PSALM 119 AND THE WORK OF PRAYER: PRAYING THE HOURS (PART 3)

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Editor’s Note: For the month of October, in the Spirituality & Practice of Faith section we will be enjoying meditations from Fr. Richard Peers SMMS on Psalm 119. We encourage you to read Psalm 119 throughout the month alongside this study.

In the western, Latin Church, Psalm 119 was used daily at the ‘little hours’, Terce, Sext and None and the first hour Prime. The Rule of St Benedict set out a slightly different pattern of psalms for these hours and 119 was used only on Sundays and Mondays. 

Thus for many centuries this psalm was the daytime psalm of Christians. Known, surely, by heart. Its use for this purpose perhaps suggested by the phrase in v. 164 ‘seven times a day’ and perhaps partly inspiring the seven hours of the Divine Office (Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline – with the night vigil an eighth Office).

It was only in 1911 the Romans Catholic Church revised its worship and issued a new Office Book (Breviary) with a radically different and new arrangement of the psalms, leaving Anglican Christians to maintain the tradition of using this psalm during the day. Anglican religious communities (apart from those adopting the Benedictine pattern) did maintain this tradition. Many used the book Hours of Prayer edited by the Cowley Father E.J Trentholme. He wrote of Psalm 119: 

“Superficially this psalm may appear monotonous, owing to its constant repetition of the same thoughts in the simplest words, bare of all imagery. But many earnest hearts find it, on the contrary, an absorbingly satisfying utterance. Repeated daily for years, and known by heart throughout, it loses nothing of its freshness and reality.” (in an essay in Lowther Clarke, 1959 p.680).

Although the Anglican Breviary is in many ways a magnificent piece of work, it is not a traditional breviary and it was not used by any of the established religious communities, they stuck with the traditional arrangement of the psalmody. The Anglican Breviary is a translation and adaptation into Prayer Book English of the 1911 Roman Office which itself only had an authorised existence of 60 years or so up to Vatican 2. It distributes different psalms over the Little Hours over the course of a week and therefore the contemplative memorisation of a daily psalm is lost.