The Liturgy of the Hours in the Domestic Church

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After turning off the lights in the kids’ rooms at nighttime, Andrew Casad and his wife, Michelle, pray their own ad hoc version of the Liturgy of the Hours’ night prayer together with their school-aged children, Miriam and Joshua. It is the last thing they do together as a family before the children go to sleep. Andrew observed that he and Michelle found, accidentally, that this family prayer ritual “can create a sense of structure.” Night prayer imparts a peaceful, calming sense of closure to the end of the day.

The Liturgy of the Hours, also referred to as the Divine Office, Christian Prayer or the Roman Breviary, is a rich prayer resource for singles, married couples and entire families praying together as the domestic church.

Praying the Liturgy of the Hours as a family “makes a lot of these texts of the church familiar,” notes Andrew Casad, the former director of the Liturgy Office for the Archdiocese of Seattle.

What is the Liturgy of the Hours? It is “the daily prayer of the Church, marking the hours of each day and sanctifying the day with prayer,” according to the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Every day, all around the world, Catholics pray these same prayers together. This prayer “is truly the voice of the bride addressed to her bridegroom,” as the Second Vatican Council put it. “It is the very prayer which Christ Himself, together with His body, addresses to the Father.” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 84)

There are five canonical hours: the Office of Readings, Morning Prayer, Daytime Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Night Prayer. Each hour includes psalms, which lead up to a Scripture reading. Morning and Evening Prayer include petitions, which flow from the reading. The Office of Readings includes readings from classic writers in Christian spirituality.

Jim and Dierdre Pierson, of St. Michael Parish in Olympia, started praying the Liturgy of the Hours together in the early 1970s. They currently enjoy praying the Office of Readings together five to seven mornings a week. Jim testifies that it has fed him spiritually and provided an “incredible” education in Christian classics. He and his wife will often pause during their prayer to discuss what they read, or jump up to look something up.

“I’d be far less educated without it,” he said. “It’s so meaty, there’s so much there. It just draws us together as a couple. It unifies us, we get the same nurturing, we’re praying the same thing.” It also connects Jim and Dierdre with the liturgical seasons of the church.

The structure of this prayer is well-suited for praying aloud together, alternating stanzas of the psalms. Andrew Casad agrees: “It’s intrinsically dialogical. It’s really a key thing that’s there.” Jim notes: “It’s social, designed more for communal reading than personal reading.” This social aspect makes it perfect for prayer in households or fellowship groups.

Andrew and Jim both praised the way that praying the psalms opens one’s heart to the full range of human emotions. As Andrew put it, “Too often, people are reluctant to hold up in prayer emotions they think they shouldn’t have in prayer.” For instance, “Is it OK to be angry at God because my spouse died? Is it OK to go short today, because I’m really busy? The psalms give us permission to not hide our emotional states from God but to reveal them as we would to a deep friend, because we trust that relationship is deep and good.” This, in turn, “opens us up in our relationships with others.”

What advice would Andrew give families wanting to start this prayer practice? He recommends choosing just one “hour” and praying it daily. The prayer will become a sanctifying note in the rhythm of your daily life.

Originally posted on Northwest Catholic – March 2017