Praying The Psalms With Saint Benedict

The appointment would take a while. 

Doctor’s appointments can sometimes take a long while. It was a beautiful Lower Alabama winter morning with plenty of sunshine, so I figured I would sit in the car and wait while my wife was inside for her appointment.

I took along some reading material that would help sanctify the time – a New Testament with the Psalms, a copy of the Rule of Saint Benedict, an English translation of the book In Silence With God by Abbot Benedict Baur that was first published in 1955 and bears both the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur, and my Monastic Diurnal.

I used my breviary to recite Lauds for Thursday that includes Psalm 51, 88, 90, and The Song of Moses from Exodus 15:1-19. Our car, for a short season, became an oratory where the Opus Dei became the most important matter within my reach.

A breviary is a wonderful tool.

A Benedictine breviary is an especially wonderful tool.

I had, for a number of years after becoming an Oblate, used the four-volume Liturgy of the Hours. Though a beautiful composition, the Liturgy of the Hours was more than I could sustainably keep up with in the normal routine of my family and work life. It made me wonder, too, how busy diocesan priests faithfully keep up with it.

I opted to use Shorter Christian Prayer as a breviary. It is a beautiful composition, as well, and based on the Liturgy of the Hours. It is set up on a four-week cycle, and something that is much easier to carry in hand or in a pocket than one of the four volumes of the Liturgy of the Hours.

Somewhere along the way, in my search for something that was more in tune with the prescription of Saint Benedict, I discovered the Monastic Diurnal. According to their website, Lancelot Andrewes Press still carries them.

Diurnal?

It is an interesting word, though one fairly well lost to our more modern English usages. It’s simplest definition means having to do with each day every day. The Monastic Diurnal was the breviary followed by busy Benedictines going about their lives outside the monastic enclosures nearly a hundred years ago.

I sat quietly, there in our mobile oratory, after reciting Lauds. I was in no hurry. There was no need to hurry. There was no urgency to do anything other that what I was doing. I simply sat there soaking like a sponge in a sink of warm water. I began to sense that my offering had touched the heart of God and that he, in return, was benevolently touching mine.

In the quietness, I was reminded of how the Benedictine practice of repetitiously praying these Psalms from the breviary affect my perception and vision.

They cause me to look upward toward the absolute holiness and perfection of the Father and the Son where they are seated in their heavenly place. They cause me to look outward toward the world and all that is going on in the world; a world of humanity that seems, at least to me, to be fast falling apart in its downward moral spiral. They cause me to look inward into the interior realms of my own heart; drawing me into a place where, though living in the state of grace, I cannot forget or excuse myself for the grave sins I have committed, and into a place where the vision of Christ on the Cross becomes ever more beautiful, ever more personally appreciated, motivating me to continue laying down my life in order to embrace his life.

The sun was at a place in the sky where its rays created bright shining glare reflecting from the chrome bumpers and windshields of cars sitting around in the parking lots. I lowered the visor in front of me and put on some shades to protect my eyes from the eye-piercing glare. I could not help, in that moment, but to think about how easy it is to be attracted to the lesser things in this world that glitter and shine while, at the same time, blinding me to the beauty of the Son and eternal realities that he represents.