Prayer and worship

Daily prayer

A rule of prayer you can actually keep - the hours, the psalms, and what to do when it goes cold.

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The Church has always prayed at fixed times. Israel did - evening, and morning, and at noon, will I pray (Psalm 55:17); Daniel three times a day; the apostles at the third, sixth and ninth hours. The monastic hours grew from this, and every one of the four traditions has a form of daily prayer for ordinary people.

A rule of prayer is a fixed pattern you keep whether or not you feel like it. The point is not to achieve a quantity but to establish a rhythm that does not depend on mood - because mood is exactly what fails.

Three principles the traditions agree on:

Small and kept beats large and abandoned. Ten minutes morning and evening, kept for a year, will do more than an hour attempted and dropped in a fortnight. Every spiritual director in every tradition says this, and everyone ignores it at first.

Use the psalms. They are the Church's own prayer book, given by God, prayed by Christ, and they teach you to say things you would not have chosen - which is their value.

Anchor it to something. Prayer that happens when I get a moment does not happen. Attach it to waking, to a meal, to a commute, to going to bed.

The traditional shape is simple: morning - praise, a psalm, Scripture, the Lord's Prayer, intercession for the day. Evening - thanksgiving, examination of conscience, confession, a psalm, commendation into God's hands.

And the piece of advice every tradition gives to beginners: when it goes dry, keep going. Dryness is normal, it is not a verdict, and abandoning the rule when it stops feeling rewarding trains you to pray only when prayer is pleasant.

Why fixed times

The instinct of modern Christianity is that scheduled prayer is less sincere than spontaneous prayer. The traditions hold the reverse, for a practical reason.

Prayer that depends on the impulse to pray will occur when you feel religious, which is to say when things are going well or when they are going catastrophically. It will not occur during the long ordinary stretches, which is most of life. A rule prays through those stretches, and the stretches are where a Christian is actually formed.

There is a second reason. The times themselves teach. Praying at the day's beginning puts the day under God before you have begun to manage it. Praying at its end forces a reckoning you would otherwise avoid. Praying at noon interrupts. The structure says something that content alone could not.

Pause and thinkPause: most people who try a daily rule abandon it within a month. Before reading on - what do you think the commonest cause is, and what is the remedy?

The hours

The monastic day is divided by prayer. The full form has seven or eight offices, from Matins in the night through to Compline at bed.

Ordinary people cannot keep that, and the traditions have never expected them to. What they did was compress it.

Morning prayer (Lauds, Matins, Orthros) - praise at the day's beginning.
Midday prayer (Terce, Sext, None) - a brief interruption.
Evening prayer (Vespers) - thanksgiving as the light fails; historically the lamp-lighting service.
Night prayer (Compline) - short, quiet, penitential, ending the day. Often the easiest office for a beginner, because it is brief and because its mood matches the hour.

The psalter is the backbone of all of them. Monastic use reads all 150 in a week; Cranmer's Prayer Book spreads them over a month; Catholic and Orthodox schemes vary. Any scheme will do. What matters is that you are praying all of them, in order, rather than the dozen you like.

A rule you can keep

If you have no rule, this is a reasonable place to begin. Every tradition has its own forms and you should move to those; what follows is the common shape underneath them.

In the morning, five to fifteen minutes:

The sign of the cross, or a short invocation.
A psalm - follow a scheme, do not choose by mood.
A short Scripture reading - the lectionary appointed for the day.
The Lord's Prayer.
Intercession: two or three people by name, and the day ahead.
A closing collect.

In the evening, five to fifteen minutes:

Thanksgiving for the day.
Examination of conscience. Walk back through the day. Where was I ungenerous, dishonest, unkind, cowardly? Where did I receive something I have not acknowledged?
Confession, briefly and specifically.
A psalm.
The Lord's Prayer.
Commendation - into thy hands I commend my spirit.

Through the day: grace at meals, and a short repeated prayer - the Jesus Prayer, or a line from a psalm - to return to in gaps.

Two habits make the difference between a rule that survives and one that does not: the same time and the same place, and a book rather than improvisation. Improvised prayer at six in the morning becomes a review of your worries.

Where the four traditions stand

Catholic

The Liturgy of the Hours - also called the Divine Office or the breviary - is the Church's official daily prayer, obligatory for clergy and religious and warmly commended to the laity. Its principal hours are the Office of Readings, Morning Prayer (Lauds), Daytime Prayer, Evening Prayer (Vespers) and Night Prayer (Compline). The psalter is distributed over four weeks. Many lay Catholics pray Morning and Evening Prayer only, and shorter published forms such as Shorter Christian Prayer exist for that purpose. Alongside the Office, Catholic daily practice includes the Rosary, which for many lay people is the practical rule; the Angelus at six, noon and six; daily Mass where possible; the examination of conscience at night, which Ignatius made a daily discipline in the Examen; and grace at meals. Lectio divina - slow, prayerful reading of Scripture in four movements, reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation - is strongly encouraged.

Orthodox

Orthodox daily prayer is built around a prayer rule set in consultation with one's spiritual father, which is expected to be modest and to be kept. The standard morning and evening prayers are printed in every Orthodox prayer book and include the Trisagion prayers, Psalm 50 (51 in Western numbering), the Creed, and a series of set prayers from the Fathers. The Jesus Prayer - Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner - is central, often counted on a prayer rope (chotki or komboskini), and in the hesychast tradition is prayed until it becomes continuous. Prayer is conducted before the icon corner in the home, standing, with the sign of the cross made frequently and bows or prostrations according to the season. Fasting is integrated with prayer through the year's cycles, and the two are treated as inseparable. Orthodox counsel is emphatic on two points: keep the rule small enough to sustain, and do not vary it according to feeling - the elders' repeated advice is to pray as you can, not as you cannot.

Lutheran

Luther gave the Church the most practical daily prayers in the Reformation tradition. The Small Catechism contains Morning and Evening Prayers written for ordinary households, each beginning with the sign of the cross and the invocation of the Trinity, and each short enough to be learned by a child: I thank you, my heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ your dear Son, that you have kept me this night from all harm and danger... It also contains table blessings and the instruction that the head of the household should teach these to his family - daily prayer is domestic before it is monastic. Lutheranism retained Matins and Vespers in simplified form, and these appear in Lutheran hymnals for congregational and household use. Luther's A Simple Way to Pray, written for his barber Peter Beskendorf, remains the best short guide: take the commandments, the Creed and the Lord's Prayer, and from each make a garland of instruction, thanksgiving, confession and petition. His advice on dryness is characteristically blunt - pray briefly and attentively rather than at length without attention, and do not wait for the mood.

Anglican

Morning and Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer are Anglicanism's distinctive contribution to daily prayer, and their design was a deliberate act of democratisation: Cranmer compressed the eight monastic hours into two offices an ordinary literate person could say at home, in English, with one book. The psalter is read through every month, the Old Testament once a year and the New Testament three times. The structure - sentences, confession, absolution, Lord's Prayer, psalms, two readings each followed by a canticle, the Creed, the lesser litany, collects - is stable and quickly learned. Evening Prayer, sung as Choral Evensong, is one of the most durable achievements of English religion and is attended by many who would not call themselves believers. Modern provinces provide shorter forms, and Common Worship's Daily Prayer offers Prayer During the Day and Night Prayer alongside the two principal offices. The Anglican tradition's characteristic counsel is moderation: a modest rule, kept faithfully over decades, and no spiritual heroics.

Where modern denominations differ

Who differs: Most Baptist, Pentecostal, non-denominational and evangelical Christians practise a daily quiet time: personal Bible reading with a commentary or devotional, followed by extemporaneous prayer, usually in the morning. This is a real and serious discipline, and many evangelicals keep it with a consistency that puts liturgical Christians to shame.

What they hold: That prayer should be personal and unscripted; that the point of the daily discipline is to study Scripture and then respond; and that set offices are formal, repetitive and liable to become mechanical.

How to answer - and here more than anywhere, the right posture is exchange rather than refutation:

Concede the strength. The evangelical quiet time gets one thing conspicuously right that liturgical Christians often get wrong: sustained personal engagement with the biblical text. Many Catholics and Orthodox hear Scripture at the liturgy and read almost none themselves, which is a genuine deficiency and one their own authorities say so about - Dei Verbum urges the laity to read Scripture, and Jerome's line that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ is quoted in the Catechism.

Then name the weakness, which is the same weakness the rest of this course keeps returning to. A discipline that depends on the individual's own resources will vary with those resources. On the day you are exhausted, bereaved or bitter, you must generate the prayer yourself - and you cannot. The offices ask nothing: you open the book and say what is appointed, and the psalm for that morning was chosen by a sixteenth-century scheme that knows nothing about your week and is very often exactly right.

On the psalms specifically: a quiet time tends to settle into favourite books and congenial passages. A psalter scheme makes you pray lament when you are cheerful, penitence when you feel fine, and praise when you are furious. It enlarges the range of what you are able to say to God, and left to ourselves we narrow it.

On mechanical repetition: grant it happens, and then note that improvised prayer develops its own ruts faster than most people notice - the same three concerns, the same phrases, in the same order, every morning for a decade.

The genuinely useful suggestion is not to replace one with the other. It is to add the missing half: an evangelical who adds Evening Prayer or Compline to a quiet time loses nothing and gains the psalter and a fixed shape; a liturgical Christian who adds fifteen minutes of actual Bible reading to the offices gains something his tradition has always told him to do.

Work with it

Check yourself

What is the commonest reason people abandon a daily rule of prayer, and the standard remedy?

Check yourself

Why do the traditions insist on praying the psalms in a fixed scheme rather than choosing by mood?

Check yourself

What was Cranmer's innovation in the Book of Common Prayer's daily offices?

Objection drill

A rule of prayer is legalism. You are turning a relationship into a checklist - saying the same words at the same time whether you mean them or not. That is exactly what Jesus criticised in the Pharisees. Prayer should be spontaneous, from the heart, when you actually have something to say.

Write your answer first. You will remember it far better than one you only read.

A model answer

The comparison with the Pharisees is worth examining, because it does not go where the objection needs it to.

Jesus criticised praying to be seen - they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men - and praying with a sense of superiority, as in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican. He did not criticise praying at fixed times. He kept the Jewish hours of prayer Himself, went to synagogue as his custom was, prayed the psalms, and observed the feasts. The apostles are found going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour, after the resurrection, when they could have done anything they liked.

On saying words you do not mean. This is the real objection and it needs turning over rather than answering quickly.

Consider what it assumes: that the value of a prayer depends on the intensity of feeling behind it. If that is true, then most of anyone's prayer life is worthless, because most of life is not lived at emotional intensity, and the times of highest feeling are not usually the times of clearest sight.

Now consider the alternative account. A husband who says I love you on a morning when he feels nothing in particular is not lying. He is saying what is true independently of how he happens to feel at half past seven, and the saying of it is part of what keeps it true. Vows work this way. So do liturgies. The words are not reports on an inner state; they are acts.

On relationship versus checklist. Every real relationship has structure, and the structure is not the enemy of the intimacy - it is what carries it through the periods when intimacy is not being felt. People who eat together every evening, whether or not they have anything to say, generally know each other better than people who meet when the mood strikes. Nobody calls the shared meal legalism.

On waiting until you have something to say. Here is the practical difficulty. Prayer that waits for something to say will happen when life is intense - a crisis, a joy, a fright - and will not happen during the long ordinary stretches. But the ordinary stretches are most of a life, and they are where a person is actually formed. A rule prays through them. That is its entire purpose.

And there is a specific danger the objection does not see. Spontaneous prayer tends to be about whatever is currently on your mind, which means, over time, your prayer life acquires the shape of your anxieties. You pray about money because you are worried about money. A psalter scheme makes you pray a lament on a cheerful morning and a psalm of praise on a bitter one, and a confession on a day when you feel perfectly fine. It enlarges the range of what you are able to bring - and left to ourselves, every one of us narrows it.

One concession, and it matters. A rule can become mechanical, and the traditions say so constantly. The remedy they give is not to abandon it but to keep it small enough to attend to. Luther's advice is worth quoting because it cuts against religious ambition: it is better to pray briefly and attentively than at length without attention. Five minutes actually prayed beats an hour endured. Every tradition's spiritual directors say the same thing, and beginners ignore it, and then discover it for themselves about three years in.

Memory work

Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.

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