Hello friends,
With the new year, I've been trying to get back in the habit of keeping spiritual disciplines. This is hard for me! I struggle keeping any kind of habit alive, if for no other reason than my days are so unpredictable that I think I have a hard time keeping a schedule of praise. And so for the (what feels like) billionth time, I'm hitting the reset button on spiritual disciplines.
I've picked up Phyllis Tickle's (best name in all of Christian literature) Divine Hours and started to use it as a devotional. The Divine Hours is a continuation of the practice of fixed hour prayer, that is that three times a day, at the exact same time every day, I set aside a little bit of time to pray. So for me, I'm going to be doing my best to pray at 8, 12, and 9. I already slept through the first hour (or "office") today, but that's ok. This is a bit of a learning process.
So far (I've only been doing this for a day now) I'm really appreciating a bunch of things about the Divine Hours:
The Prayers are based largely on the Psalms. I think as Christians we tend to ignore the Old Testament, and the Psalms are some of the most beautiful pieces of Scripture in the whole bible. Using them as my prayers has been incredibly meaningful.
Repeated Prayers. Each office has the Lord's Prayer as a central component, and in addition each week has a prayer that is repeated at each office throughout the week. I am a forgetful person, and so being reminded of the same thing every day, and in this case, three times a day, can't be a bad thing. I know a lot of people are against the sort of "rote" prayer habits, but for me at least I'm finding a lot of meaning in them.
Habit habit habit. I am so bad at habit, but this book makes it fairly easy to try to break into a new habit for the new year.
Have any of you had any experience with the Divine Hours? If so, feel free to share in the comments!
Godspeed,
J
0 comments:
Post a Comment