Liturgy of the Hours

One of the beautiful aspects of praying the Liturgy of the Hours is that the psalms we pray each day don’t necessarily match our own moods and feelings at that moment, so it draws us into a wider view of God’s world, instead of allowing us to simply focus on our own personal worries and concerns. Our prayer truly is a prayer for the entire church. According to Fr. Stephanos, OSB, a monk at Prince of Peace Abbey in California, “You end up praying God’s Word about himself, and praying God’s Word for the world and yourself.”

Author and poet Kathleen Norris, spent a great deal of time living at St. John’s Benedictine Monastery in Minnesota and she wrote about her time there in her book “The Cloister Walk.” She has this to say about her experience of the Liturgy of the Hours…“Gradually, my perspective on time had changed. In our culture, time can seem like an enemy: it chews us up and spits us out with appalling ease…Liturgical time is essentially poetic time, oriented toward process rather than productivity, willing to wait attentively in stillness rather than always pushing to ‘get the job done’…every day you recite the psalms and you listen, as powerful biblical images, stories and poems are allowed to flow freely, to wash over you.”

Found here.