Pastoral liturgy

Taken from www.ritemagazine.org
This resource is a catholic resource for the liturgical pastor.

"A thirst for God is apparent today. While engaging in issues of the day, from local and global violence to homelessness and unemployment, individuals are seeking more of an understanding of their place in the world. This thirst for God comes first as people begin to experience deeper personal prayer. People want God to speak to them. Still many people only "talk" when they pray to God. However, we need to listen to God in times of silence, in both our personal prayer and at the liturgy. Nevertheless, this is not easy to do in our age of continuous, all-pervading sound.

Although still shy in approaching scripture, people want to experience and pray the word of God. It is the inspired word that helps us to lift our prayer in formulas that we cannot express ourselves. The Liturgy of the Hours is thoroughly the word of God in its use of psalms and canticles."

I. HISTORY OF THE LITURGY OF THE HOURS
The Acts of the Apostles (2:46) shows how the early Christian communities lived out the teaching to pray always. Jewish prayer certainly had an influence on the prayer of the early Christians. The Shema, the basic creed of Judaism (Deuteronomy 6:4-9), accompanied by its series of fixed benedictions, was prayed in the morning and the evening. It is important to note that "Christians, like Jews, adopted the custom of praying at fixed times, and that the most important times for public liturgical prayer in both traditions were the beginning and end of each day" (Robert Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: The Origins of the Divine Office and Its Meaning for Today, Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1986, p.11.). These would be natural times for praying in any tradition.

The earliest Church order, the Didache, gives us the Matthean "Our Father" with a concluding doxology and the rubric "pray thus three times a day" (William A. Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, vol. 1, Collegeville, The Liturgical Press, 1970, p. 3). The writings of the early Church tell us that this pattern of prayer was normative, including hymns and psalms, but do not give much information as to form and content. The early Church Fathers, however, give witness to the eschatological character of Christian prayer at night and the themes of Christ as Light of the World and Sun of Justice in the morning.

The development of the Office in the first three centuries originated in the private devotion of the early Christians. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Hippolytus all give witness to the practice. The morning and evening Hours were obligatory in the eyes of Tertullian and Clement. Hippolytus "enumerates the morning and evening prayers as well as those of terce, sext, and none" (Juan Mateos, "The Origins of the Divine Office," Worship, 41, 1967, p. 479), and thus he harmonized the three hours during the day with the principal moments of the Lord's Passion.

A shift happens in the fourth century with the Edict of Milan in 313 and the Peace of Constantine. This brought to the Church the freedom of cult, and worship became a public activity. In the fourth century we see a development of the Office, with a monastic model and a cathedral model."

The reformation is mostly a movement that had its soul depth in the monastaic, rather than the cathedral, model. Luther was a monk. Lots of the soul of protestantism, pietism, holiness, and the whole lot of it, was born in the soil of this monastic model of daily prayer.


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