The first time I ever chanted a Divine Office (the worship service prayed by Catholic monks several times each day), I was 18 years old, a freshman in college, visiting a group of college students who did this twice a week and called themselves “Monks.” I loved the silence. I hated the Psalms.

Martin Luther said, “For every man, on every occasion, can find in the Psalms that which fits his needs, which he  feels to be appropriate as if they had been set there just for his sake…(pardon the male language).” I found this rather difficult to swallow as an 18-year-old. What I found, instead, were anger, misguided nationalism, and comfort given only to those who are righteous.

St. Augustine didn’t help: our “Abbot” of teh colleg monks group quoted Augustine as saying something like, “Every prayer that has ever been prayed can be found in the Psalms.” Well, you can guess what an 18-year-old male’s response to THAT might have been!

I was an intermittent college-monk at best. In the process of reading books on spirituality,  I discovered, thanks to Thomas Merton, Zen Buddhism. There was also a professor who was similarly interested in Eastern spirituality, so I bounced back and forth from the silence of Zen to the quiet chants of my brother and sister monks. I loved the fact that with Zen, the fewer words, the better.

My mother’s response to my interest in Zen (I think we had about a six-hour conversation about it one Friday evening!) was, “Let me get this straight: your chosen spiritual path includes sitting still AND being silent for long periods of time?” Those of you who “knew me when” know that both of those things seemed quite impossible.

The little Trappist monastery that I frequented my junior and senior years in college had monks who became my teachers. There was Brother Jim, who taught me Zen in a more disciplined way, and Brother John, who loved the Divine Office, especially the great silence after it was over. Brothers Dave, Al, and Tom all taught me as well, just not as directly. It was John who directed me to pray the Psalms more intentionally, more slowly, and with more focus. He said that the Office was the beginning of his prayer time, and that the time after the Office was where real prayer occurred. The Psalms and silence, the scripture and the prayers, all laid down a pathway to where a real encounter with God was possible (not to say that the Office itself does not offer an authentic experience of God).

Years later, as a young full-time pastor, I realized that I had fallen into the same hole that my two favorite professors had warned us about: getting so busy doing the “work” of the pastor that I failed to do the personal work that would keep me grounded, the work of prayer, the work of actually being with God in an intentional way (I defined prayer a few years ago as “the way we and God love each other directly”). Looking around in the attic of my soul, I was reminded that the Divine Office was a good place to begin.

As I pulled out my favorite Bible and started the prayer, “God, come to my assistance; Lord, make haste to help me,” followed by the doxology, I was grateful for the grace given me to enjoy that moment: it made me want to keep going. Although distracted by a desire to transform one of the rooms in my house into a chapel, I prayed the office with pretty decent focus. Yes, I did leap up from my meditation cushion and begin straightening the room; but as soon as I had done enough to satisfy my need for “sacred space,” I lit candles and incense, and once again sat cross-legged on the cushion and began another office.

I received the four-volume collection of The Liturgy of the Hours for Christmas one year, and I was set. I also discovered a Trappist monastery outside of Atlanta, The Monastery of the Holy Spirit, and began making monthly treks there to pray the office in the silence of the huge monastery church, sometimes with the monks, sometimes on my own.

The words of Luther came true for that 31-year-old as they could not have for the college freshman. Once you have lived a little life and felt the disappointments, betrayals, and even the successes that happen to all of us, the  prayers found in the Psalms really do come to life! Yes, there is still the bad stuff; I was overjoyed to find Psalms Anew: In Inclusive Language, translated by Nancy Schreck and Maureen Leach in 1986 ( my original copy still goes with me, battered by over 30 years of travel in my car, suitcase, and backpack). A few years ago, I connected online with http://www.divineoffice.org and learned to download spoken daily offices to my phone.

It is said that Fr. Matthew Kelty of Gethsemani, in his latter years, used to loudly whisper the Jesus Prayer whenever a Psalm was chanted that he didn’t particularly like (usually the violent ones). None of us loves all the Pslams.

Yes, much of what I need can be found in the Psalms, and the Divine Office is a great place to use them. For some people, they are still too violent and male-oriented. For me, I just keep finding God hidden in little nooks and crannies in them, and there seems to be something new always. Praying a daily office is helpful in my quest to spend time with God each day. And I’ll add that praying the Psalms has helped me also to find the prayers in so much of poetry, sacred or not.

And, as St. Augustine said, the Pslams do contain all our human prayers, even those we wouldn’t admit to praying. Yes, the prayers for new cars and enough money for tuition and good grades might not be there in obvious ways, but there aren’t many of us who haven’t prayed in some form or another the most violent of those ancient human prayers, as well as the better ones, and especially the desperate ones – “How long, O God…”).

Praying the office also keeps my ego out of my prayer better than anything else I have found. But that’s another matter for another day.