticism or contemplative spirituality to shamanism, I invite you to join with me in seeing this as a poetic, metaphorical comparison. It’s not meant to be understood in a kind of linear, calibrated correlation. Rather, what I have sensed on an intuitive level, for many years now, is that elements of mystical Christianity function in the lives of Christians in a way that is poetically similar (not identical, not even necessarily correlatable) to how elements of shamanistic spirituality function in the lives of indigenous visionaries and healers.

  

  Today, I was chatting on the phone with my good friend and Encountering Silence co-host Kevin Johnson, and we were talking about how shamanism can be a meaningful tool for trying to understand the visionary heart of contemplative Christianity.

  As we were talking, I had the following insight:

  So many people who have embraced shamanistic spirituality have found a meaningful practice in meditation or guided visualization to the accompaniment of a steady drumbeat. Indeed, the steady beat has a slightly hypnotic effect on practitioners, helping to entrain their brainwaves into a relaxed or even dreamlike state of “theta wave” consciousness (theta brainwaves being the normal level of brain activity accompanying dreams and deep, silent meditation).

  Shamanic drumming has not been a regular part of Christian spirituality, of course. But my insight is this: Christian contemplatives and mystics have embraced a slowing-down of brain activity using a different kind of rhythm: the rhythm of fixed-hour prayer, of daily liturgy, of the Divine Office. In regularly chanting psalms and canticles, and revisiting key texts like the Benedictus, the Magnificat, and the Nunc Dimittis, the monastic contemplatives of much of Christian history have engaged in a slow but inexorable “rhythm” of prayer, chant, and silence, that over time served to induce a subtle state of relaxation and engagement with interior silence.

  If mystical Christianity is shamanistic, then the Divine Office is the drum. And in the rhythms of daily prayer, the supplicant for the mysteries of God becomes available to the wisdom that is encoded only in silence.

  So the next time you pray morning or evening prayer or one of the other liturgical offices, try not to be too engaged with “what the words mean.” Instead, simply allow the cadences and rhythms of the words you are reciting (or chanting) to wash over you. Those cadences and rhythms are entraining you to be more responsive to the silence that is already found within you. In that silence, at a level far beyond words, the wisdom of God speaks silently to you. The slow “beat” of the liturgy helps you to listen, at a level deeper than words.

  November 15, 2018

  Contemplation, Divine Office, liturgy, shamanism

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• Learning to Love the “Habit” of Spirituality

  We human beings are creatures of habit.

  We brush our teeth in the same direction, we take the same route to work, we fold our clothes or make our beds in pretty much the same manner day after day. We like to sit in the same pews at church and eat the same kinds of candy bars. We shop in our favorite stores and sometimes we even have a particular method of shopping (look at the clearance rack first, then go for the new arrivals, and finally zero in on the item we actually need).

  Maybe you don’t do all of the above, but I suspect most people reading this blog have at least some of these habits.

  We want to break our bad habits (there are those candy bars again) and learn some new ones (why is the treadmill so boring?). We laugh at how predictable we are, and we excuse our grandparents because they are “set in their ways.” But truth be told, a five-year-old can be just as anchored in habits (good or bad) as any octogenarian. If we love a habit, we say we’re in our groove, and when it makes us restless, we decide we’re in rut. But either way, our habits shape our days.

  Here’s something I find interesting: even though habits shape our lives in so many ways, there’s one area of life where we consciously reject the force of habit: our spiritual/religious life. We say we don’t like “empty rituals” and that “rote prayers” don’t have much meaning for us. Nothing seems to be worse than just “going through the motions” when it comes to our faith.

  Why do we feel this way? I think it’s because we want our relationship with God to be alive, spontaneous, authentic. We crave genuine intimacy with God — not just some mechanical pattern that we cycle through mindlessly. In other words, we want to be wide awake when it comes to responding to God’s grace, mercy and love in our lives.

  That’s a beautiful thing, and I commend it to everyone. But maybe we need to rethink this idea that “habit” and “mindfulness” are at odds. What if the cure for rote religion is not getting rid of rituals, but rather learning to express our faith mindfully — even in the midst of our most routine ways of behaving?

  

  You Are More Than What You Think You Are: “You Are What You Love”

  This is the fascinating idea at the heart of one of the most provocative books I have read in quite some time: You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K.A. Smith.

  Even the title is a wake-up call: is there spiritual power in habit? Smith would say yes — and the secret, to meeting God right in the middle of our habits, is prayer — and love.

  Smith, a Christian philosopher and professor at Calvin College in Michigan, argues that discipleship means a lot more than just learning the facts about the Christian faith. It’s a matter of learning an entire way of life — shaped not just by what we know to be true, but by what we love. Naturally, Christians will say we love Christ. But do the habits of our lives reveal that love? Or, are our habits shaped by other loves — the love for security, for comfort, for the respect of others, for money, for power?

  Dr. Smith says that if we don’t cultivate habits that are anchored in our love for God, then by default we will fall into habits that are shaped by our lesser loves: habits oriented toward pleasure, or entertainment, or shopping, or whatever we like to do to pass the time.

  Whether we like it or not, we organize our lives around our habits. So what if we took control of that all-too-human tendency, and devoted our lives to creating beautiful and sustainable habits of prayer, of meditation, of contemplation, of expressing love for our neighbors as well as for God? What would that look like? How would it transform our spiritual lives?

  Make Spirituality an Everyday Habit

  What thoughts do you have about how we can harness the power of habit to foster a closer relationship with God? What “contemplative habits” do you have? Or are you trying to develop? Let me know — share your ideas with me on social media, or as a comment here. Thank you!

  May 26, 2018

  habit, James K.A. Smith, liturgy, Prayer, spirituality

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• Better to Light a Candle (of Silence) than to Curse the Darkness (of Language)

  

  Does language always limit the way we talk about, think about, or even pray to, God?

  This question has been on my mind for the past few days.

  This past weekend I attended a service at a nearby Episcopal Church. The liturgy came from Enriching Our Worship, a contemporary, inclusive language resource approved for use in Episcopal Churches. For the most part it was poetic and lovely. However, one phrase during the Eucharistic prayer startled me — and not in a good way.

  Glory and honor are yours, Creator of all,
  your Word has never been silent;
  you call a people to yourself, as a light to the nations…

  “Your Word has never been silent.”

  I was stunned. It felt like a slap in the face to the practice of contemplative prayer.

  Is this prayer implying that God lacks the power to speak to us through silence, or values silence so little that it is always overrun by the noise of the “Word”? Or perhaps it is implying that God’s Word (i.e., Christ) never prayed in silence?

  Because on the surface, it appears to be saying one if not both of these things.

  Now, I can do a kind of interpretive dance around this. It’s not meant to be anti-contemplative, it’s just an affirmation of God’s loving word spoken throughout all times and all places. God’s Word is Christ, and Christ is never silent, because Christ always calls us to reconciliation and renewal. 

  In other words, blah blah blah.

  This reminds me of how defenders of gendered language in liturgy make their case. When we call God “Father” this does not mean God is male, in a human biological sense. And when we call humans “mankind” that’s not meant to exclude women either. Yada yada yada.

  Now, I doubt that the author(s) of the Enriching Our Worship Eucharistic prayer were setting out to write something that seems to attack contemplation. They were just trying to make a poetic statement abut the pervasive presence of God’s Word, Christ, in our lives. But by doing so, they inadvertently said something that sounds like bad theology (at least to me).

  Maybe the idea that God’s Word is never silent is not a big deal to most people. But as someone who believes the problems in Christianity mostly stem from its rejection of its own contemplative heritage, language like that is stunning in its implication. Likewise, a lot of people don’t understand the importance of inclusive language, mainly because they enjoy and find comfort in traditional language, gender bias and all. But to others, such kind of language leaves them feeling excluded, or unhappy because it appears to exclude others.

  My point is this: whether we’re talking about something as obvious as gender bias or even something as seemingly innocuous as “Your Word is never silent,” language — even the best, most traditional, most poetic language — always seems to fail us when it comes to talking about, or praying to, God. God is greater than language, so when we try to talk about (or to) God, we are trying to fit something infinite into the finite container of human speech and syntax. And the result is always messy.

  So what should we do? Should we give up on talking about God? I don’t think so, although arguably that’s what atheism is all about. When an atheist says “I don’t believe in God” he or she is saying, by implication, “God is not worth talking about.”

  A better approach, what I believe to be the more contemplative approach, is to continue to talk about God, since God is love, and justice, and mercy and forgiveness, and we live in a world that is starving for all these things. But we need to talk about God with great humility and non-attachment. Our language about God will sooner or later fail.

  What we believe reveals God may inadvertently conceal God. Our human sin — our capacity to hurt one another, oppress one another, impinge on each other’s freedom — will creep into even the most mindful ways of talking about God. Knowing this can be an important step toward refusing to let our human language of God become an idol.

  

  The essential key, of course, is silence. “Silence is praise” muses the Psalmist; and Elijah encountered God in “the sound of sheer silence.” Silence does not make language obsolete or unnecessary, but it does help us to hold our language lightly. This not only can keep us from turning our language into an idol, but can also help us to be forgiving when we hear God-talk that is limiting or exclusionary or oppressive.

  In other words, I know that “Your Word is never silent” is a limiting way to talk about God. But when I pray in silence, I am reminded that I do not need to let that kind of language impact my own spirituality. As the Quakers say, “better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”

  Perhaps this blog post has been a bit heavy on the cursing-the-darkness side — so I’ll be silent now. For silence — praying contemplatively — is a way of lighting a candle for God.

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  Is there language about God that you find limiting or exclusionary? Or language that you think is important to retain? Leave a comment to share your thoughts on this topic.

  June 3, 2015

  God-talk, Image of God, language, liturgy, silence, theology

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