Prayer Is...

The best way to kick your new year's resolution into high gear is to start in December, so that once the health club ads start running in January you can smile smugly as you write out a check for the full balance you charged on your credit card last month while balancing a coffee cup within the voluminous folds of the two wool sweaters you wear to cut down on your heating bill.

My new year's resolution was prayer. Not the "now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep" rote prayer from childhood. Not the ingeniously-creative-whoever-goes-on-the-longest-is-holiest extemperaneous prayer I learned in Protestant circles. I'm not even talking about the Rosary. What I'm talking about is honest, boring, day-in-day-out liturgical prayer, which is the official prayer life of the Church. The Divine Office. Now that's a mouthful for those in the know, so let me add several qualifiers.

1. I am a boring, stick-in-the-mud, only occasionally creative person who loves routine and structure. Prayers that are written out in a book were designed for people like me.

2. The Liturgy of the Hours is no longer the nine-hour-a-day ordeal that you read about in historical novels. The charming Latin names are gone, but so is the getting up in the middle of the night and praying all 150 psalms in one week.

3. Those who are raising two kids and taking care of the household practically by themselves are not obligated to say the entire Divine Office, but are invited to participate in the public prayer life of the Church by praying Morning and Evening prayer, which can be said whenever it fits into your day and only takes about twenty minutes total.

I thought I'd report on this after I'd been doing it for a while, so I wouldn't embarass myself by appearing to have monastic pretensions, or by quitting two days after the book arrived. The book I use is Shorter Christian Prayer, which is the short version of Christian Prayer, which is the short version of the four-volume Liturgy of the Hours. Now, figuring out this book is an act of faith in itself. It took me about forty-five minutes to read through the ordinary while flipping through the psalter and trying to figure out what an antiphon was. It didn't help that Christmas was right around the corner, and I had to tangle with the Common of Seasons. And this was the short short version!

The best help I can recommend for someone who is trying to get started with Morning and Evening prayer is to find an audio clip of what it's supposed to sound like. On the EWTN web site you can find the link along the left hand side at the bottom, and mouse over it to find the appropriate day.

"Oh, what Romanist tripe! Who needs all this LEGALISTIC muttering day in and day out? You Catholics are losing sight of Jesus in all this stuff. Why don't you just pray to Him?"

I have to respond to this objection, because it's what I would have said before I converted, and it honestly deserves a response. The fact is, I have considered myself a Christian most of my life, have gone to several churches, read most of the Bible, and heard some good preaching here and there. But I have NEVER had a prayer life. I mean, I can put on a good show if I'm sitting in a small group study or something and I'm really put to it: "And we lift up So-and-so who has cancer to you, Lord, and we just pray that your will would be done upon him..." and on and on and on. And that kind of prayer is fine, I ain't saying anything against it. But I never prayed at home on anything like a regular basis, except in times of extreme stress.

What I've discovered is a threefold reality. One, that the Church is universal, and historic. If you were going to start a church that was supposed to cover the earth and last until the end of the world, and you were supposed to devise a mode of prayer to fit all these nations and times and situations, spontaneous extemperaneous prayer wouldn't be your top pick. That is a conceit of modern Evangelicalism, and has anti-Catholic bigotry at its heart.

Two, people are prone to shirk, sidestep, and procrastinate prayer whenever possible. This is because of sin. Turning prayer into something that is between you and your nightstand is a guaranteed recipe for failure. Jesus knew that, and that is why he gave us the Lord's prayer. The Church has since created forms of liturgical prayer to carry us through the day and throughout the year, but they always have at their heart the Lord's prayer. You could say more, but the Lord's prayer really does say it all.

Third, spontaneous prayer, while offering complete freedom to tailor what you say to God at any one time, lacks all rhythm--and if you are planning to have a regular prayer life, you will get tired of having to come up with every single thing you say to God yourself. It's like trying to join in a dance without bothering to learn the steps. It's fun once or twice, but you eventually get tired and feel foolish. You never have the opportunity to just rest in Him, to trust the words that he has given you through his Church. And what about praise? I never feel so foolish as when I try to praise God in my own words. But that's exactly what so many of the psalms are for!

The Liturgy of the Hours is the endless, rhythmic, call-and-response of the Church to her Bridegroom, who called her to pray without ceasing. The Catholic Church has always taken this command at face value, requiring the full Divine Office of all Her consecrated clergy and religious on a daily basis. Though not so rigorous as it once was, the prayer life of the Church is an endless reflection of the divine life that is within us by virtue of the grace we receive with our baptism and through the sacraments.

It means that I, an isolated housewife with many small tasks on her hands, have the chance to consecrate time itself--to offer it, and myself, back to my Lord. I come from a family that has a history of mental illness and alcoholism. I've battled depression all my life. You could say that my main motivation is to stop the voice of fear for just a few minutes. But then a miracle happens. The fear goes away. I can't tell you how, in so many ways, I have experienced peace, moments of beauty, reservoirs of patience and charity towards others (especially my children) that aren't native to me--and a complete surcease of fear.

Prayer in this sense is a duty, a service, a consecration, and a consolation. Those psalms...they're love songs. Even when I've only got my short little book and I have to repeat some of it day after day, I get to rest in it. Meditate on it. Everything takes on meaning.