The Deacon

In June 1997 I fell in love … with the Liturgy of the Hours. Yes, that’s right — I fell in love with the official prayer of the Catholic Church, and I have loved it ever since. A month or two prior to my introduction to the breviary, I had begun to see a spiritual director on a regular basis. I was about a year and a half out of college, working full-time and discerning a possible vocation to the priesthood. In our first meeting, my director introduced me to the acronym ACTS, which stands for adoration, contrition, thanksgiving and supplication.

These elements, he told me, should characterize prayer life. That’s great, I thought, but how do I go about regularly and consistently incorporating them into my daily prayer? It seemed a bit artificial to just sit down and say, “OK, God, I adore you and praise you, I’m sorry for my sins, I’m thankful for my blessings, and here are all the needs I’d like to bring to you today.” There’s nothing wrong with doing that, especially as these sentiments spontaneously arise in prayer, but I felt the need for some other way to live out the elements of ACTS in my relationship with God. That’s where the breviary came in.

My spiritual director gave me a well-worn copy of the version of Christian Prayer published by the Daughters of St. Paul, which contained morning, daytime, evening and night prayer from the Divine Office. He also gave me some basic instructions on how to use it. Luckily, for me, we had just started Ordinary Time, and it wouldn’t be for many months that I’d have to figure out how to navigate the seasons like Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter.

I started praying morning, evening and night prayer right away, and found that here, in the official liturgical prayer book of the Church, was a way to live out the elements of ACTS. Built into the psalms, Scripture readings, antiphons and petitions were those four elements of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving and supplication. I felt as if I’d discovered a treasure, which, in fact, I had.

Discipline

Partly because I found myself loving the breviary, and partly because at the time I thought I was going to be a priest and would one day have to commit myself to praying the hours, I began the discipline of praying them every day. I’d say morning prayer before going to work, evening prayer when I came home, and night prayer right before going to bed. After a few weeks, I incorporated daytime prayer into my schedule, praying it on my lunch hour and seeing it as a nice opportunity to check in with God in the middle of the day. About a year later, I added the office of readings to my routine, which opened up new spiritual horizons by giving me longer passages of Scripture to meditate on, along with some theologically rich reflections from the Church Fathers and other saints.

I did end up entering the seminary — two seminaries, in fact — one diocesan, the other a religious order. At one point, I took some time off, and eventually I left for good, because I had fallen in love and felt the call to marriage. Amid all the twists and turns of my vocational journey, however, one thing remained consistent and anchored my prayer life: praying the breviary.

I was blessed to marry a woman who also loved praying the hours. To this day, my wife and I pray some of them together every day. Doing so has helped to solidify our marriage. In particular, adding our personal intentions to the intercessions at evening prayer has helped us to be aware of concerns close to each other’s hearts, while praying night prayer has allowed us the privilege of ending our day in God’s presence (and, on occasion, tempered the temptation to go to bed angry with each other!).

Solemn Commitment

Because of my lengthy experience with praying the breviary, on the day of my ordination as a deacon I was able to say an enthusiastic “I do” when the archbishop asked me and my classmates: “Are you resolved … to celebrate faithfully the Liturgy of the Hours for the Church and for the whole world?”

At that moment, we made a solemn commitment to pray, at a minimum, morning prayer and evening prayer every day for the rest of our lives. This was not a light commitment — it was not a case of, “Yes, well, I’ll do it if I have time or if I’m in the mood.” It was a commitment that is solemnly binding, one that, the Church reminds us, we cannot renege upon without a grave reason, on pain of sin.

Why does the Church ask her ordained ministers and deacons, in particular, to make such a commitment? First, just as the diaconate is a ministry of service and charity, so praying the Divine Office is a preeminent act of service and charity. If this sounds odd, it might be because many of us equate service with action: ministering to the homeless in a soup kitchen, visiting the sick, working long hours at the parish fish fry, etc. Don’t get me wrong: All our concrete acts of service have tremendous value. But before we go out into the world to do whatever apostolate the Lord is calling us to, we must be men of prayer. As clerics, we are asked to make the particular sacrifice of setting aside specific times during the day to pray on behalf of the Church, the world and all its needs. For this reason, we should see praying the office not simply as an obligation but as an opportunity to carry out a vital ministry of service and charity.

The servanthood dimension of the Liturgy of the Hours is closely connected to our daily contact with the psalms in the breviary. The beauty of the psalms is that they contain the whole range of human emotions that we experience every day: joy, hope, sorrow, anger, despair, and so on. For this reason, the psalms not only help us to adore, thank and petition God, but they enable us to more effectively pray for others.

On any given day, we might find that the psalms the Church offers us in the breviary do not align with our personal moods. When this happens, it is important to realize that the very sentiments with which we cannot identify at the moment are the sentiments being experienced by our family, our friends, our parishioners and other people completely unknown to us. Some are joyful, some are grieving, some are thankful, some are angry. Attentively praying the psalms provides us with a powerful means of praying for and on behalf of the people entrusted to our pastoral care by giving voice to their needs.

Communion with Jesus

In addition, the psalms put us in communion with Jesus Christ. When we pray the psalms, we are praying the prayers Jesus prayed during his life. Also, many of the psalms find their deepest fulfillment in his life, death and resurrection. In the words of St. Ambrose, “In the psalms, not only is Jesus born for us, he also undergoes his saving passion in his body, he lies in death, he rises again, he ascends into heaven, he sits at the right hand of the Father.” As men who are sacramentally configured to Christ the Servant, we should do all we can to strengthen our union with him. Praying the psalms helps us do this.

Praying the Liturgy of the Hours is also a source of grace and blessing because it is a participation in the liturgical life of the Church. We unite ourselves with the same prayer that is said every day by the pope, the bishops, all priests, deacons, religious, and laypeople all over the world. All of us in turn, by taking part in this liturgy, are uniting our voices with those of the angels and saints who praise God in heaven.

Moreover, praying the office enables us to sanctify every minute and hour of every day of our lives. What better way to thank God for the gift of our lives and the gift of each day than to make a small sacrifice of our time — 10 minutes here, 5 minutes there — to him in return for that great gift? The Church only requires permanent deacons to do the bare minimum of saying morning and evening prayer each day. It takes 10 minutes to say these “hours.” To be blunt, if we can’t give God 10 minutes at the beginning and end of our days, why did we get ordained?

Finally, the breviary provides structure for our daily prayer lives, especially if we go beyond the minimum and pray some of the other hours. The short readings and morning and evening prayer, and the longer readings in the office of readings, provide us with substantive material for lectio divina. Night prayer affords us an opportunity to do an examination of conscience at the end of the day. Daytime prayer allows us to check in briefly with God during busy workdays, much like I might send a text to my wife just to touch base and let her know that I am thinking of her while I’m at work. In other words, all the things that we should be doing already — prayerful reading of Scripture, a daily examen, staying close to the Lord amid our work — are “covered” by participation in the Divine Office.

Twenty-seven years ago, I fell in love with the Liturgy of the Hours. It is my hope that all of my brother deacons and deacon candidates might have the same experience, to develop a deep love and affection for the Church’s official prayer and offer it to God with dedication and fervor.

DEACON STEPHEN FAHRIG, STD, is a permanent deacon and associate professor of biblical theology at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in the Archdiocese of Saint Louis.

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The Church’s Prayer

The Catechism of the Catholic Church notes the following of the Liturgy of the Hours: “The Liturgy of the Hours is intended to become the prayer of the whole People of God. In it Christ himself ‘continues his priestly work through his Church.’ His members participate according to their own place in the Church and the circumstances of their lives: priests devoted to the pastoral ministry, because they are called to remain diligent in prayer and the service of the word; religious, by the charism of their consecrated lives; all the faithful as much as possible: “Pastors of souls should see to it that the principal hours, especially Vespers, are celebrated in common in church on Sundays and on the more solemn feasts. The laity, too, are encouraged to recite the divine office, either with the priests, or among themselves, or even individually” (No. 1175).

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