Because It's Time | Ora, Et Cetera
If we are called to pray without ceasing, how do we do it?
Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.
1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 KJV
Last year, I wrote in my work newsletter about taking a retreat at a Benedictine monastery in southern Indiana. One of the main takeaways of that experience was showing up to prayer with the monks at regularly scheduled times throughout the day:
The schedule of prayer was the perfect shock absorber. After I checked into my room and got my things put away, I started feeling antsy. What do I do? Pretty soon it was five o’clock. Ah yes, let’s go to prayer with the monks. The monks don’t pray because they feel like it. They pray because it’s time.
They pray because it’s time.
This resonated strongly with me as I returned home from the retreat. Because I had spent a few years in college studying to be a Catholic priest1, I was familiar with the Church’s Liturgy of the Hours, so I started trying to pick up the rhythm of prayer at home. In January of this year, I started committing to praying all five2 of the hours each day.
My wife, Emily—who has joined me for much of the journey this year—and I have both commented at how much more readily scripture is on our minds and in our hearts since prayer has become more regular in our lives.
What’s involved in this kind of prayer, and how can it be structured?
Praying the Psalms
The first thing to know about praying the Liturgy of the Hours is that’s essentially an act of praying the psalms at various times of day. And I really mean praying the psalms, not a bible study or even Lectio Divina, but rather prayer, joining with the psalmist to raise our voices to the Father.
They remind us of God’s compassion and mercy:
As a father has compassion on his children,
the LORD’s compassion is on those who fear him.
For he knows of what we are made;
he remembers that we are dust. (Psalm 103:13-143)
And his majesty:
O LORD, our Lord, how majestic
is your name through all the earth!
Your majesty is set above the heavens. (Psalm 8:2)
And sorrow:
I am wearied with with crying aloud;
my throat is parched.
My eyes are wasted away
with waiting for my God. (Psalm 69:4)
Another reason we pray the psalms is because Jesus prayed the psalms:
He too, as we well know, took part in the public prayers of the synagogue—when ‘as was his custom’[19] he entered on the Sabbath—and in the prayers of the temple which he called a house of prayer.[20] He also said those private prayers which pious Jews were accustomed to say every day. He said the customary blessings over meals, as is expressly narrated in the multiplication of the loaves,[21] at the Last Supper,[22] and at the meal in Emmaus;[23] he likewise sang the psalms with his disciples.[24]4
When we show up to pray the psalms throughout the day, we enter into a prayer that Christ made to the Father throughout his life here on earth. The psalms shape both our prayer and our lives.
Prayer Schedule
Since I began this post by reflecting on my time on retreat with the Benedictine monks at St. Meinrad Archabbey, let’s revisit their prayer schedule:
5:30 am Vigils (Office of Readings) and Lauds (Morning Prayer)
7:30 am Mass
Noon Noon Prayer (Daytime Prayer)
5:00 pm Vespers (Evening Prayer)
7:00 pm Compline (Night Prayer)
If words like “Vigils” and “Vespers” have no meaning for you, no worries; I’ll explain that in a future post. For now I’m just focused on the schedule of prayer. You can clearly see how prayer is the foundational element of each day’s schedule. It’s not something they “fit in” to their schedule. It is their schedule—everything else fits around prayer.
Taking the monastic schedule of prayer as a model, I wanted to find something where prayer became a critical part of my schedule, but adapted for a domestic family life. Here’s the prayer schedule I came up with for a given weekday:
4:30 am Office of Readings (with Emily)
~7:00 am Morning Prayer (family can optionally join)
~Midday Daytime Prayer (in private)
~5:00 pm Evening Prayer (family can optionally join)
8:00 pm Night Prayer (with entire family)
Let’s start with what I’m not prioritizing. My fellow Catholics might be surprised to discover that, except for Sundays, I’m not prioritizing going to daily mass. I’m a layman. Unlike the monks, whose work takes place adjacent to where they worship, I have to go out of my way to get to a physical church for mass. At least for where I’m at in my life right now, I’m prioritizing “showing up for prayer throughout the day” above going to daily mass (though I still try to make it to mass when my schedule allows).
How about that 4:30 AM start, yeah? We’ve only been doing this since January, and it will likely get shifted back as we get closer to summer, but the key takeaway is that we both start our day in prayer. We literally jump out of bed, use the bathroom, and then pray together. We don’t check our phones. We don’t waits until kids are waking us up. We start with prayer. This does marvels for our state of mind as we begin our day.
Another thing you might notice is that while I aim to pray Morning and Evening Prayer at consistent times, life happens, so I might shift it a little bit based on the family schedule. Daytime Prayer has the most flexibility. I almost always pray that on my own, either around lunch time or after picking up one of my kids from school.
Night Prayer we try to keep somewhat consistent, as it represents the end of the day for the family as a whole.
Get started praying “because it’s time”
The Catholic Liturgy of the Hours can be found for free online at DivineOffice.org. Even if you’re not Catholic, I recommend clicking through just to get a feel for the structure of the various hours, which will help you make sense of what I mean when I say things like “Office of Readings” or “Evening Prayer”. Also check out the free iBreviary app.
Also for Catholics, the one-volume Christian Prayer is a great way to to get started with a physical book, or pick up the four-volume breviary set if you’re feeling particularly ambitious and want to pray all the hours. I’ll save a full explanation for how to get started praying the Liturgy of the Hours for a later post.
If you’re not Catholic, or you’re otherwise looking for ways to “pray without ceasing” without necessarily diving into the liturgical prayer of the Catholic church, turn to the psalms. Before your morning devotional, choose three psalms (or parts, for longer psalms) and pray them. Begin and end your day with prayer. Structure time on your calendar where you intentionally step away from work and the busyness of life to revisit the Lord in prayer.
You might also check out Abbey Psalms and Canticles, which is a pocket-sized book of psalms and selected Old and New Testament canticles. It includes the complete schedule of the four-week psalter in the back. Part of the challenge in getting started praying the psalms is deciding which ones to pray. If you want to remove the guesswork but not have to worry about the full Catholic liturgical prayer, this might be a good place to start. You can also find a complete table online here.
When we shift our mindset away from “fitting in” prayer to instead structuring our activities around our intentional time for prayer, we can begin to say:
Blessed indeed is the man
who follows not the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the path with sinners,
nor abides in the company of scorners,
but whose delight is the law of the LORD,
and who ponders his law day and night.
He is like a tree that is planted
beside the flowing waters,
that yields its fruit in due season,
and whose leaves shall never fade;
and all that he does shall prosper. (Psalm 1:1-3)
I’ll have to share my full vocation story another time, but I’ll give the short version here. In my third year as a seminarian studying to be a priest, I felt a distinct call to the vocation of marriage. As a Roman Catholic, this meant I couldn’t be a priest because of the requirement that priests be celibate.
By “all five” I’m referring to the canonical requirement for ordained members of the Latin Catholic Church to pray the Office of Readings, Morning Prayer, one of the hours of Daytime Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Night Prayer, as articulated in Sacrosanctum Concilium of the Second Vatican Council in 1963.
There are of course other ways of numbering “all” the hours, both in monastic and other contexts, but for the purposes of this newsletter, when I refer to “all” the hours, I’m referring to what’s required today for clergy to meet their canonical obligation in regards to the Prayer of the Church.
Psalms are from The Abbey Psalms and Canticles, Magnificat, 2023
From the General Instruction on the Liturgy of the Hours, 1974, with footnotes referencing:
19 Lk 4:16.
20 Mt 21:13 par.
21 Mt 14:19 par, Mt 15:36 par.
22 Mt 26:26 par.
23 Lk 24:30.
24 Mt 25:30 par.