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| The Triumph of St. Augustine by Claudio Coello |
In today’s post
on the Liturgy of the Hours we are taking a look at The Office of
Readings. This office was traditionally
called Matins, and took place in the middle of the night, where it was
considered to be the first office of the day.
In the reformed Liturgy the Church has untethered it, so to speak, from
any fixed time so that it can be said at any time of day.
We should take
this independence from an appointed time as a sign of how important the Church
considers this office to be; she wants us to have every opportunity to pray it,
regardless of the hour. And it is, in
certain respects, different from the other offices, in that it contains fewer
prayers and much longer scripture readings; not only that, it includes
non-scriptural readings from the Saints and from magisterial Church documents. The
result is an office whose rewards are not only spiritual but educational, and
the whole of which is greater than the sum of the parts.
Let’s first take
a look at the structure of the Office of Readings. When it is not preceded by
the Invitatory [
link], it
begins as do the other offices:
God, come
to my assistance.
` Lord, make
haste to help me.
Glory be 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.
The Psalmody
comes next, consisting of three psalm readings, each either a complete psalm or
several stanzas from a longer one, preceded and followed by brief
antiphons. After the psalmody and a very
brief verse and response we find the first reading, a scriptural reading
normally in the range of 500-600 words long; these are normally arranged so
that very large portions of the various books of the Bible are covered over a
period of a week or two. After a short
responsory there is a non-Biblical reading, often from the Fathers of the
Church, sometimes written by the Saint whose feast falls on that day. After another short responsory there is a
closing prayer; on important feast days the closing prayer is preceded by the
ancient hymn of praise Te Deum (see below).
These long
readings are one of the treasures of the reformed office.
I’m not sure I would have found the time or
occasion otherwise to read so much of books such as Esther or Revelation.
But there’s more to it than that.
This isn’t simply reading: it’s very much
like the practice of
Lectio Divina in which we are
simultaneously taking in the words of Holy Scripture, and also offering up them
up to God.
One function of the
liturgical prayers and the psalms in the first part of the office (in addition
to their their own intrinsic value) is that they put us into a sort of “prayer
state” in which we are receptive to the words in a way that is simply not
possible when we are reading in an ordinary way.
The non-Scriptural
readings also deserve a special mention.
There is an impressive variety of authors to teach and inspire us. To take
a random sample, on the ten days from March 19th through March 28th
of this year there are readings from: St. Bernadine of Siena, St. Hilary of
Poitiers, St. Irenaeus, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Basil the Great, St.
Leo the Great, St. Theophilus of Antioch, Tertullian, and St. Gregory the
Great. It is very unlikely indeed that I
would have assembled this list of writers on my own, impossible that I could
have chosen such consistent quality of selections, which although they are not
inspired in the way Holy Scripture is, all have the approval of the Church
to which Christ granted authority to act in His Name on Earth. None of the authors above is infallible,
after all, and Tertullian, for one, actually ended his life a heretic. We know
that the passages we find in the Office of Readings, however, are free from
doctrinal error; more than that, they are not only endorsed by the Magisterium
of the Catholic Church, they are offered to us as part of her daily liturgy as
nourishment for both our mind and spirit.
I myself have
found the Office of Readings to be an unexpected source of enrichment over the
dozen or so years I have been praying the Liturgy of the Hours. With the internet resources that are
available today it is easier than ever to do.
See:
TE DEUM
You
are God: we praise you;
You
are the Lord: we acclaim you;
You
are the eternal Father:
All creation worships you.
To
you all angels, all the powers of heaven,
Cherubim
and Seraphim, sing in endless praise:
Holy,
holy, holy, Lord, God of power and might,
heaven
and earth are full of your glory.
The
glorious company of apostles praise you.
The
noble fellowship of prophets praise you.
The
white-robed army of martyrs praise you.
Throughout
the world the holy Church acclaims you:
Father,
of majesty unbounded,
your
true and only Son, worthy of all worship,
and
the Holy Spirit, advocate and guide.
You,
Christ, are the King of glory,
the
eternal Son of the Father.
When
you became man to set us free
you
did not spurn the Virgin’s womb.
You
overcame the sting of death,
and
opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.
You
are seated at God’s right hand in glory.
We
believe that you will come, and be our judge.
Come
then, Lord, and help your people,
bought
with the price of your own blood,
and
bring us with your saints
to
glory everlasting.
Amen
