Transcript

DiscerningHearts.com in cooperation with the Oblates of the Virgin Mary presents Praying the Liturgy of the Hours with Father Timothy Gallagher.

Father Gallagher was ordained in 1979 as a member of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary.

He obtained his doctorate from the Gregorian University and has dedicated many years to an extensive ministry of retreats, spiritual direction, and teaching about the spiritual life.

Father Gallagher has numerous books published by the Crossroad Publishing Company on the spiritual teachings of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and on the life of the venerable Bruno Lantieri, founder of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, as well as Praying the Liturgy of the Hours: A Personal Journey.

Father Gallagher is featured on the EWTN series Living the Discerning Life and Finding God in All Things.

Praying the Liturgy of the Hours with Father Timothy Gallagher.

I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

Welcome, Father Gallagher.

Thank you, Chris.

We continue our conversation about the liturgy of the hours, and what a vital part of our spiritual program that it could become, helping us nourish not only ourselves but the lives of the church.

Yes, it certainly is that in the mind of the church.

There are many people in all vocations, priests, religious, laymen, and women, who experience it in that way and that allows me actually to move to the next considerations I'd like to share which a- are now just experience.

And so I'd like to share just a little bit of what the liturgy of the hours has come to mean for me as I've prayed it for 40 years now since I entered the seminary.

What I'll share, these are things that I'm taking from the little book that I've written on this, Praying the Liturgy of the Hours: A Personal Journey, which as the subtitle says is not so much a theological reflection on the liturgy of the hours but just what it's actually meant in one person's experience to pray this over the years.

And then gradually, as I think is true of all things in the life of prayer, a- as we stay with the life of prayer the ways of praying that were there from the start for us deepen and grow.

So just, uh, some very simple experiences along those lines.

We've shared a number of conversations about Ignatian discernment, talking through the different books and presentations that I give on that.

In the course of dealing so intensively with that, the experiences of spiritual consolation and especially defending against spiritual desolation which is Ignatius' goal in this particular set of guidelines that he gives, or rules.

We all have these ups and downs in the spiritual life and there's no shame in that.

You can, we can read, for example, the story of the soul of Saint Thérèse and there it is, or Saint Ignatius's own autobiography and spiritual diary and it's there.

We all know that we have these times when we don't really feel inclined to pray, when we don't feel today God's closeness, when, uh, we have less energy for the spiritual things that we've been doing.

And so you have this invaluable teaching from Saint Ignatius to help us understand those times and above all to give us a set of very practical tools for getting through those times, not only without harm but actually with growth, which is what God intends in permitting us to go through those times.

So gradually over the years, uh, as I was teaching these rules, something clicked with the liturgy of the hours for me.

In one of these rules, his Rule 6, Ignatius tells us that in a time of desolation, like the times I've just described, we won't feel very inclined to pray.

It'll be a little harder to go to daily mass or to pray the rosary or if we're praying the liturgy of the hours and so Ignatius says, In such times, not only do not shorten the prayer, but actually, his word is, insist more upon it in such times both in prayer of petition and in meditating on the truths of God's love that our faith teaches and which can sustain us in such times.

And so I gradually came to, to see a pattern.

Let's say on a given day I had a meeting in the morning and something didn't go well and there was a heaviness in my heart, uh, and I wasn't aware of it and didn't work to resist it, it touched also the spiritual level and so it's getting a little harder to pray and a little less energy for the, uh, activities that were filling, we'll say the afternoon.

And there it is in the time of desolation, there's that disinclination to pray, you know, letting prayer go if we're not discerning, if we're not aware of what's going on.

Well, the hours of the day would be unfolding and here would be this experience of desolation and over here on my desk was the breviary.

You know, there was still daytime prayer to say.

As we get into the afternoon, we're getting close now to evening prayer to be said, the office of readings needs to be said at some time.

So at some point I would pick up the breviary, usually having to overcome a little bit of resistance.

The first few minutes might be dry and difficult but this pattern repeated over and over again.

After a few minutes, the prayer would start to get easier and warmer.

I would find something would change very much now in the, the uplift of heart that I was feeling or the return of peace, I could look at the desolation itself and instea- instead of just feeling burdened by it, now I could say, Oh, you know what?

That started in that meeting this morning and, you know, here's what I can do about that that can solve that tension or that situation.

And I would find over and over again that the liturgy of the hours would be the tipping point into prayer that would lead me out of desolation and so I've become very grateful for it in the sense that that periodic call to prayer throughout the day never allows me to go too long in the day without prayer, and in times of spiritual desolation it really can make all the difference.

It's happened so often in my life now that Now I know what's going to happen, you know.

I don't really feel like picking up the breviary because of the desolation, but I know it's going to change and most of the, of the time, within not too many minutes after I begin.

So this, I think, is an invaluable tool for us.

The Liturgy of the Hours of the day constantly calling us back to prayer, never lets us get too absorbed or engulfed in whatever discouragement or desolation we might be experiencing.

Another thing that I was teaching constantly to people as I would teach about Ignatian prayer with scripture or the examen prayer, also things we've talked about in, uh, other settings, was Ignatius' counsel on how to cross the threshold out of what has preceded into the time of the prayer itself, so this brief transitional moment into prayer which, a- as we can easily see, can make all the difference in prayer.

Sometimes we may be well into the prayer and still feel like we haven't really entered into it.

Well, here is Ignatius' simple counsel on how to do this.

And so he says in his spiritual exercises that when I'm just about at the place where I'm about to pray, so even physically there's a threshold, a sense to this, for the length of time that it would take to say an Our Father, maybe half a minute, I will consider how God our Lord looks upon me.

Well, how do I know how God our Lord looks upon me as I'm about to begin this prayer?

We read in the Gospel of John, No one has ever seen God.

John immediately continues, The only Son, God, who is at the Father's side has revealed him, so that we know what is in the eyes of God as He looks upon us through the Word made flesh.

And we can look at what those who encounter Jesus with all their weakness but humbly and sincerely approaching Him, what they saw in the eyes of Jesus.

So for example, I would invite people to consider what the Samaritan woman, this woman whose life is so broken with her repeated failures in her marriages, what she sees in the eyes of Jesus that so transforms her life.

Or Levi, the tax collector and generally a, a group of people not very well thought of, what he sees in the eyes of Jesus that makes him want to leave everything just to be with this man who has looked upon him in this way.

Uh, the woman who enters the Pharisee's house, house and washes Jesus' feet with her tears and in some of the movies of the life of Jesus you have this done very beautifully where she finally raises her head and their eyes meet and what she sees in the eyes of Jesus.

Or Mary Magdalene on Easter morning with the exchange of names, Mary, Rabboni, and what she sees in the eyes of Jesus that opens her heart to a joy that will never fade knowing that the Lord is always with her, and on and on and on.

I would invite people to consider what Gospel figures see in the eyes of Jesus and then would say, This is what Ignatius is inviting us to do, roughly for a half minute or so as we are about to begin our prayer.

And I would suggest to people that you could do this not only when you specifically begin to pray with scripture, but you could do this, we can do this before any time of prayer, the beginning of mass or about to say the rosary or any form of prayer.

And finally after more years than I wish it had taken me, it dawned on me that I could do this before beginning to pray the Liturgy of the Hours each time I would begin one of the hours.

And so I began doing this and my way of doing it was to take the verse in Mark 10 where this young man meets Jesus and Mark tells us that Jesus looking upon him, loved him.

And so I would just call that short verse to mind and just in, in whatever way grace would give me to see and feel that look of love upon me meeting my eyes as I was about to begin the prayer.

Now, what that does as Ignatius wisely intends is it m- means that the prayer immediately becomes relationship which is what prayer really is.

So that when I'm praying the Liturgy of the Hours, it's not something that's taking place between me and the book I'm holding in my hand or the smartphone or tablet, but it's something happening between two persons.

And to see the look of love in the eyes of Jesus looking upon me as I begin would help me enter the Liturgy of the Hours in a new way and pray it often with a greater depth.

Well, what I found after a while was since the, uh, the priest says the entire Liturgy of the Hours, so five times in the course of the day you're returning to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, that if you do that, see that look of love let's say when you begin to pray with scripture and then throughout the hours of the day five times you return to see that look of love, something begins to change in, in your day.

You can't see that look of love that repeatedly without a growing sense of relationship beginning to fill the day.

And I would find that, that it would become easier to do that, for example, before beginning a time of exercise or sitting down to prepare a talk or do some reading or whatever other activities, meeting with someone, whatever else it might be.

And the Liturgy of the Hours began more and more to become what the church has always seen it, 1 Thessalonians 5:17, Pray constantly.

Prayer begins to fill your day more and more.

Now, I don't want to over exaggerate this, you know.

I could just as often be distracted in the Liturgy of the Hours and all the other things we could say, but you can't return to that look of love that regularly in the course of the day without something really changing and, and I would feel it.Something else developed in the Liturgy of the Hours, too, uh, over the years.

A number of the books that I've written, I wrote as a writer-in-residence at a, um, Catholic college in Canada, invited by the religious community that ran this college.

And they would give me room in their residence.

I would live with the community of the religious, and then had an office over on the campus where I would actually do the writing.

Now, this was a community, uh, of, uh, scholars and academics, and so they had, in their residence, a wide selection of periodicals, some of which were new for me.

And also because we were outside the United States, there were periodicals that had to do with other parts of the world that, to which I hadn't been exposed, uh, so much before.

And I found that I really enjoyed reading these.

I was learning about political and cultural and religious situations in countries about which I really hadn't known that much, let's say some of the countries of Eastern Europe or Africa or Asia.

And at the same time, of course, the daily paper there dealt with news in Canada.

Now, my routine there was to rise fairly early, would have some time for prayer, and usually by the time I got to breakfast, I would, uh, still be alone for that, so most of the time breakfast was, uh, on my own.

And there was the daily paper, so of course, I would look through that while I was having breakfast.

Then I would walk over to the college, get Open up the office, would say Morning Prayer before beginning to do the actual writings.

And gradually, over the weeks, uh, these two things came together: the increased input in learning about situations in the world and the praying of the Liturgy of the Hours, at this morning hour specifically, Morning Prayer.

That is, I, I would have just read th- the news of the world of the day and then, minutes later, would be sitting down to pray Morning Prayer.

So I would be praying it with a consciousness of the needs in the world very alive within my heart.

Now, I had long felt that I didn't pray as much as I would have really wanted to for the needs of others.

People would ask me for, for prayers and I would say a very sincere yes to that and would pray for them, but after some time would remember those intentions less, and I knew there were people who were praying daily for me and was very grateful for that.

So I always felt that something was not as complete as I would have wished in the way that I was praying for other people.

Well, now what began to happen was, I would pray Morning Prayer and we talked about the point near the end of it where you have the intercessions, and then there's a space after the last of these five intercessions where you can freely add personal intentions that you might want to include.

And I would find myself asking the Lord's blessing on maybe people who were in some situation of trial or struggle that I had just read about in the, in the news eh, anywhere around the world, maybe situations in the Middle East or Africa or in our own country or elsewhere around the world.

Then it got so I was At the Before I would begin Morning Prayer, I would offer the entirety of Morning Prayer for maybe that partici- particular need in the world, and gradually it dawned on me I could That I could do this five times a day with, uh, any of the, of the hours that I was praying.

And so since that time, that's what I do now.

And when people ask me to pray for them, I'll write down their names, place that in my breviary.

The breviary now has become the primary, not the only obviously, we say Mass for specific intentions and other forms of prayer too, but it's become the special place where I remember specifically the people who have asked me to pray for them and the different needs of the nations of the world and our own nation as different things unfold as time goes by.

So I've become very grateful for it now.

The piece that was Felt like it was missing no longer feels like it's missing, and it's given a whole new richness to praying the Liturgy of the Hours.

What you've just done is affirm my own pattern that I thought was lacking, in, in that each morning, the very first thing I do with this new means of communication is I look at certain apps on Either on my phone or my iPad, and the first thing I'm drawn to is The pattern has been to look at the weather, which draws me into the news.

Frustrated with myself because I thought I was being distracted, because I wanted to start the day with prayer, but yet I found myself drawn into the events that have been happening around the world, because I'll have apps that will tell me what's happening, uh, from the BBC feed or from a Vatican feed.

Then after I've gone through all that, I've thought, Well, I'll get that out of the way.

Okay, now I begin my prayer.

And that's when I'll open the app, iBreviary, that contains th- the Liturgy of the Hours and I begin my prayer.

I thought that that was a disordered way of going about it, because I did find that I would start praying for the The needs of the world would come up, those incidences, and then I would read the psalms and it would seem in some way to address those, but I thought that I was approaching it, as I said before, in a disordered way.

But now after hearing you, it wasn't as disordered as I thought.

Well, as we've said from the start, in the mind of the Church, the Liturgy of the Hours is a prayer that an individual prays together with all the others throughout the world praying it this day, for the needs of the Church and the world.

So to bring them into the Liturgy of the Hours, uh, is exactly right.

You know, it's exactly the mind of the Church.

I may also pray it for- the needs of people in my family or those close to me, or for personal needs, but very much i- it is a prayer that is open to the whole church and the whole world.

What came into my mind as you were saying that is that, um, famous line from Tennyson's poem, More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.

Who can say, you know, that morning prayer in the silence of a person's home, lifted up for the needs of this nation, or this person, or the church str- as it struggles in this part of the world, or that part of the world, who can say what blessing that brings to the world?

Thomas Merton, after his first visit to the monastery of the Trappist monks in Gethsemani in Kentucky, w- wrote in his journal, he said, Now I know what holds this world together.

Now I know why this world continues to go forward in its life, because this is the center.

Out of here comes a prayer that goes out and blesses the world.

And as we've seen so often in these conversations, it isn't just the monks.

This is a prayer for all.

The laypeople, too, are meant to be a part of this chorus of prayer holding the world together, blessing men and women as they face so many situations in life.

So I think it's exactly on target.

However we do this, you know, whether we pray first or read the news, and read the news after, or reverse that, however we do that, to bring those two together is very much something that the church wants us to do as we're praying the Liturgy of the Hours.

As you've described to us, it's a way of incorporating and uniting with our day, not dividing it.

It complements the routine of our day as opposed of being something that's being inserted into it.

I- am I describing that appropriately?

Yes.

I think a way of saying that is, let's borrow from, uh, Merton's phrase.

What it does is it brings us back to the center of our day, over and over again throughout the course of the day.

We all have that sense, people who love the Lord and try to live the Christian life and want to be people of prayer, I think we all have a longing to be more aware of the Lord throughout the hours of the day.

And there's a certain sense of regret that busyness may lead me to spend many hours in the day without consciously thinking of the Lord.

This is a prayer that keeps bring- bringing me back to the center.

So far from taking me out of the day, this brings me right back to the heart of the day, out of which everything else in the day is to be lived.

Above all, the Mass, but then right around it is the Liturgy of the Hours.

And uniquely, because it is a prayer of the hours of the day, it brings the day back to that center of relationship with God over and over again, absolutely.

The, the work of my religious community, the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, primarily, not exclusively, but primarily, is the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, which we give as retreats, but also as parish missions, something our founder, Venerable Antere, wanted us to do.

Some years after ordination, wanting to learn more about how to give a parish mission well, I contacted a, a Redemptorist priest that I'd met in travels earlier who was a master at this and asked if I could come kind of as an apprentice with him on a parish mission, and we did that.

And I'll never forget the experience.

I've never seen anything like this.

This, um, church was packed as this man preached.

They had people up in the choir loft.

They put chairs in the, uh, the main aisle.

Uh, the church was, could not have been more full and the people just loved listening to this man.

Well, at one point, he, uh, showed me how he prepared his talks.

He brought me to his room and showed me these extensive files that he had developed over the years with clippings from newspapers, from magazines, from movies, works of literature and art, where he found illustrations of the points that he w- wanted to make so that expressed in such concrete, accessible terms, the points would take on life, be easier for the people to listen to, and would help them remember what he was saying.

And I was impressed by that, and at that point started to do the same thing much more formally than I'd ever done before in my priesthood.

Eventually this expanded to the Liturgy of the Hours, and in this case specifically the Office of Readings, because in the Office of Readings for meditation, you have two longer readings.

One is, uh, from the Bible and then one is from the church's tradition, above all, the Church Fathers.

So you have readings from, uh, Saint Augustine, Saint Anselm, Saint Bernard, and, and so on, but also other important saints in the life of the church.

So you might have something from Saint Thomas Aquinas or Saint Francis and so on.

And I would, as I found different things that really spoke to me and appealed to me in these Church Fathers and saints, I would copy these out and put them on file.

Well, some years later, I had just finished giving a retreat for a group of laypeople, and what we'd done in the course of the retreat was to explore a number of, of texts from the church's tradition on prayer.

So the focus was prayer.

So we looked at things that Saint Augustine said, and Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Columban, Saint Anselm, Saint John Vianney, the, uh, theologian Romano Guardini, and a number of others.

Then we had the final sharing on the, uh, early Sunday afternoon at the end of this retreat, and a number of the people said that they had really welcomed the readings from these writers in the church's spiritual tradition, and they'd found them very nourishing, but also for a nu- a number of the people, uh They had discovered a whole tradition of sanctity and spiritual wisdom that they didn't even know existed, and now they found they wanted to learn a lot more about.

Just to give a, a feel of just a couple of these qu- quotations that we shared, at the start of the retreat, we looked at this from Saint Anselm, and you'll see why I began the retreat with this quotation.

O little man, he says.

Escape from your everyday business for a short while.

Hide for a moment from your restless thoughts.

Break off from your cares and troubles.

These are words for our culture today.

And be less concerned about your tasks and labors.

Make a little time for God and rest a while in Him.

And then th- and then I would say, this is what we're here for, and it's a longing that is there in all of our hearts.

Break off for, just for a bit from your cares and troubles.

Be less concerned about your labors.

Make a little time for God and rest a while in Him.

Saint Augustine, The entire life of a good Christian is an exercise of holy desire.

You do not yet see what you long for, God, face-to-face, eternal life, Heaven, but the very act of desiring prepares you so that when He comes, you may see and be utterly satisfied.

And so we would explore the, the role of desire in the spiritual life.

Augustine says elsewhere that we pray because by praying, we increase our desire for what God has always wanted to give us, and as our desire increases, our capability to receive it increases.

So these would be the kinds of teaching we would explore, and then maybe just one more.

Saint John Vianney, these were these lovely, um, catechetical talks that he would give at the end of the morning after hours in the confessional to a packed church with, with no time to prepare them, but he would just speak from his heart.

My little children, your hearts are small, and our hearts are small, and we touch that so often, but prayer stretches them and makes them capable of God.

Through prayer, we receive a foretaste of heaven and something of paradise comes upon us, and so on from other church fathers.

What dawned on me that Sunday was almost all of these readings that I had shared with the people were readings that I had found in the Liturgy of the Hours.

And I realized then how the Liturgy of the Hours was steeping me day-by-day in the rich spiritual tradition of our church.

On my own, I probably would not be reading these doctors and, and figures in the church's history, but here it was every day, a steady diet and nourishment of this that built up something that gave me a whole new richness personally, and something to share with others.

A final thought, Father Gallagher?

Here is a whole field that lies before us, and I think it becomes, again, understandable why the church, without any sense of obligation, speaking now to lay, laypeople, lay, men, and laywomen, simply says, Here is a richness and you're invited in.

Thank you so much, Father Gallagher.

Thank you, Chris.

You've been listening to Praying the Liturgy of the Hours with Father Timothy Gallagher.

To hear and/or to download this discussion along with many others, go to discerninghearts.com.

This has been a production of discerninghearts.com.

I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

Join us next time for Praying the Liturgy of the Hours with Father Timothy Gallagher.