The Wine-Dark Sea

I don’t listen to the Divine Office podcast very often; but I have the app on my phone and sometimes when I can’t find a chunk of time to sit and pray I can at least listen to the office on the go. The other night, for example, my sister put on Evening Prayer while I was coking dinner. Although I only heard about 80% of it because of interrupting kids, still it was very nice to be able to pray while I worked.

But this morning it was a special treat. I played the podcast on my phone as I got myself and the children dressed for Mass and was very pleasantly surprised to hear them chanting the psalms instead of the usual recitation. This is how the psalms are meant to be heard! I’m guessing that they only do it for Sunday’s office because I’ve never heard it before; but perhaps someday they may move to chanting all the hours? I can hope.

Daria has been writing about chanting the psalms over at her blog. As I told her, I’ve been wanting to learn to chant the psalms for a long time; but I don’t read music and don’t think I’m likely to learn anytime soon. I know musical people tell me it’s not that hard to learn to read chant notation; but I just don’t think it’s something I’m going to be able to pick up. The beauty of chant is suppose d to be that you don’t have to be musically trained in order to learn it. I think I could learn the chants by ear if I heard them often enough. So here’s hoping that more resources become available for people like me .

Recently Daria of the Coffee and Canticles blog had a lovely post titled Worth Doing Badly in which she responds to a promoter of the Liturgy of the hours who stressed the importance of praying on a schedule, finding a quiet time and place for contemplation. Daria says, yes, that is the ideal but suggests that there is a danger in making the perfect the enemy of the good enough. I love what she says about praying the liturgy of the hours in less than ideal circumstances :

And when I think back to the years of homeschooling/raising seven children and just trying to remember to do Morning and Evening Prayer…if I had imagined back then that a monastic schedule and a place of peace were required, I would have given up a long time ago.  And maybe wouldn’t be doing it today.

Daria goes on to describe her own less than perfect prayer sessions:

Even now, Evening Prayer is likely to be read in the midst of fixing dinner. A pslam here, check the recipe there, another psalm, flip the pork chops, pour that child a drink before he spills it all over the counter, shoo the cat off the counter, do the reading while peeling the carrots, find the Magnificat antiphon, answer the phone, go find the Magnificat antiphon again, no, go find the breviary which has gone missing—there it is, a little one took it and is practicing writing the letter M on it’s pages, read the antiphon again, say the Magnificat from memory, call someone to set the table, escape for a moment to read the intercessions while the food simmers, yell at a child to put on your coat, it’s cold out there, and don’t go past the swing set because dinner is almost ready, pray the Our Father and concluding prayer. Take a deep breath. May the Lord bless us, protect us from every evil and bring us to everlasting life.

Yes, yes, I should do Evening Prayer after dinner. But no, we’re going out this evening so that won’t happen. Before dinner? It just doesn’t seem like Evening at 4:00 PM, and chances are, that’s when I’m tardily getting around to Daytime Prayer. (That “choose one” feature for mid-morn, midday, and midafternoon must have been designed by the Holy Spirit with me in mind.)

Now, I know the above dinner-prep Vespers sounds awful to some people. And no,its not the ideal way to do things. Some would say it’s better to skip it altogether than to pray it like that.

Problem is, if I skipped prayer every time the conditions for it were less than optimal, I’d be likely to lose the habit altogether. For me, consistency is important. Not consistency in schedule. Not consistency in a prayerful environment. But consistency in the daily slog of getting it done.

I love Daria’s description of her “badly done” evening prayer in the midst of chaos. I really needed to read it recently and I thought I’d pass it on to other mothers struggling to pray in the chaos of the trenches of motherhood.

Since reading it I’ve started trying to pray morning prayer while cooking breakfast on those days when I don’t get up before the kids instead of waiting to try to find a quiet time after breakfast that may or may not appear. It’s been a gift. I’ve allowed myself to pray daytime prayer while hiding in the bathroom and to pray evening prayer while brushing my teeth. Giving myself permission to stop looking for the quiet place but to just pray in the midst of the chaos was exactly what I needed right now as the quiet places in my day have seemed to dry up recently. It’s been like looking for a creek in Texas in August. There just isn’t anything there. I’ve been so frustrated.

Even though I’ve never held myself up to some sort of ideal of ordered peacefulness and have learned to pray with the kids climbing all over me, I guess I was still clinging to the notion that I should try to find time to sit down and devote my full attention. Letting go of that has really been a blessing.

Daria also has a follow-up post in which she adds:

My only followup is to make this suggestion to Melanie and all moms (and dads) who put down their breviary to attend to Life, only to see it sitting there several hours later and realize that one never got past the second psalm of the hour, and now it’s time for the next hours to be prayed.  Don’t try to go back and finish that earlier hour.  Imagine that your guardian angel finished it for you, since that is in fact what he did.  Your guardian angel, and the millions of believers all over the world. Sort of like when you get up at mass to take a child to the bathroom. You wouldn’t feel you had to go back and recite the prayers you’d missed to “catch up” to the others. No, because they prayed the mass for you. That’s called the communion of saints.

Oh what a lovely thought that is. And on that note, I suppose I should stop staring at the computer and go to bed.

First, you absolutely must visit Coffee and Canticles, a wonderful new blog dedicated to the Liturgy of the Hours. Daria is a Catholic mom, not any kind of expert. But to my mind that makes her the perfect person to speak to other moms. Sometimes expertise is helpful; at other times it rather gets in the way. The expert can be so steeped in the material he knows that he forgets how to relate it to his audience.

I love her very useful Divine Office Boot Camp and other How To posts that break it down into short, useful lessons in the nitty gritty of the mechanics of navigating the materials.

I love asides like this one because I do the exact same thing:

In fact, I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t always pray the Invitatory psalm before Morning prayer. Since I know it by heart I often say it as I’m getting out of bed in the morning. Later, when I do morning prayer, I open with “O God come to my assistance…”  This custom of mine is not in the rubrics. It’s just my way of getting into the day’s office well before I go downstairs and figure out where I left my breviary. Luckily we lay folk are not bound to do everything according to regulation. In fact we are encouraged to adapt the Divine Office to our situation.

I’ve also enjoyed some of her thoughts on the Psalms that she’s shared. If you pray the office for any length of time, you begin to develop your favorites. I find that hearing about particular psalms or verses that speak to someone else often gives me new appreciation for those psalms or verses, helps me to see them in a new way. It’s a great way to realize that we are all in this together, praying as one body, and that words that feel empty to me may very well be exactly what someone else needs to nourish them today.

Daria also writes helpful posts answering possible objections the newcomer might have:

• But that is, like, sooooooo Old Testament!
• But my soul isn’t filled with evils

Have I gushed enough? Convinced you to put her blog on your list of must reads yet? There’s so much more there that I haven’t shared. You really should go check it out for yourself.

A few more items I’ve gleaned in recent weeks:

In the same vein of mom bloggers posting about the psalms, Misty’s Mornings recently wrote about finding new relevance in a psalm that had previously baffled her: Praying the Psalms {Psalm 60}. I love those moments of insight! 

At Abigail’s Alcove, my favorite Third Order Carmelite mommy blogger, offers some advice on how to pray the Liturgy of the Hours.

Praying with the Cosmos, the first in a series of posts about the divine office at The Way of Beauty blog (HT Amy Welborn):

If we pray in harmony with rhythms and patterns of the cosmos, especially the cycles of the the sun, the moon and the stars, then the whole person, body and soul, is conforming to the order of heaven. The daily repetitions, the weekly, monthly and season cycles of the liturgy allow us to do just that. In his book, the Spirit of the Liturgy, Pope Benedict XVI calls our apprehension of this order, when we see the beauty of Creation a glimpse into ‘the mind of the Creator’. This conformity in prayer opens us up so that we are drawing in the breath of the Spirit, so to speak, as God chooses to exhale. It increases our receptivity to inspiration and God’s consoling grace and leads us more deeply into the mystery of the Mass.

Part 2: How all human work can be inspired; Part 3: Prayer of the Heart – How to Engage the Whole Person in Prayer.
(These posts are a little more formal and academic in tone and are perhaps not so friendly to beginners; but offer some beautiful insights into The Liturgy of the Hours.)

The Chant Cafe invites you to Sing Compline for Lent. While I don’t find this quite basic enough for me (a complete non-singer) to pick up and sing the Office, I’m sure someone will find it helpful.

St. Francis de Sales’ four steps for putting yourself in the presence of God.

This blog post from Jennifer at Conversion Diary is particularly timely for me. When I discussed my prayer life in my last confession, one of the questions Father asked me was whether I spent time putting myself in the presence of God before I began praying. I had to admit I often skip this smal but important step. I’ve been trying to be more mindful of it. These four tips from St Francis de Sales that Jen shares are invaluable. I’m glad she posted them because I’ve been meaning to go look them up and haven’t had the chance to do so

For further reference, here’s a list of my previous Liturgy of the Hours posts.

One of my favorite bloggers, Leila of Like Mother Like Daughter, wrote recently about how she won’t write about her prayer life. She’s a wise woman, much more so than I am. I think I’m probably a fool who rushes in where angels fear to tread.

When it comes to prayer, I’m really like a child reading at the level of “the fat cat sat on the mat.” I know my letters and the sounds they make and I can string them together to make words; but there’s a whole world of literature out there that is still inaccessible to me. So my writing about how to pray, daring to advise others about how to pray is perhaps like the blind leading the blind. Though in his book on the Psalms, C.S. Lewis argues to excuse his audacity in tackling a subject he knew that he was singularly unfit for that sometimes when a boy is learning math and gets stuck he’s better off turning to a fellow student than to a teacher because the teacher no longer remembers what it’s like not to know how to work that kind of problem while for the fellow student his own recent mastery of it is quite fresh in his memory.

So that’s my excuse. I’ve been praying the Liturgy of the Hours for—goodness is it eight or nine years now?—anyway, for a while and so I’ve got some experience under my belt. And yet I remember very clearly what it was like when I was just getting started. And I know what it is to struggle. To fall down and forget how to pray regularly, to pull myself back up again and start over when I’ve let the habits lapse. I’m a work in progress and if any of my experience helps someone else, well then thanks be to God that it is so. For whatever reason, I feel compelled to tackle this subject again and again, to seek help and inspiration from my fellow travelers on this journey and in my own turn to reach back to lend a hand to those who are climbing behind me.

So now if you haven’t decided to kill me because of all my cliches and mixed metaphors and rambling going nowhere introductory and exculpatory thoughts, I’ll get to the actual topic at hand: the question.

I’ve got a question for you about praying the Liturgy of the Hours.

I’ve had the app on my new iphone since just before Christmas, and sometimes I only get to pray it in the mornings, but I’m really enjoying it. I do sometimes find it overwhelming though, and I feel like I’ve missed out when I get to the end but find that there isn’t anything that remains in my mind to take with me into my day. I’m familiar with lectio divina, and I’ve used the Irish Jesuits’ online prayer sacredspace.ie on and off for a couple of years. When I read the bible, which isn’t every day by any means, I like to read until I find something that resonates with me, and then I stop and take that thought or word into my day. So I do find there is a lot to read through with the Liturgy of the Hours. I kind of understand that the complementary psalms are to be used only at the day time hours, but if I’m only doing it once a day then I feel like I should get through the whole thing.

I guess my language says it all - I do sometimes feel like it’s something I “should… get through” which takes away much of the joy for me.

Do you have any suggestions? Is there something I don’t understand?

It’s not surprising that it’s overwhelming. I think it does take time to ease into learning how to pray the liturgy of the hours. There is a lot there and if it’s not at all what you’re used to, it can be a lot to get through, a lot to absorb.

I know some people start slow. They read just one or two of the psalms and some of the prayers. That’s probably not a bad idea. I think one fault I have is the need to finish, to complete it. I will sometimes rush to get through if I feel I’m short on time or I worry I might be interrupted. But I think the feeling like I need to get through it all is probably a stumbling block to my actually entering into prayer. I suspect that a few lines prayed deeply would be more beneficial to me than an entire office prayed at breakneck speed.

I know too well that feeling that there’s something I’m just not getting or that I don’t understand. I’ve often experienced getting to the end and having nothing to carry with me though the day. Sometimes they’re just… words on paper or on the screen. They hardly register in my mind at all and then they are gone. Am I praying? Am I just spinning my wheels? How do you pray anyway? What does that mean? Usually, I’m pretty sure I’m doing it wrong. But I muddle through anyway. I figure trying is better than not trying. And who knows maybe I’ll eventually get better with practice. Is praying like playing the piano or riding a bike? (Not that I’ve ever learned to do either.) Or is doing it wrong over and over and over again only reinforcing bad habits that some day I’ll have to unlearn? I understand that this whole venture is fraught with doubt and perplexity.

I swing back and forth between feeling that the prayers are something “I should get though” and feeling like they really do nourish me with words that speak to my heart. But you know, I don’t think either one is really a completely wrong attitude. On the one hand it would seem obvious that it is better to pray with one’s whole heart and one’s whole mind and to really listen and heed the words. But on the other hand I also do think there’s a virtue in pushing through when I don’t feel it and, yes, even when I’m just putting in my time and getting through it because I feel like I should. All of us are human and frail and our minds wander. Certainly distraction in prayer is something we should push against; but at the same time whether we experience consolations or dryness in prayer is not fully in our control either. God will give us consolations or withhold them according to his own designs and not our desires or perceived needs.

I know there are times when some things I can control will effect my prayer life. If I’ve been avoiding confession, it becomes harder to pray. If I haven’t been getting enough sleep, if becomes harder to pray. If I don’t really put forth the effort to settle myself in quiet and if I hurry through the prayers, it is harder to pray. But sometimes I am sleepy through no fault of my own. I’m a mother of small children and even if I get to bed at a reasonable hour I can have very interrupted sleep. Likewise for making a quiet space in the day. Sometimes it’s not within my power to find a time when I can pray without interruption. So I just do the best I can to get through the prayers while a toddler is climbing on me and when the two year-old is demanding I put a diaper on her dolly and all the other myriad interruptions that can and do happen.

I don’t think its entirely wrong to just sit down and “get through” the prayers if that’s the best you can do on a given day. God knows our hearts and our intentions and our weaknesses and there is also an objective reality to what we get out of our prayer beyond what we feel like we are getting out of it. When I go to Mass and receive the Eucharist, I receive Christ whether I am feeling particularly close to him or not, whether I feel refreshed or not, he is feeding me. Sometimes what impedes that feeling is my own lack of will but sometimes he allows us to not feel any consolation because consolation is not what we need at that point in time. I think sometimes I walk away from my prayers not feeling particularly refreshed because what I need is not to feel refreshed but to have my will strengthened. God wants us to turn to him even when it doesn’t yield an immediate reward of good feeling, even when it feels empty and rote. A friend likened it to when you are trying to help a baby learn to walk how you stand him up and then let go and move away a little bit so that he has to totter a few steps under his own power. Likewise, God wants us to approach him under our own power and seeking him for his own sake and not for the happy feelings we receive in prayer.

I like the idea of looking for a phrase or word or thought to carry with me through the rest of the day. But I’m not sure I could force it. Though I do think I could be more receptive to listening for it. I don’t know, perhaps it’s best to ask God to grant you that favor, but then to be ready to accept ‘no’ as an answer? Listen for something but if nothing speaks to you, let go of the need? Because if you really need it, God will provide.

I do sometimes have that happen. Yesterday morning Dom had to leave early for a meeting in Cambridge. He said goodbye to me while it was still dark and I was still asleep. So I was solo getting the kids up and making breakfast. I was sleepy and didn’t get up before the children woke me so I didn’t have a quiet time to pray before they needed me to change diapers and serve breakfast. Then I had another OB appointment and so had to rush out the door before I had a chance to sit and pray.

So I did my usual rush through the Invitatory Psalm (Psalm 95 which I’ve memorized by reciting it daily for years and years) while I got out of bed and began to face the day. For Morning Prayer I found my oasis of quiet in the car on my drive to the OB. I put on the Morning Prayer podcast from DivineOffice.org and prayed as I drove.

One phrase jumped out at me. It was from the Reading, from the book of Wisdom.

  Wisdom 7:13-14

  Simply I learned about Wisdom, and ungrudgingly do I share—
  her riches I do not hide away;
  For to men she is an unfailing treasure;
  those who gain this treasure win the friendship of God,
  to whom the gifts they have from discipline commend them.

That final line “to whom the gifts they have from discipline commend them” tugged at me. In the moments of quiet that the podcast so beautifully gives for contemplation (I’m bad about doing that when I read the office on my own) I pondered it. What does it mean “the gifts they have from discipline”? What kind of discipline?

Suddenly I recalled all the various times I’ve found myself lamenting my lack of self discipline. And I felt a little nudge. Perhaps instead of seeking self-discipline, what I instead need to be trying to submit myself to God’s discipline. The discipline of his wisdom rather than my own folly.

I’m still not exactly sure what that means. I’ve got more pondering to do. But I suspect it means more listening and less trying to impose my own ideas about order and structure. Letting go of my need for control and instead allowing Him to take the reins.

Has this answered any of your questions? Or am I totally misreading them? I hope at least I’ve been able to show you that as long as I’ve been praying I still don’t have it all figured out. Some days I still feel I really know what I’m doing. I just do the best I can to muddle through. But I want beginners to know that that’s ok. Perhaps the one thing I’ve learned it that it’s not about doing it right or wrong; but about making a space in my life for meeting God.

I don’t always hear him. But to me a huge part of it is having the habit of daily prayer not getting it right every single day. I get into ruts when prayer becomes mechanical but because I am persistent, I am at least still giving God a window into my life.

All I know is that I have experienced many fruits in life through the discipline of the liturgy of the hours in whatever form I have approached it. How I pray and when and how much I get through in a day changes from season to season with pregnancy and new babies and moving and vacations and all sorts of factors. I’ve come to recognize that there is an ebb and flow. Sometimes I am more faithful than others. And yet I keep coming back, even after falling away for weeks and weeks I find it nags at me, calls to me. I feel empty when I am not filling myself from that stream.

Just for easy reference, I thought I’d gather together a list of all the blog posts I’ve written about praying the Liturgy of the Hours. (Hereafter abbreviated as LOTH) For my own use when I want to find them. Also for anyone else who is interested in finding out more about the liturgy of the hours; seeing how I pray the hours in my home; finding tips on how to pray Liturgy of the Hours when you are a mother with infants and toddlers.

I’ve arranged the links chronologically. And included the date each was posted in parenthesis at the end, mainly for my own reference but also because it might be interesting to see the time frame and follow the development of my current approach.

The * indicates the posts I think are probably most useful.

*Motherhood and the Monastic Life
My thoughts on an essay I’d read called “The Domestic Monastery”. My first realization I could link prayer times with nursing times. (7/26/06)

Bedtime Prayers.
More about praying with toddlers than LOTH, though there is a brief mention of how I’m incorporating LOTH into my days. (7/8/07)

A Still, Small Voice
Sometimes in the midst of the busiest seasons of motherhood of motherhood, pregnant and caring for a small toddler, God grants the gift of quiet prayer time through the seeming curse of insomnia. (8/14/07)

Holy Cards
Praying the Liturgy of the Hours with a toddler, using holy cards as a tool for distraction/redirection. (9/13/07)

* The Liturgy of the Hours in the Home, Christ in Our Hearts
A Christmastime reflection, mainly providing links to other bloggers writing about incorporating the Liturgy of the Hours into their days; but also some thoughts on perseverance in prayer, dealing with interruptions, pregnancy and postpartum periods and quotes from Pope Benedict on uniting one’s voice with the celestial choirs. (12/29/07)

Isabella and the Liturgy of the Hours
A brief explanation of how I encourage 2 year-old Bella to pray with me. (6/26/08)

Review : divineoffice.org Liturgy of the Hours Website and Podcast
My review of the Divine Office podcast. (3/30/09)

Praying the Psalms
Thoughts on persistence in praying the LOTH in hard times. Stories about picking it back up after I’ve drifted away. How I modify my expectations during pregnancy and when I have a new baby. (7/2/09)

I Love You, Lord, You Are My Strength: Benedict’s Birth (Part 2)
A blog post about how the LOTH helped me to get through the birth of my son (via c-section). Not for the faint of heart; but a glimpse into the way in which praying the LOTH has helped me through times of difficulty. (7/21/09)

*Praying the Psalms: or the Liturgy of the Hours for Dummies
This is my master post with tons of links I wrote to be a sort of introduction to LOTH: what it is and how do you get started. Suggestions for books and websites and all sorts of other resources. (7/25/09)

Brief review of the iBreviary application for iPod and iPhone
This is already a little dated as they have since released a new version. (9/23/09)

* Bella’s Compline 
My reflections on praying night prayer, otherwise known as compline, with my 3 year-old daughter. I include the full text of our modified version of compline. (2/25/10)

* Prayer Interrupted: The Liturgy of the Hours for Mothers of Little Ones
Originally written as a comment on a blog post at bearing blog as an encouragement to a mother who is discouraged about her ability to find time to pray LOTH when there are so many interruptions and distractions and she is so tired when she does get a bit of quiet. I tried to include all the helpful tips I could. (8/2/10)

* Questions about Praying the Liturgy of the Hours
Responses to several questions from a friend who is beginning to pray the hours. (1/30/11)

* Resources for the Liturgy of the Hours
A list of links from various sites around the web. (3/8/11)