The Mennonite tradition I was raised in did not practice recited prayers. The closest we got were the table prayers (spoken in German, which until the age of five I assumed was the only language God knew). When it was my turn to pray, I could whip through them in record  time. In grade school, we also began every day reciting the Lord’s Prayer. But that was it. Had my background been Roman Catholic, Anglican or Orthodox, I would have been familiar with the second spiritual practice of our cohort, called the “Divine Hours”.

What are the Divine Hours?

Simply put, they are written prayers specified for certain times of the day. They’re also known as fixed-hour prayer, “Liturgy of the Hours”, “the daily office” or “keeping the hours”. The fixed times are  Lauds (morning), Noonday, Vespers (evening before supper) and Compline (before retiring). The tool of fixed-hour prayers is a “breviary” (prayer book) to follow using set prayers, Psalms, chants and always the Lord’s Prayer. There are many breviaries available, but the cohort had given us one that I decided to use.

American author Phillis Tickle wrote that fixed-hour prayer, along with the Gospel and the Eucharist (communion) is “the oldest surviving form of Christian spirituality. It enables you to pray with the church throughout history and around the world.” She describes a double helix — one strand is the gospel and shared meal and the other the discipline of fixed-hour prayer. Together they’re a chain of golden connection tying Christian to Christ and Christian to Christian across history, geography, and faiths. 

Joe Stabile taught us that the main purpose of regular prayer is to infuse the sacred into the secular, regularly reminding us of the inherent holiness of God in the present moment. It’s like putting a stick in a spinning wheel, bringing us back to a bigger story. 

At first I just prayed at Lauds (morning) and Compline (before bed), but during Lent I took on Noonday and Vespers prayers as well. On days when I was out and about and couldn’t read through the liturgy, I simply let the alarm on my phone momentarily pull me back to God.

Full disclosure, I didn’t always find this practice easy and my responses have ranged all over the map. At their best, the prayers have helped order my day, calling me back to what really matters in life, giving me bumper rails in the bowling lane so to speak. The breviary contains deep prayers and solid theology. I love the poetry. The regularity of it always helped “snap me back” to remembering God in the quotidian details of each day. Both the prayers and the habit have grown on me. 

One big plus is that for the first time I think in my life, I have regularly been praying for people (instead of just saying I would and usually forgetting after one day). In the past, I have prayed long sentences of what I think others need. While I’m sure God welcomes it all, it felt relieving to just say names, confident that in the resonant silence, God is listening and filling in the blanks. I entrusted those dear to us to God’s never failing love and care, and as the liturgy beautifully said, “knowing that You will do more for them than we can desire or pray for.”

I have enjoyed actually reading the appointed Psalms, which I haven’t done for years (though many are more violent than I remember). By now I’ve read them all, some several times. I have sung the Lord’s Prayer, sometimes up to 4X/day. 

At times, when emotional issues came to a head (such as after a sleepless night), the words were a great comfort and were prayed with heartfelt devotion and intent. I remembered Terry Waite, a Brit  who had been unjustly imprisoned from 1987-1991, four years of which in solitary confinement. In his book Taken on Trust, he wrote that the memorized prayers from his own breviary growing up were a godsend. They protected him from being destroyed by the emotions of the catastrophic situation he found himself in. The set prayers gave me this type of structure during some ongoing relational issues. 

I also loved many of the actual words of the prayers, which were poetic and “just right”. During Lauds, I was grateful to know I wasn’t the only one in the world pleading for God’s help and assistance first thing in the morning. During Compline, I was grateful to ask God for a peaceful night, “letting our fears of the darkness of the world and of our own lives rest in You.” Every night, I also read Luke 6:27-38, Jesus’ famous sermon about loving our enemies. In total I have read that aloud 84 times! As Joe said, I’ll keep reading it until I live it.

“Are you levitating yet?” joked our pastor Paul the other day. (No. 😄) Though it might seem like I’m earning prayer points, like Safeway Air Miles, anyone who has prayed knows it’s nothing like that. Prayer is much more mysterious.

At their worst, the prayers became rote and boring. To be honest (and this was definitely not all the time), I did not find this spiritual practice easy. It became like a hair-shirt, itchy and bothersome. By the end of Lent, I was all too happy to throw off Noonday and Vespers prayers. Even though I knew I was praying with others all around the world, including my cohort, it was hard to imagine this invisible church. The repetitions got tedious and sometimes I even got a bit pissed off. 

Then I got worried. Didn’t I enter the cohort to draw closer to God who I need more than I need to breathe? Where were my fancy intentions now? Were they that feeble to get blown out so easily? Did I proudly bite off more than I could humanly chew? This practice seemed to be calling me out.

I love Joe Stabile’s definition of a spiritual practice as “any act habitually entered into with your whole heart that awakens, deepens, and sustains within you a contemplative experience of the inherent holiness of the present moment.” I had to confess that the “whole heart” part was easier said than done. I’m still such a beginner! Lord have mercy.

The day after I finished this blogpost, Lyle and I did our biweekly shared prayer time. I brought some of the liturgy from Lauds to help us pray for others, and we took turns offering names of loved ones. It’s been a tough couple of months, and by the time we got to the Lord’s Prayer, both of us were in tears and we sat in silence after the Amen. I was so grateful for the prayers which helped us express our hearts more deeply. 

Who am I to judge how God has been using fixed-hour prayer to form me? Joe had told us that the Holy Spirit is always there, like a pilot light on a stove, just waiting to be fired up. Even if fixed-hour prayer is not part of my hardwiring, I hope to heck that flame is going to grow brighter this year. Whether I’m beset with worry or grateful and open,  I’ll leave those results to God.