SURRENDER TO TEDIUM, SURRENDER TO THE PSALMS: PRAYING THE DIVINE OFFICE DURING LOCKDOWN

Detail of leaf from a fifteenth century Florentine psalter. Public domain.

In March 2020, I happened upon a brief video (source) in which cloistered Catholic nuns shared advice on social distancing ahead of impending regional lockdowns in the United States. In hindsight, the advice (exercise, fun, and prayer) is funny, a little hopeful, and certainly deeply unaware of the severity of what was really going to happen during the course of the next two and a half years. I had a similar mindset to many in my relatively privileged cohort—we were going to stay home, embark on new hobbies and skills, improve our lives. 

Inspired by these cloistered nuns, I decided I would indulge in cultivating my own little convent of one. I recommitted myself to praying Divine Office via the iBreviary app (link) for the thousandth time as a devotional practice. The Divine Office is the corporate prayer of the Roman Catholic Church, recited primarily by priests and religious sisters and brothers, but it has always had an intriguing aura of mystery to me. I’ve been acquainted with the Divine Office since college, amounting to a long and desultory decade-long relationship. At long last, spurred by lockdown and the lack of in-person Mass, I finally have made these prayers a part of my daily life. They’ve provided structure when my life lacked any other external scaffolding, they’ve helped me stay compassionate and soft-hearted in the face of a grueling pandemic, and over time, the Psalms have invited me deeper into prayer and toward contemplation. 

The Divine Office (the strange use of the English word ‘office’ comes from the Latin opus, or work; Opus Dei means “work of God”) emerges from the ancient Christian tradition of praying the hours, which in turn has its roots in the Jewish tradition of daily prayers in the morning, afternoon, and evening. For Christians, the desire is to accomplish that impossible task St. Paul sets before us: to “pray without ceasing.” This seems almost doable when there are traditionally seven canonical hours in the day. In the Roman Catholic Divine Office they consist of Matins (or Office of Readings), Lauds (Morning prayer), Terce, Sext, None (all of which are Daytime Prayers), Vespers (Evening prayer), and Compline (Night prayer). Matins, Lauds, and Vespers  are all considered major hours, and the remainder are minor hours with shorter readings. Each of these hours is imbued with meaning. We praise God in the morning; we lift our hands in thanksgiving to God in the evening. Terce, or the third hour of the day (said at around 9 A.M.), is when the Holy Spirit is said to have descended upon the Apostles. Sext, which is said around noon, is when, as Hippolytus the Roman wrote, “Christ was attached to the wood of the cross, the daylight ceased and became darkness. Thus you should pray a powerful prayer at this hour, imitating the cry of him who prayed and all creation was made dark...” Nones is around 3 P.M., the death of Christ and his descent into Hell. 

After the Second Vatican Council broke down many barriers within the Roman Catholic Church, the name Liturgy of the Hours came into wider use, and the Church explicitly invited lay people to pray alongside ordained priests and religious brothers and sisters. I have attempted to pray the hours in this context, but praying the hours takes on many different forms from East to West and across denominations. The number of hours differs, sometimes more, sometimes less. Some hours are combined in certain traditions. However, wherever the Office appears in Christendom, it always involves the Psalms.

I focused my pandemic-era spiritual efforts toward Morning and Evening prayer in particular. When Morning prayer is the first of the day, we read, “Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will proclaim your praise,” and continue with the invitatory, Psalm 95: “Come, let us sing to the Lord and shout with joy to the Rock who saves us.” Both Morning and Evening prayer involve two thematic Psalms and a Canticle, taken from the prophets or the epistles. Following that, we pray the Canticle of Zechariah in the morning (“Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; he has come to his people and set them free”) and the Canticle of Mary in the evening (“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior”). Then we say brief intercessions, the Our Father, and a short closing prayer.

It sounds complicated, but it isn’t at all. Still, I only really got the hang of the prayers and the structure when I gave in and purchased a one-volume paper copy (Christian Prayer) in January 2021. Despite my decade-long relationship with my iBreviary app, for the first time, I could easily visualize the structure of the Psalms and Canticles, and it no longer felt like slog of long, random prayers. As a beginner, I left out Solemnities and feasts at first to make things easier on myself—less page flipping—but the prayers gradually became routine, and I no longer needed to think about the ribbon bookmarks or getting lost. 

Then in a matter of months, the novelty wore off. As I added in feast days and Solemnities, I found myself growing annoyed with the sameness of the prayers, particularly Morning Prayer. On every Solemnity and many feast days, the Morning psalms and canticle are the exact same. We open with Psalm 63,  “Oh God, you are my God, for you I long; for you my soul is thirsting.” Then follows a Canticle from the Deuterocanonical version of the Book of Daniel that is lengthy and very repetitive, though beautiful. A quote from the middle goes, “Every shower and dew, bless the Lord. All you winds, bless the Lord. Fire and heat, bless the Lord. Cold and chill, bless the Lord. Dew and rain, bless the Lord. Frost and chill, bless the Lord. Ice and snow, bless the Lord…” and so on. When I first read it, I was charmed; however, I am no saint, and I have to admit it grates on me after a few readings. I rush through, mind wandering as I read. On some Solemnities, I simply read the weekday prayers for that day instead. Some days I skip it altogether. And there’s the drudgery of Ordinary Time, particularly the long stretch between Pentecost and Advent. With each Church season, there are different Antiphons (responses), different readings, but during Ordinary Time, there is only the four week cycle of Psalms over and over and over. This is broken up only by feasts, which more often than not, involve the aforementioned Morning prayers. 

There I was, with the riches of the Psalms, looking for yet another way to spice up my prayer life. 

I don’t remember how I came across the slim book, In Praise of the Useless Life, by Paul Quenon O.C.S.O., a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. I impulsively bought it in the spring of 2021 and devoured it, a memoir of a long life lived in a single place, singing the same Psalms forever, seeing the seasons come and go, watching fellow brothers die and pass on. It didn’t jolt me into fiery inspiration and newfound commitment to the Divine Office. Rather, I realized that if I wanted to grow in prayer, finding the Psalms and Canticles tedious was, in fact, a little immature. I recognize now that there is something to be gained by staying the course and reading the Psalms to myself, even when I am bored, even when I can’t stand to read “Oh God, you are my God” one more time. It sounds ridiculous even typing it out-- what a profound statement it is to meditate on! 

Embracing sameness has been especially meaningful and challenging in the context of the pandemic, when monotony was thrust on us by circumstances well outside of our control. The repetition of the Divine Office mirrors the repetition of lockdown life. Uncertainties about the pandemic still stretch on with the constant danger of new variants and waning immunity. By embracing lockdown sameness, I realized that life is life, even when it is tedious and uninteresting. “Real life” does not only consist of vacations, restaurants, concerts, theme parks. It’s also taking precautions for our own health and that of our communities long after we’ve burned out and grown numb. It is finding treasure in an outwardly bland paradigm, whether that is in growing a garden, meeting new people online, or reimagining our prayer life. We were told we had to live our lives and not live in fear, but what kind of life is made up solely of the most superficial pleasures? If those pleasures don’t exist, does life cease to happen? When we realize there is growth to be had in everyday life, that every moment holds something precious, we can let go of merely living through exciting novel pleasures.

There is no real epiphany here, other than a continuing daily devotion to praying the Hours. I don’t receive immediate, obvious spiritual rewards from pressing through these prayers. Sometimes I say Morning prayer at two in the afternoon. I often forget Evening prayer, because it’s not established in my routine the way Morning prayer has become. I often skip lesser saints’ feast days unless the saint holds particular meaning for me, and sometimes I even skip more major feast days if I’m not feeling up to it—better, I think, to say Morning prayer for the weekday than to abandon it altogether. Even with all that, I feel I’ve gained something by not giving up, by surrendering in a small way. After all, I’m trying to know God, not to merely appreciate some pretty poetry and then leave it be. There is something starkly powerful about reading the Magnificat each evening, knowing that “he has cast down the mighty from their thrones and the rich he has sent away empty.” These days, the words of the Magnificat are always present on my lips, because of this daily meeting in prayer. I have hope that each of the Psalms will penetrate my soul as well. 

God is present with us day after day, always a miracle. The trick of this life is to see past the mundanity, to catch the magic of the Divine, to see Christ all around us in other people and to act on that knowledge. This is what the Divine Office is teaching me, and I believe it’s a lesson learned by continually meeting God through the Psalms and Canticles, no matter my mood, every morning and every evening.