Dom Hubert van Zeller, The Choice of God

Dom Hubert van Zeller, The Choice of God

The Divine Office is not a vocal prayer primarily but a contemplative prayer. Expressed verbally, it is prayed contemplatively. The words and sentiments and chants are there, but through them the interior life of the soul stretches out in worship to God. It is as if the pages of the breviary were transparent, and that the soul took the printed prayers with it on its way.

Those who imagine that their whole duty towards the Divine Office is fulfilled by the careful observance of the rubrics and the articulate enunciation of the syllables are remote from the main purpose. The main purpose is to join interiorly with Christ in paying homage to the Father.

The homage rendered in the recitation or chanting of the psalms is the homage offered by the whole mystical body, Head and members. And because matter as well as spirit must pay its debt of praise, there must be outward forms to show that the physical is in harmony of worship with the spiritual.

But because it is always easier to cultivate the outward than the inward, the Martha side of the liturgy has a way of asserting itself at the sacrifice of the Mary side. At least when you are singing or reciting or performing the stipulated movements of the choir you are doing something. You have something which yields to measurement: you can tell, more or less, whether you are doing the thing properly or not.

It is the fear of not doing enough in prayer, as much as the desire to make a display in church, that leads to ritualism and 'vain repetition'.

Nor is the multiplication of words for the sake of multiplication encouraged by the Church. In the recurring psalmody, the same psalms and antiphons and chapters coming round week after week; it is not the mere repetition that is of value in the sight of God; what is of value is the disposition of soul which is content to go on repeating the familiar prayers without looking for the interest of novelty.

In his book Perfection Chrétienne et Contemplation, Pére Garrigou-Lagrange refers to the liturgy as a means of preparing for contemplation. But surely it is more than this?

Is it not itself a form of contemplation—an exercise in which the contemplative act can be as fruitfully employed as when praying in solitude?

Where the intellect, will, memory and imagination are directed towards God, and where the outward senses are acting in conjunction with this inward elevation, you get a state of soul which could hardly be called anything else than contemplative. The whole man, with all his faculties recollected into unity, is at rest in the proper object of his desire. Certainly, a soul can be contemplative in choir.

Thus, in a sense the Divine Office is not so much a preparation as a culmination: it is the crowning of the interior endeavors which have been going on in private. The Divine Office does not guarantee contemplation where there is no contemplative prayer before, but it does provide a medium for contemplative prayer where contemplation is there already.

An objection is sometimes raised that the long hours spent by religious in choir might better be spent in work for souls. But the Divine Office is work for souls. The apostolate feeds upon what is generated, and again and again regenerated, in the choir. The Divine Office is the Church's indirect apologetic: its influence, if we make any allowance for the supernatural, penetrates more deeply behind the barriers of unbelief, ignorance, hostility, than anything that is done by more immediate contact. Allowing that grace is stronger than argument, and that the scope of the liturgy is not confined to the four walls between which it happens to be observed, the prayer of the choir can be counted as an essentially missionary activity.

With every Dominus vobiscum the believer and the unbeliever alike receive something from the prayer-life of the Church which he will not get out of a book. Every Kyrie eleison brings down upon him a mercy which he is either too busy, too ignorant, or too lazy to ask for. It is from the treasuries of the liturgy that man, whether he knows it or not, draws pardon and grace.

When the world again comes to recognize what it recognized in the ages of the Faith it will not be surprised to find that its inheritance has been preserved over the years of materialism and unbelief in the centers where the Divine Office has been faithfully prayed.

To conceive of the psalter being out of date, to imagine that the time has come for a revision of ideas about the liturgy as a worthwhile occupation for educated men and women, to plan a substitute which can be carried into the world as a spearhead, and in lay dress with popular appeal, is to miss the nature of prayer altogether. What more fruitful prayer can there be, either in regard to the soul who prays or to those who benefit by the soul's prayer, than that which continues the prayer of Christ, joins with the prayer of the blessed in heaven, and recalls the human powers to their fullest possible function as originally designed?

For the religious the Divine Office is at once the warehouse from which he refurnishes his interior mansions when the ordinary store has worn out, the platform from which he preaches the inspired word of God, and the element in which his soul finds its freest expression. He can go on piling up metaphors like this for ever, and will not exhaust the possibilities: the Divine Office should become his second, and better, nature.

'But I am far more recollected out of choir ... there is no devotion, but rather exasperation, in having neighbours who cannot follow the common practice ... it is often more a penance than a prayer.' Amice, ad quid venisti ('Friend, to what purpose have you come?'). You have come that you may do the will of God. You have said 'Lord, teach us how to pray', and now that He has told you how He wants you to pray, you bring objections. And if it is a penance as well as a prayer, the value is doubled.

Whether the soul feels at home or not in the liturgy does not greatly signify. The worship which it gives is the public tribute of the Church, and people do not always feel at home in public. The sense of satisfaction is not, and never is in things religious, the criterion. The quality which God looks for above all others in our liturgical worship is the desire to surrender ourselves unconditionally to the action of the Holy Spirit. And that is why the Divine Office can truly be said to re-present contemplation.