Dispatch from OLP, Sunday, April 10

Dispatch from OLP, Sunday, April 10

It’s the Third Sunday of Easter, and I’m awake again at 4 a. m. I don’t know if this is merely continued time adjustment or some inner voice calling me to the peculiar contemplation of writing. Whatever, I find myself eagerly, well, willingly, responding to its yearning.
We both thrive on the rhythm of the monastic schedule. We don’t usually attend the “minor” hours during the day, but always join in for Lauds (Morning Prayer and Vespers (evening prayer). They are similar in structure in that they begin with an invitatory (O Lord make speed to save me. O Lord make haste to help me.) This begins the time of prayer with the pleading voice of total dependence on God. This is immediately followed by the Gloria Patri (Glory to the Father….) with its characteristic gesture of bowing toward each other, and the altar, representing Christ. So the office establishing the two crucial elements of prayer, utter dependence and reverential worship. The assembly then breaks into a hymn, which is something many monastic communities I’ve visited tend to skip, but which I believe is absolutely essential to creating the joyful atmosphere of prayer (monastic prayer can often seem rather somber, though it is not). In this case, as I mentioned before, we are singing the familiar Easter hymns I’ve known since childhood in English, which seems strange to be singing in far-away Guimaras. (I will have to ask Father Bruno, the guest master, about this seeming peculiarity) At any rate, I’m probably quite the topic of conversation around here as the guest who sings the hymns heartily, and a bit too loudly.
Two or three Psalms follow, each with a refrain at the beginning and the end, while the Psalm is chanted. Each community has developed its own peculiar rhythm and tone of chanting, so it takes a few days to feel comfortable. (I think I mentioned this one is led by an organ of sorts, a little electronic job that fits quite nicely needs of the community.) And this one tends to use so many different books, it becomes a bit of a chore to know where we are, but a helpful nun always sidles up when we’re shuffling books to point the way when we look baffled. After the Psalms there’s a short reading, usually from an epistle, and often related, in this season, to Easter living.
Then the silence. It is more prolonged after a reading, but it punctuates the whole of monastic prayer like a rest punctuates music and like negative space in a painting gives life to the subject. It provides space for reflecting on what was said, and for what was not said, the thoughts and longings of the heart, or sometimes, its noisy, persistent voices, which must also be attended to. I used to think I needed somehow to escape the noisy, clamoring voices in my heart and mind, but I’ve come to realize they are as essential to prayer as the more lofty thoughts and intentions. They ground me in the gritty reality of my life before God with an honesty that requires deeper trust in God’s grace. More importantly, sometimes they contain clues that lead, like the sleuths of the heart, to the real prayer, the deepest longings, the sins I don’t want to face. But in this time and place, so anchored in human dependence, it’s not so fearful or shameful. It’s simply who I am, the one God accepts, loves, and has received baptismal identity in Christ, and the daily food of grace.
In this community, as in most, the prayer widens to embraces the whole world with petition and response. With each petition the response, suiting the season, gets repeated by the community like the peals of a bell, louder and more persistent: “Risen Lord, hear us.”