Wow, what a crazy busy week it has been for me here… and it has been just orientation stuff. As I wrote about in my last post this consists mostly of business type stuff such as getting our schedule for classes, a schedule of other things going on, required and optional, and being told what is expected of us.
In addition orientation week of course had a lot of prayer time both for liturgy prayer and private prayer. This brings me to one of the things that I wanted to talk about based on a question I had… the question was in person, but I have mentioned a prayer that goes by many titles; “The Divine Office”, “The Liturgy of the Hours”, or “The Brievery”. These all refer to basically the same thing and are used interchangeably.
This is the book of prayers that is required to be prayed daily by the priests and religious throughout the world. It is heavily loaded with readings from the Book of Psalms, which are ancient prayers that are included in the Bible… a common prayer practice among Jewish people during the time of Jesus was to recite the Psalms, and we are taught that He took part in this prayer. In the Brievery is also: daily scripture readings, quotes from the Saints, hymns, and prayers written by others in the past. It is set up to be prayed at various times of the day I.E. : morning prayer, midday prayer (actually 3 different midday prayer times), evening prayer, and night prayer. This is to keep the focus of our day on prayer and Christ.
The question that I had was from someone who asked me how it can be prayer if it is pre-written down, and doesn’t come in our own words. I stumbled through an answer at that time, but wanted to address it a bit more… my thoughts on it, as I have said before, I am not teaching a Philosophy or Theology course here, although I might explain things that I find interesting.
Of course personal prayer, in one’s own words is a wonderful and very important way to pray. Silence is also important, listening to God, rather than just talking at Him. I love those forms of prayer and take part in them all the time. However, with the prayers written by others come many wonderful aspects. I can safely assume that at the time that I am praying any prewritten prayer that someone else, somewhere is praying with me. This gives me a wonderful comfort to know, maybe they are asking God to take care of all those who are praying with them, I know I do. I can also trust that I am praying the same way that people for a long time (with slight dialect changes) have prayed, many of those people are in Heaven with God now (Saints, both big “S” and little “s”), and may be focusing their prayers now toward helping those on Earth, including me. (As an aside, and I may talk about this later, when I say the big “S” and little “s” saints what I am meaning is that the big “S” are those that the Church has recognized as Saints and canonized them, acknowledging our belief and knowledge that they are in Heaven, a little “s” saint is anyone else who is in Heaven with God, but has not been placed in the canon, or list).
Another reason that I truly love prewritten prayers is that often times I am at a complete loss as to anything to say to God. This especially happens when I am praying in front of His real presence in the Blessed Sacrament. I am so in awe of the wonderful gift of salvation that He has given us, I want to praise him, but can’t find my words. At these times are times that I lean even more heavily on prewritten prayers.
Okay, enough of that for now. As I said orientation week has wrapped up. We spent a lot of time in the business sessions, and getting to know each other. I am amazed at how wonderful the guys in my class are, I don’t think that I could have scripted a better group of guys, wonderful personalities and enough diversity to keep it interesting.
One of the last sessions of orientation week was the Virtus training. Virtus is a national program on protecting God’s Children. Each Diocese has something in place for this, especially since the sex abuse crisis raised awareness of a problem, but this is the one that the Archdiocese of Chicago wants us to have to minister within their diocese. It is a wonderful program. Although of course anyone looking at the numbers knows that the abuse rate among Catholic Priests is actually lower than any other demographic group that someone can pick, any cases of it are too much, and the media attention to it drew an awareness that allows for the Church to protect the vulnerable even more.
Tonight we started a silent retreat. This will run until Friday mid-day. Of course there are recommended ways to implement this retreat it will truly come to whatever we make of it. I am allowing myself to write the blog post(s) that I may think of during this time and I will of course post them to my Facebook as always, but I won’t do much other Facebooking, or much other contact. If you absolutely need to get ahold of me for some reason call and leave a message, I will check those, or send an e-mail and put the word “important” in the subject line so that I will open it when it comes through on my phone… otherwise I will be available sometime early Friday afternoon.
One request that I have is that everyone keep the family of my cousin-in-law in your prayers. Several members of the family were seriously hurt in a recent car crash. And of course, please keep me, my class mates, all seminarians, clergy and religious in your prayers.
Peace,
Adam
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