The Work of God
The Work of God
By Fr Michael Casey
The principal work of the monk, within the context of his search for uninterrupted prayer, is the solemn celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours at regular intervals throughout the day. By his celebration of the Hours the monk participates in Christ’s work of sanctifying time, embracing all that is human and in love offering it to the Father.
Vatican II declared that the consecration of the day was the purpose of the Divine Office. The Hours of the liturgy sanctify time by a process of incarnation and inter-communication. Just as the eternal Word became flesh, eternity is embodied in time and takes on its hues. So the daily cycle of prayer is not only spaced at regular intervals during the 24-hour period, its form is governed by the hours of the natural day. It builds bridges to the normal experience of the stillness of night, the flowering of morning, daylight waxing and waning, evening’s calm and the return of darkness. For each moment of the day there is a prayer that is shaped by it. Through the choice of Psalm, hymns and prayers, the Office provides a way of passing through each day in the mindfulness of God, running on parallel tracks, as it were, with the succeeding phases of daylight.
In the northern hemisphere the liturgical seasons are superimposed over the yearly progression of natural seasons, with the paschal cycle of spring following the ancient Hebrew sequence which was originally agricultural, and the Christmas cycle coinciding, more or less with the winter solstice. We who live in the southern hemisphere miss out on this advantage. More important, however, is the yearly passage through the whole of salvation history, from creation to the final judgement, with special emphasis on the life of Jesus. This is neither historical remembrance nor a pageant of re-enactment. In the mystery of liturgy, the salvific content of events becomes accessible to us, a source of grace and formation in the spiritual life.
To speak of the sanctification of time is to speak of a divine and not a human task: the peeling back of time and an opening into the eternity of God. This process of descent began with the incarnation of the Word. The movement of return commenced with Christ’s prayer in the days of his flesh and culminated in the Paschal mystery, the “return” of the Word-made-flesh into the bosom of the Father. For as long as Christ’s body on earth journeys onward this Godward movement remains a permanent reality. This is what it means “to pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17). All our prayer is a desire for the heavenly homeland, as St Benedict says, our liturgical prayer is a more explicit participation in the cosmic liturgy which binds together heaven and earth. Mysteriously present are all moments of human history and all the phases of salvation history. Sacramentally, past, present and future co-exist in a single “now” or “today” which is the most perfect earthly representation of heavenly existence.
