Phyllis Tickle Responds
Could you describe your own use of "The Divine Hours." That is, do you use the books that you've put together, or the Book of Common Prayer or older version of fixed-hour prayer?
As I sit down to write my answer to this question, I have to begin with a thank-you to the asker. It's a question I have often longed to answer in print, but have never before received as a formal question in a written format. That having been said, though, the answer really is yes, yes, and yes.
When I was first asked to compile a contemporary manual for Christians wishing to observe fixed-hour prayer, I was surprised...initially by being asked at all and then by how easily and joyfully I fell into the work itself. Apparently, during all my years of using other breviaries and manuals, I had developed, unknown to myself, some yearning--for lack of a better word--some yearning to see certain psalms set within the same office as certain hymns or pieces of poetry or sections of scripture.
While the readings in prayer manuals in general follow a pattern of Gospels in the morning office, Old Testament or Epistles at midday, and hymns at Vespers and while the choices within the first two are based largely upon the lectionary common to the Church, the justapostion of the psalms, the Cry of the Church, the refrains etc. is the choice, by and large, of the compiler. In the twenty-two months of ten-hour days required for me and an assistant to complete the volumes, I caught myself smiling over and over again, my heart light and my spirit soothed by the pleasure of dropping a psalm in place beside a section of the Gospels that had always somehow seemed to me to be its natural and euphemous mate. Or to "hear" a refrain running through a midday office, picking up and enriching a portion of Old Testament with which it had always resonated in my own soul.
Given that experience, which only intensified as the work progressed, I can honestly say that I use "The Divine Hours" every day, and every day with an increasing sense of gratitude and quietness. Despite all that, however, I must go on to say that I observe each day the office of Prime which is not included in "The Divine Hours." Prime occurs at 6 a.m., and I observe it, as I have for years, by using "The Short Breviary" from St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. It is a beautiful office, especially as rendered in "TSB," filled with hymning poetry and psalms; and I would fight almost to the death anyone who tried to separate me from that much-loved, well-traveled, somewhat frayed handbook.
I likewise have some half dozen copies at least of The Book of Common Prayer. Its is the music and its the rhythm of the offices as I hear them in my sleep. It was the BCP that first trained me and the BCP that will always fill me with the simple comforts a child feels in the arms of her mother. Of course, a great many of the prayers employed in "The Divine Hours" are adapted from the BCP anyway. Yet I still, from time to time, have to return to the motherlode itself for refreshment.
And always I carry in my purse a small breviary--either "Hour By Hour" published by Forward Movement or "The Little Hours" by Paraclete Press or a similar manual. Such small breviaries, while they usually include only a week's cycle of offices, have the great advantage of portability and inconspicuousness. When the appointed hour of prayer comes, I find it quite easy to slip away from a meeting almost unnoticed and unremarked with such small breviary in hand or enclosed in my purse.
So indeed the answer really is yes, yes, and yes. Prayerbooks for the discipline of fixed-hour observance are as old as the Church herself; and it would be an impoverishment of the worst kind to limit one's joy to one set of manuals; for while they all are alike in the liturgical calendar they adhere to, they each differ, one from another, in the subtle and invigorating ways as do the same lines of music in the hands of different, but inspired performers....Phyllis Tickle
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