If you don’t yet pray it, or need encouragement to begin or (like me) to strengthen your commitment to regular prayer, then I hope the following reasons will be a help for you. If you pray the Divine Office, perhaps this will be inspiration to carry on.
So I thought I would share them with you.
Just off the top of my head, I came up with four reasons, and as I reflected on it, I thought of three more. He asked me why I find the Divine Office worth praying. Recently I met with one of the monks who guides our Lay Cistercian community, and we talked about the liturgy. I wish I could say that I am now a model practitioner of daily prayer, but the truth is, I still struggle with it. In the book, I go on to talk about how forming a friendship with a devout Muslim, who prays five times every day, inspired me to take the Divine Office more seriously. I muddled along, praying from time to time and justified to myself all the days that I didn’t manage to pray. When I first became a Lay Cistercian, I struggled with the liturgy… My life was too busy, too unstructured, too freeform, and too spontaneous for me to be bothered by something like daily prayers. In chapter 7, I make the following confession: If you’ve read Befriending Silence, then you know that I have a tempestuous relationship with daily prayer. Praying the Divine Office is central to monastic life, but even those of us who aren’t monks may find that this type of prayer is an essential part of our spiritual practice.īut it’s a huge commitment and many people might find it daunting to pray even part of the Divine Office on a regular basis. The rota of Psalms, canticles, scripture readings, antiphons and other prayers that incorporate this daily liturgy is known as the Divine Office (or the Daily Office, or the Liturgy of the Hours). Monastic prayer occurs at fixed-hours throughout the day. Everyone knows that monks devote their lives to silence, but also to daily prayer and chanting.
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