#DIVINE OFFICE LAUDS MOVIE#

I offer you the powerful of our world, our rich, our famous, our athletes, our artists, our movie stars, our entrepreneurs, our young, our healthy, and everything that’s creative and bursting with life, even as I offer you those who are weak, feeble, aged, crushed, sick, dying, and victimized. I offer you the bread of the world’s achievements, even as I offer you the wine of its failure, the blood of all that’s crushed as those achievements take place. I am your priest on earth.Īnd what I hold up for you today is all that is in this world, both of joy and of suffering. For I am of the earth, a piece of earth, and the earth opens or closes to you through my body, my soul, and my voice. “Lord, God, I stand before you as a microcosm of the earth itself, to give it voice: See in my openness, the world’s openness, in my infidelity, the world’s infidelity in my sincerity, the world’s sincerity, in my hypocrisy, the world’s hypocrisy in my generosity, the world’s generosity, in my selfishness, the world’s selfishness in my attentiveness, the world’s attentiveness, in my distraction, the world’s distraction in my desire to praise you, the world’s desire to praise you, and in my self-preoccupation, the world’s forgetfulness of you. In essence, when we pray at the Eucharist or at the Divine Office, we are saying this: In this kind of prayer we lift up our voices to God, not as a private offering, but in such a way so as to give a voice to the earth itself. In priestly prayer we pray not just for ourselves, nor ideally by ourselves, but we pray as a microcosm of the whole world, even as we pray for the whole world. This kind of prayer, called liturgy, is what keeps incarnate the priestly prayer of Christ. However, we pray that prayer, formally and sacramentally, whenever we pray the prayer of the church, namely, the Eucharist or the Divine Office. That’s priestly prayer in its widest sense.

As adults, elders, we have both privilege and the responsibility to, as scripture puts it, “make prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, for ourselves and for the people.” All of us, lay and cleric alike, need to offer up priestly prayer each day.īut how do we do that? How do we pray priestly prayers? We pray as priests, as Jesus prayed in the 17th chapter of John’s gospel, every time we sacrifice self-interest for the good of the community. Indeed we are all priests, ordained by the sacred oils of baptism and consecrated by the archetypal burdens that have given us wrinkles and grey hair. Like the high priests of old, we need to offer up prayers daily for the whole world. One of the things asked of us by adulthood itself, and more especially by our baptism, is that we pray for others.

Divine office lauds