How the Daily Office Changed My Life

It all began with noticing a handsome set of leatherbound books on the bookshelf in a spare room at Amistad Catholic Worker House. I was staying there for spring break my freshman year of college and (as is my wont) had been making my way through the bookshelves, being introduced for the first time to Gustavo Gutierrez and Thomas Merton. And then I found these lovely-looking volumes. I asked Mark, one of the husband-and-wife team of lay Catholics who ran the house, about the books, and he told me that they were the books for Catholic daily prayer, the Liturgy of the Hours. I was quite curious and he was glad to show me, so we started praying an office a day together. And now, some thirteen years later, the daily office has transformed my life. In all those years, I can count on one hand the times I have failed to pray at least a quick compline – which I say not to demonstrate my piety but to demonstrate how utterly central Christian liturgical daily prayer has become to me. I cannot imagine my relationship with God or indeed my life broadly without it.

 I’ve already written a fair bit for Draw Near With Faith about the daily office, offering a theological account of daily liturgical prayer (and arguing that clergy ought to pray it), suggesting that place of the daily office in Anglican piety is one of Anglicanism’s greatest strengths, and discussing the historiography of Christian daily prayer. In this post I want to do something a little more personal. I want to talk about how the daily office helped me learn how to pray again.

By the time I discovered the Liturgy of the Hours at Amistad, I had a problem: outside of Sunday worship, I did not really pray or, for that matter, read my Bible. I was faithful and diligent in attending church on Sundays, but beyond that, the amount of time that I spent with God was fairly minimal. I had grown up in a Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod household with an evangelically inflected private piety. We went very faithfully to weekly worship, had table prayers that were usually set (most often the Lutheran classic “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest…”), and would sometimes use Lutheran devotionals in Advent and Lent. For personal devotions, my parents modelled very well a classic evangelical piety of quiet time with the Bible and praying understood as casual, regular conversation with God. But for whatever reason (certainly for no fault of theirs!), I think I always struggled with the form of piety that worked so well for them. Certainly I did so by late high school and early college. Time spent reading the Bible felt like a chore; I would get devotional books to read alongside Scripture (I remember a few based on the Lord of the Rings in particular that I tried in high school) but would find myself reading those books more than the actual Bible. As far as prayer went, having a conversation with God often felt rather ridiculous, especially when I couldn’t make out any response from him. Indeed, rather to my dismay, the experience that others in my life would share of hearing God speak to them just never seemed to happen to me; I worried that something was profoundly wrong with me. In confirmation class, I was taught “ACTS” as a model for private prayer: adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, supplication. This was not bad (indeed, I still sometimes use it to this day), but it also failed to spark any real ardor for prayer. I would still pray in crises (not uncommon for high-strung 18-year-olds off at college to experience!), but there was no real regularity to it. While I read and discussed theological matters avidly, an hour a week on Sundays was about the sum total of my time spent intentionally with God.

In this state, the daily office satisfied me like cold water on a hot day. I’m not sure that I could articulate my attraction to it very well at the time; I doubt I would have described myself as having a hunger for God or desire to be in his presence. But I did know that something about it just felt profoundly right. I quickly saved up for my own four-volume set (not a small purchase on a college student’s budget) and began using it. And kept using it. Compline was always my favorite. Part of it, I’m sure, was the joy of having something complicated and serious to figure out. There were rubrics to decipher, calendars to puzzle over, ribbons to put in the proper places, new words like “ordinary” and “propers” and “antiphons” to learn. None of the embarrassing overemotionalism and soppiness of evangelicalism here (I regret to say that this is what evangelicalism seemed like to me at the time; probably inevitably, I was also flirting with Roman Catholicism, although never to the point of signing up for RCIA). But even more basically, I was given words to say, and a sense that my prayer wasn’t just about me alone with the Almighty but connected me to the communion of saints across space and time, was even a participation in Jesus’ own prayer to the Father. I think it’s hard to overstate how important this was to me. Instead of feeling embarrassed while attempting to drum up my own words in the lonely silence of my heart, I didn’t have to think about what to say and could understand myself as participating in the great eternal symphony of prayer and praise to God. This was a sort of prayer that didn’t depend so much on me, on my fickle affections or apparently nonexistent ability to listen to God’s response, or any of that. Instead, I could simply join my voice to the great crowd of saints and angels worshipping God – and rest in the knowledge that around the world, people were praying the exact same words that I was.

As I said, I was hooked. I began with the Liturgy of the Hours, which shortly began to be supplemented with visits to New Haven’s Christ Church for choral compline on Sunday evenings. I never managed to say all the offices regularly but would always say at least compline and would usually manage to add some combination of morning prayer, one of the midday offices, and/or evening prayer to the mix. At some point I picked up a 1979 Book of Common Prayer as well, although I found its daily office fairly inscrutable at first glance. There were so many choices, unlike the Liturgy of the Hours, which laid everything out for me, and having to look up the psalms and readings in a lectionary was a pain. Fortunately for me, Christ Church also had (indeed, still has) regular morning and evening prayer, so I was able to learn the 1979 office by praying it publicly. By the end of undergrad, I was attending services with some regularity and, if memory serves, had begun to pray the 1979 office by myself. The switch took no small amount of time; indeed, for years I would pray 1979 morning and evening prayer but, loyal to the liturgy that first introduced me to the daily office, still finished every evening with compline from the Liturgy of the Hours. I experimented with other variations on the office as well. I won’t bore you with treating at great length all the permutations I tried: said vs sung, enriching the 1979 office with antiphons (including an antiphon for each psalm painstakingly written in my prayer book), the use of the Anglican Breviary and, later, the Monastic Diurnal during my Anglo-Catholic days (I tried one Lent to wake up at 3 am each morning for Mattins and Lauds; the experiment did not last a week), trying out the 1662. These days, as a priest, I view myself as bound to the authorized liturgies of my church, and so use the 1979 BCP when in the United States and either the 1962 BCP (my preference) or the BAS in Canada.

But for all the variety, as the years have gone by, the basics have remained the same: the offices punctuate each day with psalms, Scripture, and prayers, beginning and ending my days with the praise of God. I’ve prayed the office in monasteries and in cathedrals, at my home prayer corner or in bed, in crowded subway cars and on airplanes. I’ve prayed it using physical books, or apps, or very occasionally (typically on road trips) along with a podcast. I have said it slowly, accompanied with song and long periods of silence, luxuriating in God’s presence – and all too often I’ve said it rushed, under my breath, in a hurry to get on to the next thing. I’ve spaced the offices out properly or barreled through all of them, piled up after another, upon returning home late after a busy day. But prayed well or prayed poorly, by God’s grace I have kept praying. And looking back, I can see what fruit it has borne in my own life. Being steeped in Scripture, especially the psalter, organizing my days around time with God, taking time every day for confession, for praise, to hear God’s word, and to petition him for my own needs and those of others – all these have been so vital to me. They have been so important for keeping me anchored through health crises, international moves, struggles in faith, the ordination process, disappointments in ministry, all the changes and chances of this fleeting world. The words of the psalter have sunk into my bones, becoming the words I use to express my deepest aspirations and profoundest distress. In the moments where my heart is full to bursting with gratitude for all that God has given me, the office is there. In the moments I am in despair, with no words to come before God, the office is still there.

And in fact, the office has provided the sort of scaffolding that has helped me sustain the life of non-liturgical personal prayer and Bible reading which felt impossible for me as an adolescent. For I should probably say that while I hardly think everyone must embrace evangelical-style prayer practices, I do not think the office alone, or even the office plus Sunday worship, is a sufficient prayer diet. Martin Thorton’s threefold rule of Mass, Office, Private Devotion strikes me as very sound. But I don’t think I could have the private prayer life I do without the office; it has become for me the foundation upon which private devotion is built. This takes many forms for me: regular reading of Scripture, prayer in tongues, using old devotional prayer books, and yes, even the quasi-evangelical moments of me alone talking with the God which made no sense to me as an 18-year-old. But I always come back to the office as an anchor, often using the office as a preparation for private prayer. And so even as I have adopted parts of the more casual devotional style that once perplexed me (aided in this, no doubt, by my Pentecostal wife!), it turns out to be precisely the office that has made it possible. This isn’t the hold the office up as a silver bullet, of course, to all spiritual difficulties. It can be prone to rote recitation, and I know of people who have (despite valiant efforts) struggled to find in it the joy I have found. I can only share my testimony: that God has used it to transform my life of prayer, my relationship with him, really my entire life.

I could conclude this with a plea for clergy to offer instruction and public celebration of the daily office at their parishes, or a lament for the diminished place of the office in contemporary Anglicanism, or any other number of analyses or calls to action. But what I really want to say is this: if you have been struggling in prayer lately, if the blocks that I described myself having sound familiar, if you’re simply interested in trying a new thing, then give the daily office a try. I will gladly show you how. It’s the least I can do, given what it has meant to me.