The Divine Office as a Method of Prayer

Extract

A priest of my acquaintance once told me that when he was a young religious, he had had a great devotion to the divine office. In order to get the best out of it, he decided to make a careful study of the psalms. So he got out the best commentaries and studied their meaning in Latin and Hebrew; and when he had finished, he found that the psalms had ceased to have any meaning to him as prayer at all. This is, perhaps, an extreme example, but it illustrates a fact of great importance, namely, that prayer is not necessarily an exercise of discursive thought, and that study of a certain kind can be an obstacle rather than an assistance to prayer.

There is no doubt that for a great many priests and religious, if not the majority, the divine office is not a congenial method of prayer. It is a duty which has to be performed, which has its own special grace and virtue, but it is not generally felt as a personal method of prayer and approach to God.