Flunking Sainthood Read online

  However, fixed-hour prayer is not something that the Christian church invented after Jesus; it comes from Judaism. “Seven times a day I praise you,” says Psalm 119. There’s considerable evidence that Jews prayed at fixed times throughout the day, and the practice became so widespread that by the age of Jesus and the Apostles it was firmly entrenched. By then, Jews were living in the Roman Empire, and their prayer routine accommodated the empire’s rhythms. In the Roman understanding, a day was cut into two parts—6 AM to 6 PM, and 6 PM to 6 AM. So prayers are set for the third hour (9 AM, or “terce”); the sixth hour (noon, or “sext”); the ninth hour (3 PM, or “none”); and so on.

  According to Phyllis, the New Testament gives some interesting hints about how fixed-hour prayer was practiced in Jesus’ time. “The first detailed miracle of the apostolic Church, the healing of the lame man on the Temple steps by Sts. Peter and John (Acts 3:1), occurred when and where it did because two devout Jews (who did not yet know they were Christians as such) were on their way to ninth-hour (three o’clock) prayers,” she writes. “Not many years later, one of the great defining events of Christianity—St. Peter’s vision of the descending sheet filled with both clean and unclean animals—was to occur at noon on a rooftop because he had gone there to observe the sixth-hour prayers.”

  This new information fascinates me. Though I’m familiar with this story from the book of Acts, I’d been so bowled over by its fantastic vision of pigs hurling themselves at Peter that I’d ignored this particular detail. It strikes me that Phyllis is right: Peter was on the rooftop to pray. The book of Acts goes out of its way to tell us what time it was. “In Joppa and far from Jerusalem and the Temple, Peter had sought out the solitude of his host’s rooftop as a substitute site for keeping the appointed time of prayer,” she explains.

  Jesus practiced fixed-hour prayer too. New Testament scholar Scot McKnight says that Jesus was an observant Jew, and “it was customary for pious Jews to interrupt the day to pray at three separate times”—generally morning, afternoon, and evening (Ps. 55). This was in addition to all those times that Jesus went off by himself to pray privately; his prayer life combined both spontaneous personal prayer and fixed-hour prayer based in the Psalms. A balanced diet.

  No way am I going to be able to do this seven times a day, though. The math of that is downright chilling. Prayer seven times a day gives you forty-nine weekly prayer opportunities: at 3 AM, 6 AM, 9 AM, noon, 3 PM, 6 PM, and 9 PM. You’d get to sleep from about 9:15 PM until 2:45 AM. Five and a half hours of sleep a night. No wonder so many monks took vows of silence; they would have been biting each other’s heads off out of grumpiness otherwise. Instead of praying through the night, I plan to quit with compline, the last prayer ritual of the day, at 9 PM. Compline says good-bye to the cares of the day and prepares us for rest; it is as quiet and pure as a lullaby.

  I am going to do five of the daily offices, and I task my trusty iPhone to remind me. I set it for 9 AM, noon, 3 PM, 6 PM, and 9 PM, using the “Chimes” ring that comes standard on the phone. Somehow its carillon-inspired music seems appropriately monastic, even if the sound is a bit tinny.

  FLEX-HOUR PRAYER

  I’m drafting an e-mail and the phone goes off. I’m in the middle of making dinner and the phone goes off. I’m driving Jerusha to flute lessons and the phone goes off.

  Now the duty of having stated times of private prayer is one of those observances concerning which we are apt to entertain . . . unbelieving thoughts. . . . It is easy to see why it is irksome; because it presses upon us and is inconvenient. It is a duty which claims our attention continually, and its irksomeness leads our hearts to rebel.

  —CARDINAL NEWMAN

  Somehow I had imagined that I would be better organized at this. I’m a planner by nature, a list-maker who gladly sits down each morning to plot out the day. So why am I consistently taken by surprise when three hours have passed and it’s time, already, to delve into fixed-hour prayer?

  I know that there’s no rule that says I can’t start praying at 12:04 or 9:07, but on the other hand there’s a certain grace in dropping whatever I’m doing and forcing myself to pray exactly on schedule. I’m supposed to be molded and shaped by this practice, not reinvent it to suit my own needs. Prayer should order my daily life, not be ordered around by it. Part of the problem I’ve had with a regular prayer routine in my years as a Christian is that I try to squash it in each day between all of those other “important” things on my list, and of course half the time it doesn’t happen at all. This month, prayer is supposed to be the main course, not the optional dessert.

  I start out faithfully, obeying my cell phone chime by pulling out The Divine Hours, which has a lovely satin ribbon to mark my place from three hours before. For days I trip happily from terce to sext to none to vespers to compline, missing a service only rarely. The language is gorgeous, I realize. Why have I not tried fixed-hour prayer before?

  Each office includes the same basic elements—a call to prayer, a request for God’s presence, some short Psalm passages, the Lord’s Prayer, and sometimes a hymn or short reading from the Bible. It doesn’t take much time to read each short service aloud: five minutes if I’m moving hastily or fifteen if I take the time to try to sing the Psalm portion. I’ve never officially learned how to chant like this, but since no one but God will hear me singing, I figure it doesn’t matter that I don’t understand the visual cues the text offers for making my pitch go up or down. I muddle through. Mostly, I’m proud of adhering to Benedict’s Rule that instructs people to “immediately set aside what we have in hand and go with utmost speed” to pray when the signal comes. I am actually succeeding at a spiritual practice!

  If you sing to God, you pray twice.

  —ST. AUGUSTINE

  Then I travel to Montreal for a conference. I’ve packed not only my large autumn and winter edition of The Divine Hours but also a handy pocket version that tucks easily into my laptop bag. (Why isn’t there a smart phone app for fixed-hour prayer, I wonder?) I feel ready to take this spiritual practice on the road. Yet somehow the quiet contentment of praying the hours at home vanishes into the ether in the face of back-to-back meetings from breakfast until late at night.

  Part of the pleasure of being on the road is seeing friends I don’t often get to spend time with. Do I want to pray the hours at 6 PM, or head out to dinner with Kelly and Donna? No contest. I float off to dinner without praying the vespers service first. When I return to the hotel room that night, I fall into bed exhausted, too tired to pray the compline service or even look at a prayer book.

  This mode of prayer is rapidly becoming inconvenient.

  There are all kinds of interruptions and excuses. I have to travel today and will be on an airplane; chanting there may well be interpreted as an act of terrorism. However, that St. Benedict is a crafty old coot. He clearly foresaw my “but I’m traveling” excuse and inserted the following in his Rule: “Those who have been sent on a journey are not to omit the prescribed hours but to observe them as best they can, not neglecting their measure of service.” There goes that loophole. I could mouth the words in-flight, but decide instead to skip it, just this once.

  However, “just this once” bleeds readily from one day to the next. I excuse myself entirely on a day I’m going to be in meetings from 9 AM to 5 PM, and driving two hours each way before and after. And several times, I’m in situations where my cell phone is turned off, so I miss the prayers because I don’t hear the chime alarm and forget about my allotted prayer time. After my trip to Montreal I figure I’m batting about .400 with fixed-hour prayer.

  My initial enthusiasm fading and the guilt piling up, I decide to adhere to Phil’s family motto (“If at first you don’t succeed . . . lower, lower your standards!”) and revise my ambitious schedule to just three times a day. It’s what Jesus and the apostles probably did, after all, and I wouldn’t want to be setting myself up as holier than they were. That would be prideful, and pride is bad.

/>   What’s more, I will give myself the flexibility to decide which three of the hours I’ll be doing on any given day. I basically forget the noon service altogether, because I’m always in the middle of something and wind up feeling resentful—not the most spiritual attitude for prayer.

  THE CRY OF THE CHURCH

  Once I’ve dialed down my expectations, I settle into a less erratic rhythm for fixed-hour prayer. Or rather, it begins to settle its rhythm on me.

  I’m surprised by how comforting I find its repetition. I’ve never recited the Lord’s Prayer this often in my life, but far from being empty words, the prayer exerts an unexpected power. Praying for daily bread every day is quite different from praying for it almost never (as in my church) or once a week (as in my husband’s). It communicates trust in God for today. Just today, we have a blue-light special on manna; only one per customer, though, so you’ll need to ask again tomorrow if you want more.

  There’s also a reassuring cadence in the antiquity of these prayers. That’s not to say I agree with everything I’m praying. Some of the assertions made in these Psalms are hard for me to swallow at face value—when the psalmist says that the Lord “guards the lives of his faithful; he rescues them from the hand of the wicked” (Ps. 97), for example, my eyebrow is raised. God does not always preserve the lives of his saints. He does not always deliver them from evil. Yet praying the Psalm out loud in the knowledge of all the millions who have prayed it before, regardless of their fates, has unexpectedly tempered my innate skepticism. We voice what we hope will be true, and we pray that God will save us, delivering us from evil. The prayer is not hollow, because it has voiced both the agony and the trust of countless generations.

  The purpose of prayer is not to get good at it, but for the Church to become good through it.

  —SCOT MCKNIGHT

  Fixed-hour prayer is an exercise in inhabiting the communion of saints, that great cloud of witnesses of all those, living and dead, who pray with us and for us. I feel connected, plugged in, to something larger than myself. This comes home to me most clearly in the middle of the night. Despite my resolution not to wake up at 3 AM like a religious fanatic to pray the lauds service, I find myself doing so—not because I have suddenly become a superhero of righteousness but because the insomnia that plagues me episodically hits for about ten days near the end of November. My bouts with insomnia tend to last a week or two, then recede for a few months, and then return without much rhyme or reason. I will usually go downstairs to watch TV and have a snack—two of the activities, incidentally, that sleep experts tell insomniacs never to do. I don’t usually mind the insomnia keenly because I enjoy the solitude and the way the house is so quiet. I’m the only one awake besides Onyx, who follows me anywhere no matter what time it is.

  Phyllis has a special book called The Night Office that becomes my friend during this time. I am still doing my usual nocturnal activities when I can’t sleep, but now I’m also reciting the Office of the Night Watch (3 AM matins) or the Office of Dawn (6 AM lauds), depending on what time I am awake. The repetition is as soothing as warm milk with honey. “I commune with my heart in the night,” says Psalm 77, which is used as a frequent refrain in The Night Office. The mood is contemplative, brooding. “Darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day,” says another refrain (Ps. 139). God is with me in the darkness.

  In both day and night, fixed-hour prayer helps me to fall in love with the Psalms all over again. I’m reminded of the truth of what everyone always says about the Psalms: that they contain in microcosm the entire range of the human experience. There’s pain, jealousy, pettiness, and anger; desolation, abandonment, and despair. But there’s also joy and praise and shouting. All of this sometimes happens within the same group of Psalms, or even within the same Psalm—check out Psalm 119 for a neck-whipping example of how God either redeems the whole of the human experience, good and bad, or the psalmist is relentlessly bipolar. Possibly both.

  WHEN WE DO NOT HAVE THE WORDS

  During my fixed-hour prayer experiment, I come across a wonderful book by Robert Benson called In Constant Prayer, in which he describes his discovery of the Divine Office in middle age and the fifteen years he’s spent softly planting this particular prayer garden and watching it bear fruit.

  Benson opens the book by introducing Bettie, a friend of his who is known as something of a prayer warrior. “Bettie would say something like, ‘Jesus, help Alan’s back to feel better in the morning,’ and in the morning Alan’s back would feel better. Or she’d say, ‘Jesus, help Robert not to worry,’ and the next day I would not be so anxious. One day, after six days of torrential rain, she said, ‘Jesus, we need good weather tomorrow for traveling home,’ and the rain stopped before any of us had time to say amen. I swear it did, and I have witnesses.”

  The problem for Benson, and I suspect for me as well, is that his prayers rarely turned out the way Bettie’s did. Miracles were not forthcoming; healings failed to materialize. For a time, he blamed this on himself and his lack of faith. After struggling more, he began to blame it on God, who did not appear to listen. “I have come to believe that it was because I was trying to say Bettie’s prayers, not the ones I could say,” he writes. His own spontaneous prayers often came up empty, like mine. They felt hollow.

  What has filled the gap for him is fixed-hour prayer, which is “prayer for the rest of us,” prayer for when we do not have the words. As someone heavily invested in language, I find that liberating. Six days a week, I try to come up with words: bits of sections of chapters of books, written piece by piece; new blog posts five days a week; dozens of e-mails a day. Maybe one reason I’m enjoying fixed-hour prayer so much is that it gives me a break from the me-me-me nature of my own spontaneous prayers. There is a deep rest associated with ancient prayers I didn’t contrive myself.

  But it’s even deeper than that, because in fixed-hour prayer I am finding to my astonishment that I am most myself when I pray someone else’s words. Given that my faith tradition suggests that following someone else’s liturgy can be empty and confining, I’m surprised to discover that instead it is rich and freeing. I don’t have to be alone with my subjective experience, my little life. I am free to rest in the words of those who are often far wiser, and who have walked this path already.

  SO IT TURNS OUT I’M A SINNER

  In my primarily low-church tradition, we don’t talk about sin much as an existential category of being; sin is something we step into sometimes, but it doesn’t necessarily define who we are. We believe we fall short and need to repent, but we don’t dwell heavily on the idea that we are born sinners. That’s even more true in American culture, where the only time we’re likely to hear the word sin is in a sentence about a particularly rich chocolate cake.

  With fixed-hour prayer, the liturgy pays far more attention to sin than I am used to. It’s inherent in the Lord’s Prayer when we pray not to be led into temptation. It’s implied in last week’s “cry of the church,” which is “Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy on us.” In this week’s cry, we’re supposed to call out, “Oh Lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon me.” We wouldn’t exactly need all that mercy if we weren’t standing ankle-deep in our own excrement.

  You’d think that this emphasis on sin to a person who isn’t used to hearing it would make me feel even worse about myself than I already do for failing at all these different spiritual practices this year: like a child with doting parents who’s always been told he was a good kid suddenly being spirited away to a rotten boarding school where he’s beaten with a switch and forced to eat tripe with a spork. In truth, however, the emphasis on sin comes as a relief, like having a boil lanced. It’s painful, but you know it’s necessary or your knee will just keep swelling to an ungodly size and the infection will spread throughout your whole body. I already know I am a crappy old sinner, even while everybody keeps telling me, in and out of church, that I’m a ba
sically nice person. They’re wrong. If I learned anything this year, especially from the Jesus Prayer back in June, it’s that I’m a selfish worm.

  It’s decent of the liturgists to tell me the truth about myself.

  It also helps that they’re not abandoning me to wallow in sinnerhood, like I felt after reading Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in the eleventh grade. I didn’t take literally Edwards’s metaphor of the spider hanging just above the licking flames of hell, but the image made a profound impression. What was the point in trying not to be a sinner, if you had little or nothing to say about your own salvation anyway because God had already played eeny-meeny-miny-moe with your soul and you lost?

  Fixed-hour prayer emphasizes sin, and the liturgy doesn’t shy away from discussing hell; it’s in the Psalms and the Gospels, after all. But it leaves me with a completely different feeling, like I’ve taken a scalding bath and emerged, red-skinned, to find that God has warmed a towel especially for me.

  The cold stones of the Abbey church ring with a chant that glows with living flame, with clean, profound desire. It is an austere warmth, the warmth of Gregorian chant. It is deep beyond ordinary emotion, and that is one reason why you never get tired of it.

  —THOMAS MERTON

  By the time Thanksgiving comes, I am fully a convert to fixed-hour prayer. So far this year, the specific practices I’ve discovered that I most want to continue are the Jesus Prayer and this one. Both have called out to some deficit deep within my soul, a scarcity I sometimes felt in a hopeless way but could not, or did not dare to, articulate.