For a few months now, I’ve been sneaking into the back of the basilica during the monks’ morning prayer, and although it’s been a source of significant blessing in my life to join the monks even from a distance, I’ve only just recently taken up their gently repeated invitation to sit with them in the choir.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve always been a little (or a lot) intimidated by the fabled complexity of the Liturgy of the Hours, but when I made my hesitant way up to the choir, I saw that Brother Edward had prepared psalter and hymnal beforehand, opening the books to their proper pages for all newcomers and guests – and even making sure that anyone unfamiliar with the Hours received a brief and welcoming explanation of the rhythms of prayer.
Well taken care of by Brother Edward’s warm and considerate hospitality and, as a consequence, suddenly much less nervous than I’d expected to be, I waited for Lauds with a growing sense that the evenly segmented stalls – their ordered continuity in stepped rows – echoed a deeper reality of Benedictine life and community.
Each stall is distinctly marked, but each belongs, too, within the unity of the whole: of the full monastic community praying together and face to face. In parts of the Liturgy, they join in one, layered voice. In other parts, the measured alternation of one side, then the other, marks a slow and lovely pacing through the psalms, evoking community in relation – almost as an echo of God’s perfect, trinitarian unity of relation, which is Love.
It’s reminding me of what community itself can mean, not only when we physically gather together in prayer, but also when we join our prayers to those rising always from the Body of Christ, the Church, in their patient, familiar rhythms across time and space.
If you’ve never prayed one of the Hours with a monastic community (as I hadn’t until about a week and a half ago), I encourage you to seek out opportunities to do so. And if this simply isn’t possible in your area – or in the daily exercise of your state in your life – I’d invite you to draw on the Psalms this weekend. Pray them slowly; let the silences hold and frame the words. I didn’t appreciate what a remarkable gift that can be until my brothers and fathers, the monks of Belmont Abbey, showed me, with characteristically Benedictine hospitality and kindness.
May God draw us closer in community through prayer.
