The previous reflection considered the details of the liturgical elements that Benedict quickly directed for use during Lauds on Sundays. Chapter 13’s reflection builds on the now familiar responsories, hymns, versicles, and canticles by prescribing fresh Psalms for use in this prayer. St. Benedict continues to instruct the community to prayer each day as dawn awakens the sleeping world. Reflecting the rhythm of God’s creative cycle of evening and morning, a new day. We rise from our rest to work, as opposed to the social of resting from our work. Perhaps that subtle shift in attitude is a great gift of God through Benedict’s rule of life. Lauds provides space to stop, pause, and measure the reality of the imperfections of our daily struggles which threaten our lives as compared to the promised perfection through the power of God in our lives. In the great gap between that imperfection and perfection there is room to lament; crying out for help, vindication, protection, and salvation. Those are the laments to be discovered in the first readings of the Psalms of Lauds. In the second Psalm the response is praise.
Sr. Joan Chittister writes a wonderful description of these aspects of this time of prayer. Please allow me to quote her own words revealing the spiritual nourishment gained through Lauds.
“Lauds becomes an unending lesson in reality and faith, in accepting what life brings, sure in the knowledge that the God who loves us is with us upholding us all the way. “Each of us should have two pockets, “the rabbis teach. “In one should be the message, ‘I am dust and ashes’ and in the other we should have written, ‘For me the universe was made.’”
These ideas are clearly Benedict’s as well. Two things he does not want us to omit from our prayer lives are Psalm 67’s plea for continued blessing and Psalm 51’s need for continual forgiveness; a sense of God’s goodness and our brokenness; a sense of God’s grandeur and our fragility. Prayer, for Benedict, is obviously not a routine activity. It is a journey into life, its struggles and its glories. It is sometimes difficult to remember, when days are dull and the schedule is full, that God has known the depths of my emptiness but healed this broken self regardless, which, of course, is exactly why Benedict structures prayer around Psalm 67 and Psalm 51. Day after day after day.[1]
She concludes her thoughts on Lauds by writing,
Benedictine prayer is not an escape into a contrived or arcane life. It is prayer intended to impel us through the cold, hard, realities of life in the home, life in the community, life in the world, life with people whom we love enough to hate and whom we hate enough to dampen every other kind of love in us.[2]
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[1] Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century (New York: Crossroad, ©2010), 112-13.
[2] _____, 115.
