The Liturgy of the Hours (Part 2)

The sanctification of time

Since the event of Jesus' saving Paschal Mystery, Christians do not comprehend the passage of days, seasons, and years as the world does, but rather as moments charged with the grandeur of God and bathed in the light of the Resurrection. Christians observe time in the light of the Easter Mystery because Christ entered into our human history, redeemed it, and set it on a path, which leads ultimately to fulfillment and consummation in God.

Even the weekly cycle of Christian life is caught up in this Paschal celebration. Pope John Paul II in his Apostolic Letter Dies Domini draws our attention back to the celebration of a "weekly Easter". Everything in the week proceeds from Sunday and returns to it since the celebration of the Lord's Day gives orientation and scope to living Christian discipleship during the week.

The rediscovery of the Liturgy of the Hours by the lay faithful responds to a felt need to sanctify time and reclaim a properly Christian sense of time. The pace of modem life is a tremendous force that impacts on basic understandings of self, family, work, faith, and religious practice. There is a growing divorce between the life of faith and life "in the world." Indeed, such is the pace of life that people need to be reminded to do what ought to come naturally, that is, to "take time" for themselves, for God, and for family and friends. The Liturgy of the Hours and its attention to the consecration of time is one way to counter this prevailing trend and to restore a sense of balance to daily life.

One of the values of this prayer is its power to shape our outlook on daily living, as was summarized most succinctly by an inmate at San Quentin State Penitentiary in California who participated in a course on the Liturgy of the Hours. His observation was straightforward: "Do time or time will do you." In other words, by consecrating time to God, the human person acts as a subject, cooperating with God in the unfolding of redeemed time, rather than being reduced to a mere object, suffering under the burden of a lived time that seems to go nowhere.

Being swept away by the rush of time will inevitably lead to dissatisfaction, alienation, and loneliness. Christians need not resign themselves to becoming so swept away, however. The integration of prayer into one's daily schedule is key! Without this integration, the Christian risks losing a sense of identity in God and the realization of one's need to be drawn into life-giving relationships with others. Consecrating the moments of one's day means turning the day over to the transforming power of the Resurrection. The vehicle of the Liturgy of the Hours prompts the believer to encounter God in the concrete moment so that the love of God in Christ becomes the cord that holds the day together. "Do time or time will do you," is the wisdom which arises out of the hard lesson of prison but which speaks eloquently of the situation of the modem world.

The prayer of the whole church

The prayer of the Hours is not the prayer of a few or of a clerical caste within the Church, but the prayer of the Church. A thorough consideration of the history and development of the Liturgy of the Hours is well beyond the scope of this present reflection. It is enough to say that over the course of its complex history, the Liturgy of the Hours moved from the regular liturgical experience of the Christian community to being understood as solely the domain of the clergy.⁶ The reexamination of that history in the liturgical renewal of this century has led to a reaffirmation of the Liturgy of the Hours as a prayer of the entire People of God, both lay and clerical.

The expression of generous, intercessory prayer embodied in the prayer of the Hours is a work of baptismal grace. It invites Christians of all walks of life to sanctify their daily lives, lifting the world and the needs of all in prayer to the generative love of the Trinity. As a prayer that unites individual men and women of faith into one heart and voice of praise, the Liturgy of the Hours has a communal dimension that is essential. Understood as the prayer of the whole Church, the Hours allows the individual to enter into an intimacy with the whole community of disciples, expressing solidarity in concern for the needs of the Church and the world.

Pope John Paul II, perhaps sensing that the beginning of the Third Millennium is the time for a flowering of the Liturgy of the Hours in the hearts and minds of the Church's members, invites all Catholics in his letter Novo millenio ineunte to make their communities thrive with "an all-pervading climate of prayer." This can be accomplished in many ways, but "perhaps it is more thinkable that we usually presume for the average day of a Christian community to combine the many forms of... witness in the world with the celebration of the Eucharist and the recitation of Lauds and Vespers."⁷ This vision of the Pope is a powerful witness to Christian solidarity as Christians throughout the world take up the same prayer.