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The lady looks like she’s on fire. Shadows lend an ebony hue to her skin. She looks down at a dove nestled in her lap with a tenderness that evokes a childish longing in me.
MEDITATIONS ON THE DIVINE OFFICE OFFERED BY ABBEY POSTULANT JACQUELYN LEE What follows is a series of meditations on the Divine Office as it is prayed at Regina Laudis. The holy sacrifice of the Mass and the Divine Office are the two public prayers of the Church. They exist in complement to each other. The Divine Office is the hidden half of the Church’s public prayer. It is Mary mulling over the words of her lost child in light of the ancient praises of her fathers. At its most basic, the Divine Office consists of praying the psalms at seven different times (“hours”) throughout the day and once at night. The names of the hours refer to the times at which they were traditionally prayed. For the details of how each hour is organized, I refer you to The Rule of St. Benedict. It is said that the desert fathers prayed all one hundred fifty psalms every day. St. Benedict exhorts his monks to make sure the full one hundred fifty are recited each week. The Second Vatican Council recommended reorganizing the Office so that the psalms would be said over the course of a longer period, and the revised version follows a four week cycle. Regina Laudis chants the psalter in Latin as St. Benedict lays it out in the Rule, which is to say, we do not use the Liturgy of the Hours as it was revised following Vatican II. The two editions of the Office arose from different contexts, in response to different needs, and we find the older form better suited to our particulars. There are many similarities between the two editions, but enough differences that a detail here or there in what comes next might distract a person familiar with the more recent edition if I didn’t make a note of it at the beginning. The Office of Compline  The lady looks like she’s on fire. Shadows lend an ebony hue to her skin. She looks down at a dove nestled in her lap with a tenderness that evokes a childish longing in me. Beneath the lady, I fumble with the matches and finally light the candle that flickers in front of Mother Abbess. The lights are out, the community stands at attention, a single knock, a pitch pipe blows, the acolyte bows to Mother Abbess and sings out, Jube, domne, benedicere. We’re headed into battle just as much as we are headed off to bed. The acolyte’s little chapter makes that clear enough: Brethren, stand sober and keep watch, for your adversary the devil prowls as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. Resist him, ye strong in faith. Vivid, and also right to the point. More than any other office, compline brings to the fore the spiritual combat aspect of monasticism. As St. Paul says, we are at war with principalities and powers. It’s hard to talk about spiritual warfare in a way that’s credible to modern ears. Compline doesn’t try to convince you of anything though, so I won’t either. That demons exist and seek to turn us away from the life of grace is compline’s starting place. The collect makes explicit our hope: Visit, we beseech thee O Lord, this dwelling, and drive every snare of the enemy a great distance from it. May your holy angels dwell herein, may they watch over us in peace, and may your blessing be always upon us.  Compline is the hour mother church sets aside to honor Our Lady with a hymn. The hymns change with the seasons in order to correspond to the mystery of Christ’s life that we are commemorating. In Eastertide we call upon the Queen of Heaven, but in Christmastide the Nourishing Mother of Our Redeemer. This tradition is biblically rooted. Genesis 3:15 foretells that the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. And indeed Christ has risen as he said. So we call his mother to our aid as we gird our loins against the business that walketh about in the dark. It is the ancient faith that her intercession is our strongest shield against both the noonday devil and midnight’s demons.The fiery lady has a counterpart at the other end of the chapel. This Madonna enthrones her child in her lap while she holds the cosmos in her hands. But they are black with night now. Instead, to her left and right glow the fourteen stations of the cross. After we sing the lady’s hymn, we recite the Crux Sacra.
That’s not just some cute rhyming Latin—it’s nearly a taunt, a twelfth-century ditty in answer to the question “Do you reject Satan and all his empty promises?” The medievals didn’t simply say “I do,” they added “Non draco sit mihi dux.” Galvanized thus, I blow out the candle. Matins The main thing about matins is that I cannot think about it. It does not make a difference if it is a night when we do anticipated matins and bedtime is merely delayed by about an hour, or if it is the night, once a week, when I wake up in the wee hours and divide the night’s sleep in two parts. In either case, as soon as I begin thinking about it, matins seems impossible. I cannot even think about matins while I am at matins. Each psalm doubles its length as soon as I begin wondering when it will end. In that way, it is like the experience, as a child, of Easter Vigil or midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.  Like for the bull to stop limping. ...And then he does. While thinking about matins is pretty much the worst thing I can do, I can think about other things. Matins is a good time for prayer intentions. I try to bring a specific intention to each nocturn. A nocturn is six psalms, and St. Benedict gives us all the short psalms during the day, which leaves the long ones for the night. I do not have the attention span to attend to the meaning of that much Latin, and especially not at the pace we chant it. I try to comprehend at least some of the Latin, but my mind will drift away from it, and then I try to restrain its wanderings to the scope of that nocturn’s intention. Sometimes I pray for very small things. Like for the bull to stop limping. And then he does. Sometimes I pray for my friends, that God will grant them the grace to grow in faith and trust in his will for them. And then we both end up growing a little in faith, and God leads us to places we did not expect. Sometimes I pray for strangers. And then I do not know what happens. But always I pray for vocations, equally for the people who ought to stay in monasteries as for the people who must leave them. Because you never know how the Lord will take you when he takes you seriously. The readings are my favorite part about matins. The short readings on weeknights are nice, but the long readings for Sundays are better. The long readings are why everyone should want to go to Sunday matins. Each nocturn (and on Sundays we have three nocturns; weeknights two) gets a reading. The first one is from the old testament, the second one is a Church Father commenting on the reading for the first nocturn, and the third one is a commentary from the Fathers on that week’s gospel, which will be sung out in full at the end. I like hearing from the Fathers. My favorite reading so far has been John Chrysostom’s commentary on the gospel of the rich man and Lazarus. He asked why Lazarus goes to Abraham’s bosom and not the bosom of some other patriarch. (Brilliant!) His answer was that Abraham is known for his hospitality to the angels and in this way his presence was a reproach to the rich man’s inhospitality. (Delightful!) The Fathers are always looking at scripture a little bit sideways like that. I guess that’s how they were able to have so much to say about it. I am ready for bed when matins is over, but I don’t regret having gone. Lauds  It is early, and people are sleepy. We aren’t really supposed to talk before lauds, but often the silence is broken prematurely by my throaty “thanks for waiting for me” as I get in the car to go down to the chapel.At the beginning of his Confessions, St. Augustine asks whether it comes first that man should praise God or that he should implore His aid. Every hour of the Divine Office begins the same: O God, come to my assistance. Lord, make haste to help me. Thus the silence is officially broken and the hour of praise commences. But, God help us, it is early. And people are sleepy. St. Benedict takes these circumstances into account in the Rule, “let the sixty-sixth psalm be said without an antiphon and somewhat slowly…in order that all may assemble in time for the fiftieth.” You say it slowly so that people can get there, because it is early, and... Psalm sixty-six certainly sets the tone—Let the peoples praise you, O God, let all the peoples praise you!—but we can’t sustain it. Psalm fifty begins Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam. We want to praise, but we call out for pity. It is easy to pray the first seven verses in a spirit of self-effacement, but that’s not quite right. These verses are a lesson in humility, which is to say they teach us our place in relation to the Lord: dust. There is a chasm between self-effacement and humility. It is bridged by the devastation of self-knowledge. From You will wash me with hyssop to I will teach sinners your ways, we gain momentum. The psalmist is praying from his bowels; these prayers are grounded in a deep faith that this sinner has a role to play in salvation history and God will not withhold the grace he needs in order to accomplish his mission. And then the psalm shifts again as we move into the last third. This part is concerned with right worship. Strictly speaking, the psalmist seems to be looking forward to the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem. However, in light of the Resurrection, we know that the true sacrifice is not oblations and holocausts but indeed a sacrifice of praise springing from a contrite and humble heart. In one way, psalm fifty models the movement from self-knowledge through faith to praise. That’s the whole arc of this life, that’s the conversatio of formation, that’s every day. And yet, the Miserere doesn’t actually culminate in praise, but rather in the desire to praise. And, in that way, it lays the groundwork for the rest of this office, which does in fact culminate in pure praise. But praise is hard for me. It requires a certain amount of self-forgetfulness that, most days, I just don’t have. Psalm fifty shows me the path to a freedom that allows me to sing a new song. Prime Prime falls between the day’s first tolling of the Angelus and the reading of the martyrology. Which is to say, it takes up the space between birth and death. My elders tell me that prime is about work. They say prime used to end with the day’s work assignments being read out, but that practice ended here long ago.  to a frothy cup of coffee and my cow’s full teats. While I am headed to the barn, a remnant remains in the chapel for prime. They chant: The Lord saith unto me, “Ask of me and I will give you the ends of the earth for your possession,” while I carry a hay bale across the frosty loafing yard and feel my body warm. I brighten with the horizon and move inside to a frothy cup of coffee and my cow’s full teats. In choir they go on: What is man that thou art mindful of him? All things thou hast laid at his feet: sheep and oxen, all of them. I sit beneath the beast, gently rocking with the rhythm of the pulls. Sweet milk flows. And still they sing: Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoiceth, my body too shall rest in hope. Between birth and death there is only work, whether the opus of the Office or the labor of the barns, but the distinction between the works doesn’t always need to be a firm one. Terce  I was bringing a tractor back from some of our more distant hay fields. The traffic headed to the town dump was thick, the turns have bad visibility, and I was on alert for impatient drivers ready to run me over. Then I recognized the gray pickup truck waiting to let me turn in front of it onto Robert Leather Rd. I relaxed, knowing that our tractor mechanic was here and would follow me into the driveway.That feeling of contentment when you know someone good is watching out for you, that’s what the psalter is about at this hour. The psalms call it peace, and it’s expressed first in the confidence of the antiphon. I shouted to the Lord, and he heard me. Recalling past kindness, we make our plea, Lord, free me from lying lips, my own just as much as those of others. How else will there be peace? But peace doesn’t come without a struggle: with those who hate peace, I am peace loving; but when I speak with them, they war against me. It’s perplexing, this peace. So I lift my eyes to the mountains, whence my help comes. My help is from the Lord. He will not let my foot slip into a trap, nor will he rest who guards me. The Lord guards me. By day the sun will not strike me, nor the moon by night. He watches over my comings and goings and from every evil thing keeps me. First peace is a person, then it finds a place. Our feet are already at thy gates, O Jerusalem! May peace be within thy walls and security within thy towers. We go to the city of peace to praise the name of the Lord. To praise is to take someone by the arm in order to gaze upon a third in all his loveliness. It’s the way the psalmist calls out to the sun and moon, stars and light, dragons and the deeps and commands them to praise the Lord. He isn’t saying that they do praise the Lord, simply by existing, although he could say that. Instead the psalmist grabs creation by the shoulders so that every heaven and everything under the heavens will turn and gaze upon the goodness of the Lord. But, of course, you have to be at peace with your sister before you can follow her gaze to the other’s loveliness. So, we are back to the beginning: Lord, free me from lying lips and from a deceitful tongue keep me. Sext and None  I’m searching the heavens for mercy. The psalms for sext and none seem acutely aware of my difficulty. Sext starts us off with Ad te oculos meos qui habitas in caelis, I lift up my eyes to you who dwell in the heavens. Behold, as the eyes of servants attend to the hands of their masters, as the eyes of handmaids to their mistress’, so our eyes to the Lord our God, until he should take pity on us. I’m not looking at the boxes anymore. I’m searching the heavens for mercy. Because, indeed, unless the Lord had been with us, the torrent might have rushed over us. But instead our soul has escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowler. I know the press of the torrent; the psalter calms the waters. I know that snare is of my own making; the psalter frees me from it. None begins immediately. We have boxes to return to after all. But it’s like the psalter is calling out to me in my preoccupation: The Lord ended the captivity of Sion. Our mouth was filled with rejoicing and our tongue with gladness. Then was it said among the nations, “The Lord has done great things with them.” Yes, the Lord does great things with us. For unless the Lord builds the house he labors in vain who builds it. Unless the Lord guards the city, he watches in vain who keeps it. Then this psalm goes on to tease us: It is vain for you to rise before dawn and late go to rest, you who eat the bread of carefulness. By midday, I have made an idol of myself in at least a dozen ways, and ten of these ways are obscured from my sight by good intentions. Sext and none give me the chance to return to my creaturely place and practice gratitude for Providence. A note on psalm 118 
The psalms prayed at terce, sext, and none are the same from Tuesday through Saturday each week. But, for the little hours beginning with prime on Sunday and continuing through to none on Monday, St. Benedict disrupts this order to have us recite the whole of psalm 118. This is good simply for the change of pace at the beginning of the week. It is also a practical way of fitting the longest psalm into the weekly rotation. But such a disruption to the order of things calls attention to itself, and I have to think there was some spiritual insight motivating St. Benedict too.One of the difficulties of psalm 118 is that it is easy to read in the spirit of the Pharisees. We read Oh that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes! Then I shall not be put to shame, and we hear the pharisee in the temple, “Thank you, God, that I am not like that man over there, for I give alms and fast twice a week” (Luke 18:11–12). But that’s not how St. Benedict hears it. Perhaps the first reference to psalm 118 in the Rule comes at the end of the prologue: As we progress in our monastic life and in faith, our hearts shall be enlarged, and we shall run with unspeakable sweetness of love in the way of God’s commandments (cf. 118:32). Much of psalm 118 features the psalmist begging to be taught the statutes of the Lord. This is curious because the Torah is the revelation upon which Judaism is built. It would seem that he already has the law. In the same way, a postulant is handed a copy of the Rule. They seek wisdom and understanding. While the psalmist longs for the precepts of God, he also delights in the law, clings to it, loves it with his whole heart. Doesn’t this seem like the enthusiasm of a beginner? This man knows that he has been presented with something deep as the netherworld and high as the sky, he just wants to exclaim about it to all of his friends, but, sweet mercy, don’t ask him to tell you exactly what it is or how it works. But also he is not exactly a beginner. I don’t think a beginner could say I know, O Lord, that your rules are righteous, and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me. That is the kind of understanding that comes when mercy has broken open the afflicted heart and left it enlarged. That’s a man who knows the unspeakable sweetness of running the way of God’s commandments, not just someone who aspires to run so. Not once does psalm 118 tell you what the statutes of the Lord are. It is very long. But it is not so long because it digresses into a recapitulation of Deuteronomy or Leviticus. And maybe that’s because the Torah isn’t exactly what the psalmist lusts after. He’s not looking for the six hundred and thirteen mitzvot, but rather for the mercy that flows through them. But the only way to the mercy is to cling to the commands. The Rule operates the same way. Psalm 118 doesn’t simply disturb the regular rhythm of the hours, it puts before us the practical keys to the kingdom as we begin each week anew. Vespers  dripping from Aaron’s beard. It wets my soft chin and shines my shoes. I am often distracted by my self. By the events at home I am missing because I am here. By my fears about tomorrow. By the hopeless striving that fuels too much of my thought. By grief for this or that lost friend. By disappointment that I did not have more courage or more precision or more discretion in one encounter or another. But I am not always distracted by my self. Just as often, I am chanting the psalms. The Rule does not indicate the psalms for vespers with quite the same specificity as it does for some of the other hours. All the same, certain themes which are ubiquitous across the psalter become poignant at close of day. One of these is the fact that the Lord works marvels in history. It is for us to remember he accomplishes great wonders. The psalms can only be genuine praise if indeed this is the living God who works in time. Liturgy is diminished to theater when God is removed from history and placed upon a shelf. It is fitting, then, for vespers to culminate in the Magnificat, Mary’s hymn that bursts forth at the sound of Elizabeth’s greeting. The Lord is faithful and is bringing about the fulfillment of his promises in her very body. The oracles have fallen silent. Yet he is still the Lord who made heaven and earth, who brought Israel out of Egypt, who frees my feet from snares. When I call upon him he hears me. I call upon him day and night and he rescues me. He works his wonders even still. He accomplishes his will by means of my body. My body, which leans and slumps in choir, which aches in ever changing ways, which is so reluctant to bear up under small burdens. This is somehow his tool of choice, too. The psalter is grace poured out like oil dripping from Aaron’s beard. It wets my soft chin and shines my shoes. As we move toward Easter, light leads us out from choir and into our evening obediences.
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