What
Drew Me In and Kept Me Practicing Fixed-Hour Prayer
by Phyllis Tickle
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Like
many another cradle Protestant, I grew up with little
or no knowledge of the historic disciplines of Christianity.
We kept the Sabbath stringently at our house, but that
was about the sum total of the thing. The association
between the monthly “communion” at our church
and the Passover or eucharist or mass was rarely made
and, for all I know, was no more understood by the adults
in my life than by me. Fasting was regarded as peculiar
to the extent that it was regarded at all. Bible reading
was a private function assumed, but not discussed; and
chanting was an antique something or other that happened
in misty, sepia-toned movie scenes involving monks and
exotic landscapes, usually with medieval pretensions. The
irony in all of this was, and is, that one
of the three most ancient of Christian disciplines (and
some would say, its most ancient) was
too completely lost from common view even to be ignored,
save in so far as it was related to the chanting monks
on the misty movie screens. I
was in college before I ever heard the word breviary. It
fell out of the lips of my very Anglican major
professor, a woman whom I both adored and also
regarded as the most
balanced Christian I had, up to that point anyway,
ever met. As a result, I went scurrying to a
dictionary, only
to discover that a breviary was really just a
book, albeit a particular kind of book…a
book for “praying
the hours,” or as the dictionary also put
it, for “observing
the daily offices.” Clueless
and young, I parked my curiosity just there and
went on to more compelling subject matter. Several
years later, married and with three children, I
chanced--one wonders, of course, about that choice
of words—I
chanced upon an old breviary in a second-hand bookstore, opened it, read
for
no more than three
or four minutes, went to the cashier and, from there, home with my treasure. My
life quite literally pivots on that moment, all things autobiographical
dating from before or after it. Within
a matter of a few days, I had learned the rhythm of praying on the hour every
three hours, had mastered the instructions and rubrics for finding my way
through the breviary to the prayers appointed for each office each day, and
had even
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discovered how to
excuse myself unobtrusively from a group or activity each
time the time of an office or divine hour came around. It
was amazing to me…amazing that I had heard a hundred times
over the Psalmist’s saying, “Seven times a day do
I praise Thee,” and never bothered to ask what he was talking
about; amazing that even though I knew Jews prayed at set times
each days and that Muslims are likewise called to their prayers
at five set times a day, I had never wondered where the discipline
came from and whether or not it was also part of my own heritage
which had somehow got misplaced along the way; amazing
that the prayers I was offering were the same ones being offered
by thousands of Christians in my time zone at exactly the same
time I was offering them, as if we were indeed a cloud of witnesses and
a great company of believers; amazing that the prayers I was
offering were in large part the same prayers of praise and worship
that my Lord had prayed and offered; amazing that increasingly
as I prayed I could hear, as one friend of mine now says, “a
thousand’s thousand voices” joining mine across all
that is or has been or will be. Such
discoveries are heady stuff; and while they have settled now
to becoming less startling and exhilarating, they have also grown
into a way of worship and governance that is solid and steady,
as much to be trusted for instruction and sculpting as to be
celebrated for its great beauty and holy communing. In
time and after my initial discovery, spirituality was of course
destined to become a hot button of conversation for us Americans.
Interest in it would send us scurrying, first for any discipline
that opened the domain of the spirit to us and, eventually, for
those disciplines that were our natural birthright as practicing
Christians. The
first thing to be re-discovered in the latter part of that process
was fixed-hour prayer or praying the hours
or, if you prefer, observing the offices. Over the last decade,
as a result, thousands of Christians—main-line Protestants,
evangelicals, Orthodox and Roman Catholics alike—have returned
to the relief and joy of the divine hours. I join them there
every day. I hope you will, too. And
one last word…if this discipline is not for you, you will
discover that fact fairly early on in trying it. In that case,
move on and keep looking until you are led to the practice that
most suits your own relationship with God. A wise rabbi once
said to me years ago, in speaking of fixed-hour prayer, that
it is the
prayers one says which interest God, not the prayers one does
not say. On so long a journey as life, that is a good
thing to remember. Copyright
©2004 Phyllis Tickle
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