I’m
starting, appropriately enough, with the Invitatory Psalm. This is not a separate Hour, but an
introductory prayer that is usually said before Matins (Office of
Readings) or Lauds (Morning Prayer), whichever of the two you say first (if
you start later in the day, the Invitatory is not said). This prayer is
intended as the start of the entire cycle of prayer for a given day. The
General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours says: “This invitatory
verse and psalm daily invite the faithful to sing the praises of God, hear his
voice and look forward to the ‘Rest of the Lord’”. The Psalm we usually say for the Invitatory is
Psalm 95 (Psalms 100, 67 or 23 may be used in its place), sung or said as a
responsorial. The optional Psalms are all interesting in their own right, but
today I’ll focus on Psalm 95, which is the “default” prayer, if I may use that
term. It is said with an introductory
verse and antiphon as follows:
Introductory Verse:
while tracing the Sign of the Cross on your lips, say: Lord, open my lips, and
my mouth will proclaim your praise.
Psalm 95
Recite and repeat
Antiphon
Come, let us
sing to the Lord
and shout
with joy to the Rock who saves us.
Let us
approach Him with praise and thanksgiving
and sing
joyful songs to the Lord.
Antiphon
The Lord is
God, the mighty God,
the great King over all the gods.
He holds in
His hands the depths of the earth
and the
highest mountains as well
He made the
sea; it belongs to Him,
the dry
land, too, for it was formed by His hands.
Antiphon
Come, then,
let us bow down and worship,
bending the
knee before the Lord, our Maker,
For He is
our God and we are His people,
the flock He
shepherds.
Antiphon
Today,
listen to the voice of the Lord:
Do not grow
stubborn, as your fathers did in the wilderness,
when at
Meribah and Massah
they
challenged Me and provoked Me,
Although
they had seen all of My works.
Antiphon
Forty years
I endured that generation.
I said,
“They are a people whose hearts go astray
and they do
not know My ways. So I swore in my anger,
“They shall
not enter into My rest.”
Antiphon
Glory to the
Father, and to the Son,
and to the
Holy Spirit:
as it was in
the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen.
Antiphon
The
introductory verse is always the same (“Lord open my lips . . .”); the antiphon
changes according to the day and liturgical season. In the season of Lent, for instance, the
antiphon would be either: “Come, let us worship Christ the Lord, Who for our
sake endured temptation and suffering”, or “If today you hear the Voice of the
Lord, harden not your hearts.” Since
today, July 31st, is the feast day of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who
was a priest, we use the antiphon for priest’s feast days: “Come, let us
worship Christ, chief shepherd of the flock, alleluia.”
What I find really interesting about this
prayer is the way it draws us into the daily liturgy by mirroring the way we
are drawn in to a love relationship, both with another person, and with God. The first strophe starts out joyfully, like
our excitement at the beginning of a relationship: “sing to the Lord and shout
with joy,” etc. But there’s also a
little bit of foreshadowing in “the Rock who saves us”. We see God described as a defensive rock, a
fortress, in Samuel 22:3 and Psalm 62:2.
But there is also a rock in Exodus 17:7
and Numbers 20:7 that St. Paul
tells us (1 Corinthians 10:4) is Christ, and, yes, that rock provides water to
the Hebrews in the desert, but at the same time their grumbling and lack of
faith (these places are called Massah, “testing” and Meribah,
“quarreling”, in the scriptural texts) anger God.
In the second strophe we learn more about
who God is: He is “great King over all the gods”, creator of all, an “it
belongs to Him”. Again, as in a
relationship, true love starts to grow as our initial infatuation is informed
by a real knowledge of who the other person is and what they are like.
We bring the action of the first two
strophes to a conclusion in the third: we “bow down and worship”, acknowledge
Him as “the Lord, our Maker”, and that pledge that “he is our God and we are
his people.” Here we commit ourselves to
a covenant relationship with God, to which the wedding in a human relationship
is (roughly) analogous. But those of us
who are married know that the wedding is just the beginning . . .
We see things take a perhaps unexpected
turn in the fourth strophe. “Listen to
the voice of the Lord”: unlike a human relationship, this is not a union of
equals. But look at what the Lord has to
say: “Do not grow stubborn, as your fathers did in the wilderness,/when at
Meribah and Massah they challenged Me and provoked Me . . .” So, it seems that
we are talking about both the Rock that protects us, and the Rock to whom we were
faithless. Relationships, especially
love relationships, carry responsibilities, and here the Lord is reminding us
of where our weakness lies.
Finally, God reminds us in the fifth
strophe that we have the freedom to reject His love, and that abuse of that
freedom has consequences. The generation that He endured “for forty years” is,
of, course, Moses’ and Aaron’s generation.
Nobody in the Old Testament enjoyed a closer relationship with God than
Moses, and yet he was barred entry into the Promised Land because of his
faithlessness at Meribah.
At this point, we close the Invitatory
with the Doxology and a final repetition of the antiphon. The prayer closes, not at the end, but in the
middle of the relationship; we continue to live out, or better yet, to work out
that relationship throughout the day in the Divine Office. It is a liturgical prayer, after all, and the
word “liturgy” comes from the Greek leitourgia, “work of the
people.” It is not simply prayed,
but done.
We may be surprised at first by the tone
of the final two strophes of the Invitatory.
The General Instruction tells us that it invites us to “look forward to
the ‘Rest of the Lord’”, but that’s not quite right: it’s really warning us not
to lose
it. It reminds me of this exchange from
John’s Gospel:
After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went
about with him. Jesus said to the
twelve, "Do you also wish to go away?" Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom
shall we go? You have the words of eternal life . . .” John 6:66-68
The message
here comes from a negative, rather than a positive direction, but it serves a
purpose. It is what we call in
educational jargon an “open-ended question”, one that requires some initiative
on the part of the recipient; as we begin our daily work of prayer, God is
asking us, as Jesus does the Apostles: “What choice will you make? What are you going to do?”
To read the whole series go here.
Below are some resources for anyone interested in exploring the Liturgy of the Hours -
Websites:
Universalis.com – This was the first website I encountered with the text of the LOH. It does have the full text of all the daily prayers, although, at least in the free version available online, many of the translations are not the approved ones. They do say that the translations in the App version are the standard ones.
Ebreviary.com – Full tests of all the prayers, which are designed so that they can be printed as booklets – but you need to buy a subscription.
Divineoffice.org – My favorite LOH website. It contains the full approved translations of most of the canonical hours (there is only one hour for Daytime Prayer). There are also audio versions of each hour which include recorded hymns and recitation of the prayers, either spoken or chanted.
Books:
There are various one-volume books entitled Christian Prayer that contain most of the Liturgy of the Hours. The best choice available is this one [here], although it is not complete (particularly the Office of Readings), and hasn’t been updated since 1976. I prefer this one [here] from the Daughters of St. Paul, which contains everything except the long readings from the Office of Readings (which are available from the websites above). It also dates from 1976, however, and, even worse, seems to be out of print.
The Gold Standard is the four-volume Liturgy of the Hours [here]. It’s all there, but it’s gonna cost you.
No comments:
Post a Comment