The Liturgy of the Hours (Liturgy, Time and Space)

3605 Words15 Pages
INTRODUCTION Public and common prayer by the people of God is rightly considered to be among the primary duties of the Church. This is true because the scriptures attest to it that the early Christians "devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the community, to the breaking of the bread, and to prayer"(Acts 2:42), and that “many times the Christian community prayed with one accord.” From this Testimony of the early Christians we discover that individual Christians devoted themselves to prayer at fixed times or hours then as time went by, in different places, it soon became the established practice to assign special times for common prayer. This tradition has been handed on to the contemporary community of faith- the church. Therefore in order to solemnly carry out this gracious mandate to pray in and out of season she developed and formulated prayers to sanctify the hours of the day which is called the breviary or the Liturgy of the hours. WHAT IS THE LITURGY OF HOURS? The Liturgy of hours is one of the celebrations in time and space which forms a part of the living complex we call liturgy. It is a prayer devised to sanctify the hours of the day such that it becomes an expression of the prayer of each participant and, above all, of the entire ecclesial community. It is a form of the heavenly liturgy, an officium divinum- a divine office that is to be rendered to God through the praises we render to him. By way of summation, “the Liturgy of the hours is essentially prayer organized by the church but always carried out through the personal prayers that each participant offers in the celebration.” HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE LITURGY OF HOURS Prayer is a universal phenomenon in world religions meaning that there is no religion in any level of culture that does not recognize the phenomenon of prayer. In this light, when we consider the Christian
Open Document