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Volume 37, Number 3 |
Richardton, ND 58652 |
July 2009 |
In Praise of the New Office: II
by Terrence Kardong, O.S.B.
After a few years of experimentation, most communities settled back down to a basic program of prayer that included certain essential elements: hymns, psalms, readings, canticles, responses, orations, and usually in that order. Eventually, the Church declared the period of experimentation over and told us that we needed to include these elements in our Divine Office. By that time, most of us were more than ready to fall back into some kind of fairly stable structure of public prayer. Experimentation can be exhilarating, but it can also be exhausting. And some of us never again wanted to hear the typical experimenter declare: “The theme of today’s Office is faith in God.” Well, what else is the whole liturgical enterprise about, for God’s sake?
But I might add that there will always be a need for fresh and creative input into our liturgies. For example, at most Offices, we have a reading and this cannot be the same all the time. If it is Scripture, then we must have an intelligent system of excerpts that covers the whole Bible without necessarily including some of the genealogies and so forth. If the community wants to use other readings, such as those from the Church Fathers but also from modern writers, then somebody has to be searching out those passages for us. In our case, Bro. Alban has been locating good readings for our Offices for many years. This is a real service to the community on his part. Thank God he has good taste, and we have an adequate library for this purpose. But communities that do not have such a person can also find standard lectionaries for their readings in the Office.
At any rate, I do not want to leave the impression that things have settled back down to where they were before. They have not. There has been a fundamental change, and I do not think that the most important change has been the shift from Latin to English. That is a very big difference, but I am not sure that it is as important as we once thought it was. As I am free to admit, before 1970 with the Latin we hardly knew what we were saying. But with the English as well, we also hardly know what we are saying.
This is partly due to a lack of focus on our (my) part. The words still fly by and I do not even know what I have said to the Lord. But deeper than that, it seems to be in the very nature of group singing or recitation that one cannot achieve much concentration. That is because you cannot stop; you must keep going. There is no time to stop and ponder a verse of the psalms. The readings are a little different, but here again one often loses the train of thought unless you apply a good deal of concentration to your listening. But in all honesty, I often leave the Divine Office without any clear sense of what has been said there. I am not sure I felt much different after the old Latin Office. At any rate, I doubt if the whole thing is about comprehension.
Well, then, what is it about? After fifty years in choir, I now think that it is a much more global experience, having more to do with the heart than the head. The Divine Office is about spending time with the Lord and with the brethren in a sort of symphony that is not so much about the words. In other words, the whole atmosphere is what counts most. If there is a spirit of charity and serenity in the Office, then it will be good and the monks will love it. People will find it truly nourishing for their spirits. Attendance will be no problem; people will not miss the Divine Office unless they absolutely have to. In this sense, I feel that the new Office is a tremendous success, a smash hit. But I still have not said why.
In my opinion, the new Office is highly successful, at least in this monastery, mainly
because we have slowed down. We now have a rather rigid policy of reciting quite
deliberately, with a distinct pause between the two sides of the choir. We also demand
a full minute between the psalms and after the reading. When the leader of the Office
gets nervous and begins to chip away at these pauses, he gets told in no uncertain
terms. Some years ago the abbot passed me a note insisting that I should begin the
one-
How did this slowdown come about? Not by accident! When Fr. Valerian came home from school at St. Meinrad’s about 1974, he introduced the idea of these pauses and the community bought into it. Not only that, he held training sessions for us, since it was not easy for us to slow down. But we did slow down and we stayed slowed down. Not only that, Valerian offered to train the local convents in the same practice and they also bought the program. I do not know if these pauses were Valerian’s own idea, but they have proven crucial to the reform of the whole Office hereabouts. He deserves a lot of credit.
Only somebody who experienced the old Office can fully appreciate the difference. I suppose that we mostly did not realize how rapid and frenetic the old Office could be, but once you experience a slowdown you know very well. At first, some of the monks found the slowdown irritating and even silly. At Sant’Anselmo, when the young Germans tried to slow down their Office, the old Germans actually seceded. That left two German Offices, fast and slow! Needless to say, this was a source of amusement to us Anglophones. But the truth was that we also had gone through an uncomfortable transition to the new, slow Office.
In an important sense, the change of speed was a big part of why we needed to set aside the old Office. In fact, it was just too long and too complicated to provide what we now need. What do we need? We need a contemplative atmosphere when we pray, even when we pray together. Oh, there are still the obvious problems like the difficulty of staying together in the singing and recitation. And people still have ways of irritating each other in common prayer. But by and large, I think people do find the new Office contemplative. I would not even be afraid to suggest that the very pace of the recitation and the generous pauses of silence have an effect on the heartbeat. When you come out of the new Office, you feel rested, not exhausted.
In traditional terms, I have to admit that the new Office can be criticized. St. Benedict says that we absolutely must recite all 150 psalms every week. We can arrange them in any pattern we want, but we must go through the whole psalter. Given that precept, I can well imagine that St. Benedict is not entirely happy with the new Office. Of course, he has other things to think about now, so this is no big deal, but we still would like to be as faithful to his wishes as possible. But, as we told Pope Paul VI, we have to figure out our own way to pray and that no longer necessarily includes 150 psalms.
Perhaps one should even question the whole business of numbers in these matters.
What is sacred about 150? As soon as you focus on numbers, you risk slipping over
into a mentality of production. In this mindset, we need to do such and such amount
of work for God. St. Benedict uses the term pensum servitutis, which means “measure
of service.” Was he thinking of a certain amount of praise that the monk owed to
God each day? Was it something the Church demanded as the monk’s daily or weekly
quota? I suppose that kind of thinking need not undermine prayer, but for the modern
work-
When I first entered the monastery, I saw evidence in our choir of this production mentality. One old man simply had to pray the whole Office himself. He could not rest while the other side was singing its half of the antiphonal psalmody. He had grown used to reciting the whole Office alone as a parish priest, so one could understand his restiveness at only being asked to recite half of the verses. But the same mentality found it rather hard to appreciate the silent pauses in the new Office. What are we waiting for? Let’s get the show on the road!
But the truth is that we go to church for prayer, not for production. It does not matter much whether we say one psalm or two or ten. John Cassian says somewhere in his vast writings that it would be better to sing one psalm with fervor than a dozen without devotion. Of course, it might be even better to sing a dozen with zeal, but that is really beside the point. The point is to find a way to pray well. For the moment, I think we have found a way.
Besides the direct spiritual benefits of the new Office, there have also been some distinct side benefits for our communities. For one thing, the vernacular Office now permits our whole community to pray together. In the old days, the priests and clerics prayed the Latin Office, while the brothers prayed a separate Office in English. Now that the Office is in English, we can all pray together. This is a very helpful thing for most of our communities, because we no longer have the luxury of large groups of people to pray two Offices. We now need every last member to keep the Office going. And since we always were one community, it is now very good to have only one Office.
But in addition to that, the new Office is also much more accessible to guests and visitors to our monastery. In the old days, these people were not invited to pray the Office with the monks. It was really not something that anyone could manage without elaborate instruction and practice. The new Office also takes a bit of help, but most of our visitors find it quite manageable. Sometimes they find it a bit hard to recite as slow as we do or to allow the pauses, but they quickly catch on. At any rate, the Office is now an important part of our ministry of hospitality. We cannot invite visitors into our cloistered living area, but we can include them in our daily Offices. And so they get a good feeling for the spiritual heart of our monastic existence.
