We owe it to our King to prepare ourselves for His royal banquet, His wedding feast, and the Church has given us an abundance of ways in which we can do that: the Divine Office; Eucharistic Adoration; Lectio Divina; Confession; the Rosary; and so forth. The Mass is the crown jewel, to be sure, but it is not the entire crown; indeed, the jewel is given its appropriate place by the other materials that hold it and complement it.The Divine Office
After the Mass, the most important public prayer offered by the Catholic Church is the Divine Office, a “sacrifice of praise” consisting of psalms, prayers, canticles, hymns, and readings divided into particular “hours” such as Lauds (morning prayer), Vespers (evening prayer), and Compline (night prayer). The shape and content of these magnificent liturgies come down to us from the monks of antiquity — in the West, above all from St. Benedict and the monastic empire inspired by his example and his Rule.
Characteristic of the Benedictine way of life is the sanctification of time through a calmly recurring cycle of prayer that permeates the day and night. In addition to the celebration of the Mass, the traditional Benedictine monk or nun prays communally seven times a day and once in the middle of the night, with the long office called Matins. In this way they fulfill what is said in the Book of Psalms: “Seven times a day I praise you” (118, 164), “I rose at midnight to give praise to thee” (118, 62), and “the just man meditates on the law day and night” (1, 2).
How beautiful is this patient, persevering dedication to set times of prayer, in order that the whole of time — the whole span of the day and stretch of the week, the month’s reach and the cycle of seasons, the passing years and decades and centuries, all of this human time — may be divinized, offered up to its unchanging Lord, penetrated with His grace, pregnant with sacred meaning and fruitful with a host of virtues!
This is the monastic life, this is the angelic life (says the Byzantine tradition), and we lay people are called to imitate it in some fashion, according to our ways and means. While the schedule of most modern lay people does not make it particularly easy to pray the Divine Office, it is often possible to find enough time in the morning for a short office like Prime, or in the evening for Vespers, or before bedtime for Compline. In fact, I am given to understand that before the Council, some used the expression “Prime and Compline Catholics” to refer to laity who made these two short hours the bookends of their day.
Being composed almost entirely from Scripture, the Divine Office is the most natural way to become intimately familiar with the Word of God, which will form our minds and hearts as Catholics. Lectio divina and the Divine Office fit together like hand in glove.
Sacred Conception of Time
It has struck me over the years how infrequently Catholics reflect on, or are even aware of, the difference between the secular conception of time and the sacred conception of time. Isaac Newton introduced the notion of absolute space and time, where space is seen as a giant grid of Cartesian coordinates, and time is seen as an equable ticking of a clock, all seconds, minutes, and hours being equal. This may be called temporal egalitarianism.
The premodern notion of time, in contrast, sees it as hierarchical, organic, and malleable. The day is understood to have a spiritually significant rhythm from dawn to noon to dusk to night, and each one of these parts has its own character, its own “weight” and role in the spiritual life, not to mention its function as a sign. The week has an internal dynamism emanating from the Sunday past and straining towards the Sunday to come, with certain days connected customarily to certain mysteries or saints, above all Friday’s connection to the Passion (hence, the rule of abstinence from flesh meat on the day when the flesh of God was crucified). Into the seasons of the year the great mysteries of the Catholic faith are woven, so that the cycle of nature mysteriously symbolizes the cycle of grace, each providing a key to the other. In short, the Catholic mind sees time as differentiated by days and seasons of feasting and fasting, by Sundays and Solemnities, by memorials, novenas, and processions.
As individuals and as communities, we should strive in big and little ways to live out a properly Catholic sense of time, understanding the calendar of days, weeks, and months as a recurrent cycle of celebrations of different persons—especially Our Lord and His Mother, but also the saints and angels. We should try to be aware of the Church calendar. “Whose feast is it today?” ought to be a question we ask every morning. Do we know when it is a major feast, e.g., the Nativity or Birthday of Our Lady, or the Exaltation of the Holy Cross? On the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, one might choose to pray the Stations of the Cross or the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. If it’s the feast day of a saint, we should invoke that saint in our prayer, think about him or her, and congratulate a fellow Catholic who shares the saint’s name.
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The traditional Roman calendar |
Levels of Time: (1) The Year
At the level of the year, numerous and profound are the differences between ecclesial time and secular time, especially in an explicitly secular country like the United States. For example, our secular year begins on January 1st, but the Western Church’s year begins with the First Sunday of Advent, while the Eastern Church’s begins in September.
The weeks before Christmas are a time of quiet expectancy (even called by the Eastern tradition “little Lent”), whereas they are an orgy of fake Christmas music and commercialism in the surrounding secular culture. Americans celebrate a Puritan Thanksgiving once a year, whereas Catholics celebrate thanksgiving every day with the Eucharistia, a Greek word that means “Thanksgiving.” Nowadays there are witches who dance around on the summer and winter solstices, but we have always celebrated these astronomical events by our own feasts: the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ in December and the Nativity of St. John the Baptist in June. As St. John himself said: “He must increase, I must decrease.” John’s birthday is observed right around the time when daylight begins to lessen; Jesus is born right around the time when daylight begins to lengthen. Easter, for us, lasts two months, whereas in the secular world it lasts for one weekend of bunny rabbits and chocolate.
The United States gives days off for things like dead presidents, dead soldiers, and labor; we Catholics celebrate the living saints who are at rest in heaven. When you start to think about it, the whole mentality is different. We need to be spiritually attuned to the universal Church calendar rather than taking our bearings from the secular and American. Not that we should disdain our secular holidays, but they are not holydays, and our own true and proper holydays should take precedence.
Levels of Time: (2) The Week
The week has a kind of sacred rhythm, beginning from and culminating in Sunday, the “Little Easter.” The secular world’s week is five days of work and two days of rest and relaxation to kick back and do whatever you feel like doing (which usually means taking it easy on Saturday and mowing the grass or doing other forbidden manual labor on Sunday).
The Christian perspective is different. There are six days of work, and one day of genuine rest—a rest of worship and prayer, of feasting and rejoicing with one’s family and friends. That is more than, and better than, mere “R&R.” We resist the reduction of the Lord’s Day to mere “time off” when we make Sunday Mass the pinnacle not only of Sunday but of the entire week. We get dressed up. We take time to prepare before Mass and make a thanksgiving afterwards, circumstances permitting. Perhaps one can come back to the chapel later on in the day to pray. In any event, one should not be thinking “what’s the most convenient way to get Mass over with so that I can get back to work or get out to play.” Sunday is not merely a means to something else; it is an image or echo of the ultimate end itself. In fact, for the Church Fathers, Sunday is a symbol of heaven and eternal life, so the way we treat Sunday is a bit like telling God what we think of the end or goal of our lives.
Levels of Time: (3) The Day
The day has its own internal rhythm. Not all hours are equal.
The morning, upon first waking, is the best time to consecrate our day to the Lord. When we retire for bed is the best time to examine our conscience, express sorrow for our sins, and commend our day’s work and our soul to God before entering the “little death” of sleep.
The source and summit of the day should be the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The Eucharist is the sun from which all grace radiates, so if we want to be in the sun, we have to put ourselves in its direct rays. If one goes to morning Mass, one is establishing the day on its foundation, and the rest of the day flows from it. If one goes to Mass at or around noon, one is approaching it as a kind of peak or summit towards which the morning rises and from which the afternoon descends, a centerpoint on which the day is poised. If one goes to Mass in the evening, one is gathering up the day’s work into an offering to be made to the Lord.
It’s good for us to be consciously aware of the meaning that belongs to the choices we make and the actions we perform, so that we can leverage that awareness for our spiritual benefit. Moreover, it is highly praiseworthy to form a specific intention for each Mass one attends: “Lord, I desire to offer up this Holy Sacrifice with you for [X, Y, or Z].” By doing this, you have invested yourself in the Mass—something is at stake for you.
Holiness Above All
A last word about holiness. Blessed Ildefons Schuster, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan until his death in 1954, said this to his seminarians a few days before his death:
I have no memento to give you apart from an invitation to holiness. It would seem that people are no longer convinced by our preaching; but faced with holiness, they still believe, they still fall to their knees and pray. People seem to live ignorant of supernatural realities, indifferent to the problems of salvation. But when an authentic saint, living or dead, passes by, all run to be there…. Do not forget that the devil is not afraid of our [parish] sports fields and of our movie halls: he is afraid, on the other hand, of our holiness.In the battle for souls that is raging in the world around us (and within us), holiness will always take precedence over any other weapon we can fight with. If we want to make the kingdom of God present in time, our holiness, which is inseparably linked with our life of prayer, is truly what comes first and last. Without it, we do not make God’s kingdom present, no matter how much we build, how much we persuade, how much we campaign and conquer the field. With God’s grace in our souls, however, even the smallest things we do gain inestimable value, while the great things we attempt are blessed—not necessarily with success as the world understands it, but with a fruitfulness that touches many souls. In the words of Blaise Pascal:
Do the little things as though they were great things, remembering that the majesty of Christ within us works them and lives our life; and do the great things as though they were no more than little things easily done, remembering the power of Christ within us.