ARCYB 2002

© Anglican Religious Communities 2002

What shall we say about the Daily Office?

by Father George Guiver CR

The Daily Office - the round of liturgical services of prayer and worship, which mark the rhythm of the daily routine in Religious Life - is central to the spirituality and way of life of Religious communities. Here, Father George Guiver CR introduces some of the issues upon which communities might reflect as they consider ways to enrich their corporate prayer life.

Basic to our life’; ‘instills peace and the atmosphere of prayer’; ‘mind-numbing’. If you ask any member of a Religious Community what they think of the Daily Office you can expect a wide range of responses. It is central to our life, but most communities rarely share amongst themselves their experience of it. When a
community does, you can be surprised at what comes out. It is there, given, and we just get on with it. That is often cited as one of its positive features. It can go on for years, patiently and quietly offered, everyone heads down, as it were, and it can seem all right.
But is it enough simply to be 'all right'? There are ways in which we need to do more in familiarizing ourselves with its history and with the wide range of contemporary approaches to the Daily Office, as found even in the wider monastic world today. Our age is holistic, too, and there are ramifications to the daily hours of prayer which might not seem so obvious; for instance, how far does the way we do it affect vocations? What is our gospel as a community, and what is our gospel of the daily liturgy? What is the universe that our Daily Office belongs to: the universe of the Church and the cosmos, or the little universe of this group of people, this little corner of Church or society?
I recently spent a couple of days with a Religious Community working on the prayer of the hours, and I could do worse than relate some of their comments. Naturally they did not speak with one mind on everything, but a clear overall picture emerged, an intriguing one of conviction borne up by sufficient reward to outshadow the points of chafing or puzzlement.
The Office for them was basic to the life, the repository of an enormous tradition, so much so that continuity through time is part of its nature. It is carried out in response to the call to obedience, and is an expression of that obedience, in all the nuances of its meanings, and produces and nourishes obedience. It holds up in a public way the fact that the journey with and to God is central - God is all in all. It enables a connecting-up process where individual and community are held in contact with God. In a very particular way it builds community, providing bricks and mortar wherewith God's community is continually brought to be. It releases love, not simply for the community, or even perhaps not at all for the community sometimes, as far as they can perceive it. It feeds into the invisible economy of Grace, God's hidden plumbing, for the good of the world. For the Community itself, it is heart, lungs, and indeed spinal cord for all the community's other work and witness. This has to be spoken about in terms of love for, as one person put it, it assures us all the time that God is there, in a way that connects directly with our life of celibacy. It is for those within the Community, and also for many people from outside, a visible sign that it is possible to pray, that prayer exists, and that the Christian who prays need never therefore feel he or she is struggling alone.
Often the word ‘rhythm’ crops up. We are held in a rhythm, our life finds its solid ground amid a series of markers which sanctify the time, so that our attention is turned regularly to Christ. Rhythm fosters attention, and this attention which is held by a Religious Community becomes food for the Church and food for
themselves. Outward and inward: the daily prayer is an effective sign, redeeming the world inside us as individuals, working for the redemption of the world inside our communities, and so, if we will allow it, becoming a source of food for the world around us.
It seems preposterous to make apparently special claims of this sort about the Religious Life, but we are saved from that danger for we can rarely see in ourselves and our communities what other people see in us. It is not for us to claim to be examples as communities - often the claim is too obviously preposterous! - but what we can rightly claim, because we are bound to do so, is that the life we aspire to is a divine gift, always spoilt to some extent in our hands, but no less real for that. This leads us to say that a Religious Community is an effective sign, and the
reality it encapsulates is out of its members' hands to control. The gift of being an effective sign of hope overrides all our failures, and at the heart of it the daily liturgy is a feeling-after, a questing, a reaching forward to a meeting - a meeting between a gift and its fumbling recipients, seeking less and less to miss the ball, and knowing anyway that it doesn't depend on us.
Those were only some of the thoughts which arose in our conversations. Obviously there is much more to be said, both positive and negative, both affirming and questioning; but I return to the questions with which we started. We do not often give enough thought to our daily liturgy, to the feeding of our personal engagement with it, and to our common privilege of celebrating it. Nor do we give enough attention today to the liturgical form it takes. While the desert monks limited their worship largely to unadorned recitation of psalms, we are not desert monks, and nor are we on the whole so protected from the preoccupations, the pressures and the mindset of contemporary society. It is difficult to have faith today, difficult to be obedient, difficult to worship, both for us and for those who share our life with us however briefly.
The outward form of the liturgy was evolved for a purpose, for we are psycho-somatic beings. It is not really enough simply to recite psalms and canticles in the barest circumstances. The ancient Daily Offices of the Church, in the morning and evening at least, were solemn every day, celebrated liturgically. There is a wider dimension to be rediscovered here, in evolving expressions of the liturgical tradition appropriate to our time and our communities. While the Daily Office for most of us is deep and rich, it is like a darkened oil painting - the full colour is muffled. We need a modest but joyful recovery of a few things: movement, light, space, variety of texture in different ways of reading and reciting, music, colour, symbol. We don't need to go mad, and anyway too much would quickly pall - rather will it be small sensitive touches, a little more sensitivity and imagination, a little more sense both of the Tradition, and of where modern society is at.
We can be shy of the truth that the Church is a sacramental phenomenon. Without the body, food, sight, and sound, there would have been no Christ in the first place. No incarnation, no resurrection. Monastics have never gone so far as to deny the sacramental order, but we might need to reassess some aspects of our received
tradition in the midst of a culture which is turning from a post-renaissance obsession with word and text to a recovery of the visual, the aesthetic and the bodily, and a new realization of the mystery of the Church as Body of Christ. �