Today is October 1st, 2026, and I’m William Michael. I’m the headmaster of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy. I’ve had a topic on my mind for some time that I’ve been planning to talk about. It started to haunt me, and I realized it was a really important concept. I was reading a book that’s commonly used in our Dominican formation program, a book titled Dominican Spirituality. And I saw a quote in that book, and the moment I read the quote, I felt like a light went on inside my mind, and I felt: that’s important. This quote, this concept, is really important. And I’ll talk about it a little bit, and then talk about the topic that I’d like to unfold in this talk, which I think is going to be very helpful—and I’ll explain why in a minute.
One of the early Masters of the Dominican Order was a man named Humbert of Romans. He lived at the same time that St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas lived. In fact, they actually were together on at least one occasion that I know of. So we’re talking about the leader of the Dominican Order in the time of St. Albert and St. Thomas Aquinas, and he said the following: “The greater part of our penance consists in the recitation of the Divine Office.” The greater part of our penance consists in the recitation of the Divine Office.
And when I read that, I just felt, as I said, this light go on in my mind. And I said, “Wow. You know, I know that I don’t understand the significance of this quote, but for some reason I know that this is really, really important.” And I have been looking forward to an opportunity to meditate on it and unfold it a bit.
A mother’s question
And I’d like to share that, because as I’ve been thinking about this quote and this topic, I received an email this morning from a parent in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy who asked me about the Liturgy of the Hours and the difficulty of the Liturgy of the Hours. It was a mother, and she explained that she’s been working at incorporating the Liturgy of the Hours into her life. She’s been praying Morning and Evening Prayer, but she just feels like something doesn’t click—like there’s just something about this devotion that just doesn’t take hold.
And I think we all know what this feels like and what she’s referring to. I think all of us have struggled with the Divine Office, or the Liturgy of the Hours—I’ll use them interchangeably. We struggle with the Divine Office. We struggle with the Liturgy of the Hours. And even in the Catechism there’s a passage that refers to prayer as a battle. Prayer is a battle.
Now, what happens in our lives, especially in modern culture, is that anytime something is uncomfortable or unpleasant, we think it needs to be changed. We think there needs to be some substitute. We try to pray the Liturgy of the Hours. It’s not pleasant. It doesn’t seem relevant to our lives. It’s not comfortable. Things just don’t click, as this mother said. And so we wonder, “Maybe I should be doing something else. Maybe I should just pray the Rosary. Maybe I should just say my own prayers. Maybe I should just read Scripture, or do something that I find edifying or that I find enjoyable.” And very few, I think—myself included—have understood the purpose and the benefit of the Divine Office, or the Liturgy of the Hours. And this quote draws our attention to the real purpose: the greater part of our penance consists in the recitation of the Divine Office.
The confusion about penance
Now, I’d like to talk a little bit about something that I’ve struggled with, and I think that many Christians, many Catholics, struggle with this. When I became a Dominican—when I first started my formation as a Lay Dominican—one of the things we learned, as we were introduced to the history of the Order and the life of St. Dominic, was that the Dominican Order was a penitential order. It was an order of penitents.
And I read that, and I have in my mind an idea of what that means. It’s people who devote their lives to doing penance—people who recognize that they’re sinners, recognize that they’ve committed many evils and that many evils are being committed around them every day, and they take it upon themselves to do something about it. They’re not just going to ignore it. They want to do something about it. They want to make reparation. And so they devote themselves to a life of penance.
And when I say the word penance, or when I say the phrase a life of penance, I think we all get a similar idea in our minds of what that means. We think back into history, or we think even of our own lives, and we think of penance as the example of saints whipping themselves, starving themselves, living on bread and water. We think of strict practices during the Lenten season. We think of saints who walked barefoot, who slept on concrete floors—all sorts of physical punishments. We think of these things as penances. We think of that as the penitential life. And so as Catholics, especially as laymen, we often wonder: What can we actually do? How can we live a penitential life?
It’s also confusing, because we’ll go to confession and we’ll feel like the sins that we confess are pretty serious. And we’ll struggle over all of the pride that would discourage us from making a good and honest confession. We’ll struggle with that. We’ll overcome that pride. We’ll humiliate ourselves before our priests and confess our most embarrassing sins. And we’ll find that the priest responds with a so-called penance that seems inappropriate: “Say two Our Fathers and three Hail Marys.” Really? That’s the penance for the sins that I just confessed? What about all these stories we’ve heard—all these stories of what penance used to look like? Why something like two Our Fathers and three Hail Marys?
The worst penance I was ever assigned by my priest was to pray a whole Rosary. And I remember when that came out of his mouth, he looked at me and said, “For your penance, pray one Rosary.” And I thought to myself, “Wow, that must have been pretty bad.” I’d never had anything like that before. And I also have to confess it was my most recent confession.
But we look at the penances that are assigned in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and we just say to ourselves, “Is that it, really? Is that our penance for this sin?” And it seems like there’s a disconnect between the penance that we receive in the confessional and all these stories we hear about in history—the penitential lives of saints and hermits, great martyrs who voluntarily sacrificed their lives and were tortured, crusaders who ran into battle on behalf of Christendom because they hoped to offer their lives in battle as penance. And so there’s a lot of confusion.
I know in my life I’ve struggled to get a hold of this. And this quote—that the greater part of our penance consists in the recitation of the Divine Office—just kind of blew my mind. And I’d like to talk about this a bit. The title of this talk, or what will be the title of this talk, is “How the Liturgy of the Hours Leads Us to Perfection.” And what I’d like to do in this talk—what I hope to accomplish—is to explain why we should embrace the Liturgy of the Hours, and what I think will make it click for us.
This is something, as I said, that I’ve really just come to embrace recently, and it’s been such a relief, such a source of strength and satisfaction, because I feel like there was a missing piece in the puzzle of my Catholic life, and I found this missing piece and have been able to put it into the puzzle. Not that the puzzle is finished, but at least this part of the puzzle is finished, where that piece had been missing. And I could tell something was missing. So I’d like to talk about how the Liturgy of the Hours leads us to perfection.
The Sermon on the Mount and conditional forgiveness
I talk a lot with Protestants, and I just scratch my head in total confusion when I listen to them talk about salvation by faith alone and all that. It’s just insanity. Because if we open the Gospels and read the Sermon on the Mount, it’s just so evidently clear that that heretical idea of salvation through faith alone is obviously not the message that our Lord taught there in Matthew chapters 5 through 7. We read that, and it’s so obvious that it is not teaching anything like salvation by faith alone. This whole idea that salvation is unconditional—that it’s a free gift that God gives us—is just the most made-up, insane craziness. It couldn’t more clearly contradict the teaching of Christ.
For example, think about when Christ teaches us how to pray—when He teaches us the Lord’s Prayer. We have all of this Protestant talk of unconditional this and unconditional that, free this, free that. And yet our Lord says to us, “If you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” That’s a conditional statement. Our Lord makes it very clear to us that forgiveness is conditional. You and I are going to be forgiven if we forgive.
Jesus also warned on the same subject. He said that you are going to be judged by God according to the same measure that you use to judge others. So when you react to someone’s sins, you show the Lord how you would like to be judged—or you set the rule, I should say, for how you are going to be judged. It’s clearly conditional. It’s clearly relative. We’re not going to be judged according to one common standard. We’re going to be judged according to the standard that we ourselves establish. We are not freely forgiven. We are not unconditionally forgiven. We’re very explicitly forgiven conditionally—if we forgive men their sins.
The Gospel that glorifies God
And then Protestants will talk about how the gospel of free salvation—salvation by faith alone—glorifies God, because it shows Him to be so good and so loving. And it doesn’t glorify God at all to teach that message. It’s funny, because God says that the distinctive mark of depraved men is that they look at something evil and call it good. And the Protestant message is especially that God looks at evil men and calls them good, and that’s how we’re saved. God simply calls evil people good, because Jesus died on the cross. That’s the message. “We’re saved by faith alone,” the Protestants say. “We believe that Jesus died and suffered in our place, and we just get eternal life by acknowledging that—by saying, ‘Yes, I believe that Jesus died on the cross and paid for the sins of the world; therefore I’m saved.'” That’s the Protestant message.
Again, if we read the teaching of Christ, it couldn’t be clearer that that is not His teaching. That message does not glorify God. The message that people who are corrupt and bad are saved because God simply calls them good does not glorify God. What would glorify God—what would be more glorious—is for God to take fallen, sinful people, forgive their sins, pay the penalty for their sins, but also give them a new heart; give them His own Spirit; give them spiritual life, spiritual strength; and actually enable them to truly become good—and to save them because they are good. And that goodness that’s in them is partly their own, because they will it. But it is entirely dependent on the grace of God, who supplies them with the strength that they need to become good, to do those good things.
That’s a gospel that’s not just talk—not just smoke and mirrors, not just some kind of deus ex machina trick. That is the gospel of power: God actually saving and transforming fallen men. That is the gospel that glorifies God. And that’s what Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount. He says to His hearers, “Let your light shine before men, so that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” That’s what glorifies God. God is glorified by the transformed lives of His followers. God is glorified by the good deeds of His worshipers.
So once we get past this fake and empty Protestant teaching—which has infected many Catholics; I would even say many in the Catholic clergy. If we listen to their messages, we have to wonder, is this Catholicism or Protestantism? The desire to create a seeker-friendly church, to make Christianity comfortable and attractive, simply denies the grace of God. And by grace, we don’t just mean that God is nice, like Santa Claus. By grace, we mean that God actually gives power to His worshipers. He gives the Holy Spirit to those who obey Him.
So we can clearly see that that is the message of the New Testament: that God intends for us to see Jesus not only as the Savior of the world, which He is, but also to see Him as an example—as the model of what God’s will looks like in the flesh. And St. John says that we can know that we’re true Christians if we live as He lived. And if we say that we know Him, John says, but don’t love our neighbor, we are liars, and the truth is not in us.
So the whole point of the Gospel is that fallen human beings, through faith in Christ, will gain access to the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit will work, as they will it, to transform them into holy individuals—actually holy individuals. And God will call them good, because they are actually good. That’s the Gospel. We can be good by God’s grace.
Fasting, prayer, and almsgiving
So when we look at the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is teaching His followers how to be good, how to glorify God. And He tells them that there are three works that His followers need to do—three penitential works, works that characterize Christians: fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. He talks about these three different works, these three penitential acts, works of penance.
Remember when John the Baptist was preaching in the wilderness, he was calling to the Jews and saying, “Bring forth fruits worthy of repentance.” Bring forth fruits worthy of repentance—that is, don’t come here with any empty talk. Show that you are contrite. Prove that you are sincere. Bring forth fruits worthy of repentance. And Jesus calls His followers to do the same: “Let your light shine before men.” And He describes these penitential acts, these fruits worthy of repentance: fasting, almsgiving, and prayer.
And most importantly—contrary again to the Protestant false gospel—Jesus says to us, “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” He doesn’t say, “Hey, nobody’s perfect, right?” No, that’s irrelevant. He says, “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Be perfect.
And of course, before the gift of the Holy Spirit was given at Pentecost, the law called us to know and do God’s will, but it didn’t give us that strength. It didn’t come with grace. And so the law condemned men. It taught men what was good. It led men to desire to do what was good. But men realized, as St. Paul complains about in Romans, “I just can’t do the good that I want to do. I can’t obey the law. I just can’t.” And we all experience this. This exposes our problem. And it’s a problem that’s only known to good people, who actually want to do God’s will but see their weakness.
And Christ came into the world not to destroy the law, not to get rid of it, not to create some goofy religion where people just play music and dance around. That wasn’t the intention. The intention was to actually help men do God’s will—to help them do what they want to do. Good people want to do God’s will, because God’s will is good. It’s intrinsically good. Good people want to do God’s will. The problem is they don’t have the strength.
Mercy and grace
And so we really need two things from God. We need His mercy, to forgive us for our sins. And we see how He offers that to us in Christ—in Christ’s offering of Himself as the atonement for our sins. We see God’s provision for the forgiveness of our sins. That’s great. But we need more than that. We also need grace to become good.
And we see that God—as infinitely wonderful as the Cross is—wasn’t finished with the Cross. There was more. And we see it at Pentecost: the Holy Spirit, given from Christ in heaven. We see the Holy Spirit poured out upon the Church, and for the past 2,000 years, the Holy Spirit distributed through the sacraments of the Church to all believers.
So it’s not disrespectful to say that Christ’s death on the Cross was not all. Protestants like to challenge us on that. They like to say, “What you’re saying is that Christ’s death wasn’t enough.” No, that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that that’s not all that God intended for us. As infinitely wonderful as that is, God intended even more. That’s the Gospel. Protestants are not offering more; they’re offering less. And they’re yelling at us for saying that God offers even more than they allow.
So God offers us both forgiveness and grace to obey, and He commands us to be perfect. And of course, He gives that command not like Pharaoh telling the Jews to make bricks with no supplies. God commands us to be perfect, and also stands ready to give us the supplies that we need to become perfect.
Salvation as a test of the will
And ultimately, we see that salvation is a test of the will. If you want to be saved, if you want to be holy, if you want to have eternal life, there is nothing in your way. You can have it, but you have to will it. And it’s not going to be easy. Your will is constantly going to be tested. You’re constantly going to be tested to see if you want it—and at what cost.
Think of it as an auction. You go to an auction and you see something that you’d like. You say, “Oh, man, that painting is beautiful. I would like to buy that.” And you say, “Okay, I’ll offer $100.” And then the bidding starts, and it’s up to 110, 125, 150, 200, 225, 250. And you see, the question is: How much do you think this is worth? How much will you bid? And at some point we either continue to bid more and more and more, and show that, man, we really want this thing—or we end our bids and someone else takes it.
The Christian life works in a similar way. God offers us eternal life, and then He says, “This gift that I offer you is very, very great. What will you offer for it?” And you see, it’s a test of the will. It’s not a test of our strength. It’s a test of our will, and our will is free. We don’t have to be six foot eight, 250 pounds, as if we were going to play in the NBA and be professional basketball players. The challenges that God gives us are not physical challenges. They’re challenges of our will. And so it all is a test of the will. And it’s all true. It’s the Gospel. It’s divine.
Two perfections: truth and goodness
And so we see these two perfections, truth and goodness. And that’s where our salvation consists: in truth and goodness. And Jesus says to us, “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” So then we want to understand: What does it mean to be perfect?
It means to be in actuality what God created us to be—to fulfill our potential; to realize, or actualize, what was in us potentially by our creation and, in the Gospel, potentially; to realize that potential, to actualize that potential. Jesus says, “Be perfect.” Actualize it.
When we study theology, we learn about God that in God there is no potentiality. God is all act, or all actuality. Everything that God is, He is in perfection. There is no part of Him, no attribute in Him, that is incomplete or imperfect. He is perfect. He is entirely in act and in no way in potency. Christ is calling us to become like God—to become human beings who are fully actualized, all in act.
And this relates to the two parts of our nature: the intellect and the will. The perfection of the intellect is truth, and the perfection of the will is goodness. So truth and goodness are the ends that we seek. I want to be filled with truth, and I want my will to be perfectly good. That’s what it means to be perfect: true and good.
Now, in modern circles you’ll hear people say “truth, goodness, and beauty.” And what that’s usually used for is a justification for luxurious living. The truth and the goodness are kind of set aside, and what we really end up with is beauty. It means that we can have fancy dinners, and we can have expensive wine and cheese, and we can buy expensive clothing, and we can rent out expensive halls and have big events and things like that—”truth, goodness, and beauty.” But the two perfections are actually truth and goodness. Truth is the perfection of the intellect, and goodness is the perfection of the will. That’s Scholastic teaching. That’s Aristotelian philosophy.
Now, if we think about ourselves in that sense—that the two parts of our soul, as it were, are the intellect and the will, and the perfection of the intellect is truth and the perfection of the will is goodness—we then have to ask: How do we do this? How do we perfect our intellect? How do we perfect our will?
And our Lord’s answer to the second part is: through penance. “Cease to do evil; learn to do good.” That’s what the Scriptures teach us. You have to stop doing evil, and you have to start doing good. You have to replace bad habits with good habits. That’s the Christian life. So all the things that we’ve done that are bad—we need to do their opposites. We need to do the things that are good. That’s how we perfect the will.
And as far as truth is concerned, the Church has taught us through all of its history—all of the Church’s Doctors and wise men, and all the great philosophers of the past have taught us—that truth is pursued through study, by the use of the faculty of reason, for the ordering of our own minds, our own wills, our own lives, and so on. And for our studies, we have the works of great philosophers, which demonstrate their conclusions by very clear and convincing arguments. And we have divine revelation, which reveals to us things that reason can’t access or that reason can’t get right. And so we have these two sources of truth, reason and faith: reason, which receives truths demonstrated by argumentation, and faith, which receives truths that are given by divine revelation.
So we see that through classical Catholic studies—I mean, that’s the whole point of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy—through the study of philosophy, which is the pursuit of truth by means of human reason, and through theology, which is the pursuit of truth by faith through divine revelation, we seek to perfect the intellect. That’s the goal of classical Catholic education: the perfection of the intellect.
But the perfection of the will also requires action. You know, we can move toward the perfection of the will by the study of moral philosophy. That’s the whole point. That’s the goal of moral philosophy: to order the will. But we still have to do it. We have to do good. The command is not simply to learn what is evil and learn what is good. Aristotle, 400 years before Christ, condemned that idea, and he said our goal is not to know what virtue and vice are. Our goal is to actually be good men. That’s the goal of our study: to actually be good, to be perfect in both intellect and will—to be true and good.
The Church’s liturgy: the Mass and the Hours
Now again, the title of this talk is “How the Liturgy of the Hours Leads Us to Perfection.” And I want you to see, as we think about this, how the Liturgy of the Hours brings all of this together.
Many talk about the Liturgy of the Mass. They talk about the sacraments. Many make a big deal about the Liturgy of the Mass, but they ignore the Liturgy of the Hours. And really, the Liturgy of the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours together are the Church’s liturgy, and so we can’t have one without the other. The Liturgy of the Mass by itself is not the whole good of Catholicism. It’s only a part of the good of Catholicism. The Liturgy of the Hours is also essential. It’s what the Catholic Church offers the world. It’s what the Catholic Church calls the world to. It’s a life of prayer, because prayer is the ultimate act of worship.
And so the Church provides for us in these liturgies scripts, as it were. It tells us what we need to say. It orders it all for us. It assigns the times for us. And it says to us, “Do this. Be perfect.” And so we have the Liturgy of the Mass, which is not a Sunday activity; it’s offered every day. And we have the Liturgy of the Hours, which likewise is offered to God every day—but even more, is offered throughout every day, fulfilling what David himself said in the Psalms: “Seven times a day I will praise you.” The Liturgy of the Hours is the full daily worship of God.
Why it “doesn’t click”
And so the Church hands us this book, or set of books, and says, “This is what you should pray.” And we take these books, we go home, and we get on Google and we ask, “How do I use this thing? How do I pray the Liturgy of the Hours? What do I do?” And we start to learn. We start to flip around and find the different parts in the Liturgy of the Hours. We read the Ordinary. We read the Propers of the seasons. We look through the Psalter. We see the four weeks of the Psalter. We see Night Prayer. We see the Office of Readings. We see all of the Commons in the back. We see all of these different parts, all of this content—thousands of pages.
And then we start to ease our way in. We start to ease into maybe Morning Prayer, maybe Night Prayer. And we recite the prayers and the hymns and the Psalms, and sometimes we just say, “Ugh, I don’t even know what I’m reading here. How is this beneficial to me at all? I don’t know what this means.” We find Psalms that just seem foreign to us. They belong to some other person, some other time, some other universe. How is this relevant to us?
And we’re tempted, because it’s not pleasant. It’s not flattering. It’s not cool. I’ve never heard of any chicks falling in love with a guy because he prays the Liturgy of the Hours. There’s nothing attractive about it—nothing cool, nothing comforting. It’s very difficult to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, and when people experience that, they say, “Ugh, this just isn’t for me. It just doesn’t do anything for me. It doesn’t click. I think I’m just going to stick to my Rosary. I think I’m just going to read Scripture like I used to. I think I’m just going to stick with my little book of devotions.”
But what we’re ignoring is what actually needs to be done in us for us to be perfected—what we actually need to be perfect. We have to go back to the Sermon on the Mount and ask our Lord, “You say, ‘Be perfect.’ What do I need to do to be perfect?” And so we need grace. We need to know the truth. We need to have our souls filled with light. We need to order our intellect. We need to order our will. But we also need to cease to do evil and learn to do good. We need to do penance.
And that brings us back to the topic of penance. And then we start to think, “So what should I do? Sleep on the floor? Eat one meal a day? Eat no meals a day? Drink only water? Eat only bread? Wear a hair shirt under my clothes? What should I do? How should I do penance? Should I give money to poor people? Who? Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons? Haven’t we already provided for poor people? What am I going to do?”
And we have this quote: “The greater part of our penance consists in the recitation of the Divine Office.” The Liturgy of the Hours purifies us. It attacks what is actually bad in us. And what is it that’s bad?
The Hours against individualism
I talked about Protestantism before. What is Protestantism? It’s individualism. You do what you like. You worship God in your own way. You read the Bible just haphazardly, as you want to. You do what you want. You pick a church that you like. You start your own church. You don’t submit to anyone. You design a religion where every part of that religion is what you like. That’s Protestantism—the seeker-friendly church, everything the way you like it. That’s not Catholicism. And that’s not what we need.
God gives us what we need through the Church, and we hate it. We don’t like it. It’s not fun. It’s not easy. It’s uncomfortable. It’s boring. It’s hard to understand. You know, “In order for me to understand these Psalms, I’m going to have to start studying. I’m going to have to go read St. Augustine’s commentaries on the Psalms, or I’m going to have to read about the life of David so I can learn what in the world he’s talking about.” We’re challenged to study things that we don’t know, things that are difficult to learn. We’re challenged to recite things; we have to learn the discipline of chanting. We have to learn these things. There’s so much to learn and figure out. We have no idea how to do any of these things. This is very difficult.
And then we’ve got a schedule to follow. “We’re supposed to say this around 6 a.m., and this around noon, and this around 6 p.m., and this around 9 p.m., and then you’ve got the Office of Readings. This is going to take over our whole lives. I’m going to be a slave to this thing.” Exactly. That’s exactly the point. And so you see what the Liturgy of the Hours does. It asks us to become slaves—to put everything else second, and to establish the worship of God and prayer as the first thing.
If we were to look at our daily schedules and ask, “What are the organizing principles of these schedules?”—when you say, “I wake up at this time,” why do you wake up at that time? “Well, because I have to go to work at this time.” So work, then, is the organizing principle of your day, of your life. If I ask a housewife, “Why do you do this at this time?” she’ll say, “Oh, because lunchtime is at twelve and the baby goes down for a nap at one.” Okay, so eating and sleeping are the organizing principles of your day. Does that sound like a Christian life? No, it doesn’t.
And so now we introduce the Liturgy of the Hours to this life. And we say: at this time you’re going to say Morning Prayer, and at this time Midday Prayer, and at this time Evening Prayer, and at this time Night Prayer, and there’s also the Office of Readings. “Well, what about the Rosary?” Yes. Yes, you also should pray the Rosary. “How am I possibly going to do that?” Well, you’re challenged to make it the organizing principle of your life—the organizing principle of your day.
What the monastery teaches
And if you want to see this fleshed out in completeness, look at the monastery. The Divine Office and the Mass are the organizing principles of the day. And you really can’t appreciate this unless you visit a monastery and stay there for a little while—stay for a few days. I stayed once for two weeks at a Benedictine monastery. I know that most people won’t be able to do that. I was there because I was invited to talk about education with the abbot of the monastery, and so I was there for two weeks—not a normal visit. But if you’re there for a while, you start to really feel the life of the monastery, and you realize that these monks—their whole entire life is ordered by prayer and worship.
I remember I was meeting, while I was there, with one priest. Of everyone there, he was particularly interested in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy and understanding the seven liberal arts and things like that. He wanted to talk at length about these things. And we could never finish talking, because we’d get into a discussion, we’d get thirty minutes into the discussion, and there’d be bells ringing, and it was time for prayer. And it was frustrating. But everything was subject to worship. Everything was subject to prayer. The classical liberal arts are important—but not that important. They’re important; they’re second. These subjects are important, but they’re not as important as prayer, not as important as worship, not as important as Mass. And when the bells ring, everything stops.
And so when you’re in that monastic community—again, especially when you’re not just visiting for an afternoon or even a day, but you’re there for days—you begin to feel this. You realize that for these monks there is nothing but worship. Their life is ordered entirely by prayer, and that’s what the Divine Office is for. And that’s what this quote from the Master of the Dominicans meant when he said, “The greater part of our penance consists in the recitation of the Divine Office.”
The Liturgy of the Hours after Vatican II
Now, that was a traditional Benedictine community. They prayed the old Divine Office—very rigorous, very difficult; so difficult that at the Second Vatican Council it was reformed. And I know that the traddies will fuss, but you don’t keep the Divine Office, so you have nothing to fuss about. The Church knows that almost no one actually prayed the Divine Office outside of monasteries and the clergy. And it’s not good for lay people to just dilly-dally.
And so the Church—rather than lowering the standards, as some present it—raised the standards by making the Liturgy of the Hours the official prayer for all believers. So there’s no more of this lazy-layperson baloney, where you flounder around doing whatever you want while the monks and the priests and the nuns live under this heavy discipline. After Vatican II, the lay people were called to take up this discipline. And so the Church invites all the faithful to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, and the Liturgy of the Hours was revised so that that could be done—so that some of the aspects of life as laymen that are truly different from the life of a religious community or a member of the clergy would have a little more flexibility, and things could get done.
For example, the Office of Readings was made to be one hour of daily prayer that could be prayed at any time. So you could fit that into your schedule wherever it was possible, rather than having a strict, heavy hour of Matins, which was often sung in the middle of the night. So there was flexibility added to the official prayer of the Church, and it was made so that all Catholics could participate in it and take this discipline upon themselves.
Prayer as a penitential work
So we’re looking for direction—spiritual direction—about how we can make reparation for our sins, how we can become good, how we can bring forth fruits worthy of repentance. And we think about fasting. We think about almsgiving. And we ignore prayer as a penitential work. But prayer is a penitential work. Christ taught this in the Sermon on the Mount: fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. Prayer is penance. And so this daily discipline, the Liturgy of the Hours, is a principal source—an approved source—of penance for all believers, and we’re all invited to pray the Liturgy of the Hours now.
My thesis in this talk is that if we learn to think about prayer—this liturgical prayer—as a penitential work, all of a sudden it makes sense. All the complaints we had are just complaints about penitential works. The problem is that in this seeker-friendly-church generation, we think that everything is supposed to be enjoyable, pleasant, fun, interesting, immediately gratifying, and so on. And so we judge our experience with the Liturgy of the Hours as bad and negative. But it’s because we don’t approach it with the intention that we should—which is as a penitential act, as a means of doing penance. And if we change our minds with respect to the intention of praying the Liturgy of the Hours, all of a sudden everything makes sense.
And so the Liturgy of the Hours is able to lead us to perfection by giving us a principal source of penance for our lives. The rigor of it is the penitential nature of it: the difficulty of it, the intellectual challenge of it, every part of it, the physical challenge of it—keeping a schedule, chanting the Psalms, learning new things, disciplining ourselves to stop what we’re doing and go and say the next hour of prayer.
You can see how all of those things attack that Protestant spirit. They attack that individualism. They attack that desire to have everything the way that I like it: “I want everything to taste the way I want it to taste, feel the way I want it to feel. I want all the ideas to be ideas that I like, all the sounds to be my favorite sounds.” This individualistic modern idea of religion—the Liturgy of the Hours mortifies all of that; puts all of that to death in us.
It mortifies our time. It mortifies our freedom to just wander about as if we’re lords of the universe. It mortifies our physical comfort—moving around on our own schedule, at our own pace, doing what we want. It mortifies us intellectually, by giving us a fixed source of content that doesn’t really care, or ask our opinion, about what we would like to study today. It gives us the scheduled readings and the scheduled prayers and the scheduled canticles and antiphons and hymns. And you see how this is all mortifying that individualistic will, that selfishness. It’s putting that to death.
We’re offering the Hours to God as acts of reparation for our selfishness, for our individualistic lives, for our laziness, for our lack of discipline, for all the time that we’ve wasted—for all the time we’ve spent on entertainment, and now use as an excuse to say we don’t have time to pray, when we’ve got hours and hours and hours of television, social media scrolling, idle, curious literature, and so on. “No time to pray.” The Liturgy of the Hours calls us to cease to do evil and learn to do good—to turn away from that life of self-gratifying self-indulgence, and to voluntarily submit ourselves to this daily discipline. And so the difficulty of it is the value of it. The rigor of it, the constancy of it, is the value of it.
And again, if we approach the Liturgy of the Hours with this right disposition and these right intentions, we won’t be struggling to figure out why it doesn’t click. We’ll understand that it’s difficult because it’s putting to death in us our sin. It’s putting us to death. You could say, “Man, the Liturgy of the Hours is killing me.” That is true. It’s killing us—killing us as sinners—and it’s creating in us a spirit of quietness, a spirit of humility, a spirit of patience, a spirit of self-control. These are all fruits of the Holy Spirit. These are all the marks of salvation. And it’s training us to become saints. It’s making us fit for the service of God’s kingdom. It’s making us fit to do God’s will. We’re learning to obey. We’re learning to follow instructions. We’re learning to do what someone else tells us to do, when they tell us to do it, how they tell us to do it. That’s what we need. We need to be disciplined. We need all of our wild, selfish, impulsive behavior to be mortified, to be put to death. And that’s what the Liturgy of the Hours does.
The limits of fasting and almsgiving
So when we think about how we are going to live a penitential life—are we going to fast? Sure, you can fast. But the problem with fasting is that we have to work. A mother has to nurse her child. A man has to go and do physical labor. So we can’t starve ourselves and then just spite everyone else. We can’t spite our bosses or our coworkers or our own families. A mother can’t spite her infant. So fasting has to be limited. We can’t just starve ourselves and lie in bed like we’re in some kind of clinic with some crazy supervised fasting regimen. We can’t do that. We have to eat, because we have to work. A mother has to eat because she has to produce milk for a child. So fasting is limited.
Almsgiving: we can’t just go give everything away. It’s got to be governed by reason. We’ve still got to practice justice. Even in our mercy, there still has to be justice. A wife can’t just take her husband’s money and start doling it out in the streets to strangers and say, “Oh, look how merciful I am.” We have to be just in order to be generous. So we’ve got to do our work. We’ve got to pay all of our obligations—pay our bills, pay our debts. And we can’t even start talking about almsgiving until we actually have money in our hand that’s actually our money. And by the time the costs of life are provided for, especially if we have families to take care of, there’s not a whole lot of money left for almsgiving. So our almsgiving is also limited.
And many Catholics, I think, torment themselves all the time trying to figure out how they’re going to eat less and give away more. And as they do this, they ignore prayer as a means of penance. They ignore it. They think of prayer as something else. They think, “Oh, prayer is when I spend my quiet time with Jesus.” They try to make it like it’s this fun, romantic activity between them and Jesus, and they just love it so much, and it’s fun and it’s good and it’s comfy: “I cuddle up on my couch with my blanket and my coffee and I read my—” That’s really not the idea of prayer that’s taught to us by the Church and practiced by religious. Prayer can be penitential. And the Liturgy of the Hours provides us with the approved means of offering penitential prayer. So we’re not just going off on our own like crazy people, inventing our own prayers. We’re using the approved system of prayers, and we’re committing to it as a penitential act.
And the reason why it’s difficult is because it’s penitential. And the reason why it’s valuable is because it’s difficult. Not just randomly difficult—not just hitting myself in the face with a book for an hour. It’s difficult for the right reasons. It’s attacking the real problems. It’s given to us by our true spiritual director, the Church, as an approved instrument of mortification, of penance, of perfection. And that’s actually what the Liturgy of the Hours is for.
Clothed and in our right minds
And so we can see that the Liturgy of the Hours leads us to perfection. It sanctifies us. It disciplines us. It corrects us. It orders our will. It beats down our will into its proper place.
It’s like when Jesus heals a demon-possessed man. You’ve got this crazy, foaming maniac, and Jesus casts the evil spirit out of him, and then we read that he’s seated next to Christ, clothed and in his right mind. He’s just made normal. He becomes normal again. He’s not this crazy, demon-possessed maniac anymore. And that’s what we need. We need the same thing. We need to have all the evil spirits, all the evil influences, all of the sinful habits and dispositions—we need to have all of that driven out of us. We need to be brought back to being normal, to be clothed and in our right minds. And that’s what the Liturgy of the Hours does to us. It makes us normal. It puts us back in our proper place.
And that’s what’s difficult about it. That’s what people don’t like about it. The more individualistic you are, the more impulsive you are, the more you will hate it—and that’s why you need it. And you should embrace it as a lifesaver, and realize: “This is what I need. This is the solution to my problems. This is the medicine for my sin. This disciplined life of prayer is actually what I need to save my soul, to sanctify my life, and to make me a saint. This is what I need.” The Liturgy of the Hours can make us perfect.
Kneading truth into our souls
Now combine that with everything else. And there’s one thing I haven’t said—and I want to move quickly, because I’m over an hour here. The whole content of the Liturgy of the Hours is truth. And so we are immersing ourselves in truth, kneading truth into our souls—reciting and reciting and reciting, just kneading the truth into our souls, perfecting our intellect. The Liturgy of the Hours perfects our intellect. The Liturgy of the Hours perfects our will. The Liturgy of the Hours makes us perfect. And that’s why it’s offered to us by the Church as the official prayer of the Church: not to entertain us, but to sanctify us.
And now think of adding to that the Liturgy of the Mass, and it just becomes richer and better, and harder and better. Add to that the Rosary—it becomes richer and better and harder. It becomes more penitential, and we become more perfect. And that’s what I think will make the Liturgy of the Hours click for us.
Ratcheting up, little by little
Now, before I finish, I want to say that we’re not asked or expected to pray the whole thing. That just may not be possible. It’s like fasting and almsgiving: what we can do, in a real sense, is limited. Yes, you could be lazy and make excuses. And we could say, “You should have prayed Morning Prayer today. You could have. You chose not to. You should have prayed Evening Prayer tonight. You chose to watch the news instead. You chose to put Monday Night Football on. You could have prayed Night Prayer tonight.” And you see how—man, that’s challenging. This is asking me to submit my whole life to prayer and worship. That’s penitential, man.
But there is a realistic inability to do everything. We have to work. That’s justice. We have to work. We have to honor our parents. We may have elderly parents who need help. For me, I get a phone call and it’s my mother; she needs to go to the hospital. Well, everything’s off that night. I’m going to the hospital, and I’ll be there for four hours. That stuff comes up. It’s out of our control. That’s real life. But the question is: What is really out of our control? And even more importantly, what is in our control? That’s what we need to ask ourselves.
And you see, the Liturgy of the Hours provides for everything. So you could say, “Well, you know what? I think I can pray Morning Prayer every day.” Great. You can do that. The Church provides for that. You can sanctify that first hour of your day. That’s great. You’re more perfect than you were yesterday if you do that.
And then you can say, “You know what? I think that if I put my phone away after nine o’clock, and I don’t look at my phone after nine o’clock, I can pray Night Prayer and get to bed early.” And so you can start praying Night Prayer. Great.
And then you say, “You know, in my car I can use the Divine Office app, and I can pray Evening Prayer while I’m in my car.” It’s not the best thing. It’s not perfect. But it’s a move in the right direction. Great. So now you’re up to three.
And then you can say, “You know what? I have time at lunch. I’m sitting there eating a sandwich. There’s no reason why I can’t pray Daytime Prayer, which only takes ten minutes. I can pray Midday Prayer while I’m having lunch.” And then the Office of Readings: “Well, anytime that I’m looking for something to read, why can’t I just recite the Office of Readings and read the readings?”
And little by little, I can ratchet up this life and bring my whole life into order—into subjection to the Liturgy of the Hours. Now, again, that’s very, very difficult. But it’s possible. And remember, the Gospel is that God not only forgives our sins, but also gives us grace to be perfect. And so we should be praying for God’s help to keep ratcheting up this life.
If you know this illustration of the ratchet—just ratcheting something, click by click, inch by inch—it keeps it tight. We can tighten it a little bit more, then bring the ratchet back, and it doesn’t unravel. It stays put. And then we can click it again, and we can just keep incrementally ratcheting that thing up, little by little. That’s how a sanctified life works. We need to ratchet our life up, ratchet our devotion up, little by little. And the Liturgy of the Hours allows us to do that. It provides us with everything we need for the most perfect monastic life—a totally contemplative life. And it also gives us the simplest starting points. And it provides us with a system of penitential acts.
Offering the Hours
And if we follow the advice of wise men, we can say that the greater part of our penance consists in the recitation of the Divine Office. And that’s why we do it. We don’t do it for fun. We don’t do it because we think every Psalm is so cool and interesting. We don’t do it because the hymns are so awesome—many of them are terrible. But that’s not why we do it. We do it because the Hours perfect the intellect by kneading truth into us—and when I say kneading, I’m talking about kneading like you knead bread. They knead truth into our souls by this constant repetition, where all the content is true. And they perfect our wills by destroying in us everything that’s bad and training us in everything that’s good. And so they provide for our perfection.
And if we look at the Liturgy of the Hours as this amazing instrument of perfection, this means of penitential work, I think we can approach it with the right attitude. Our expectations will be right. We can go into it with the right attitude, with the right expectations, with the right intentions. And we can offer it as we should.
We can offer it as we do in the Morning Offering, which I hope you pray: “We offer all of our works and prayers of this day.” This is my penitential offering. I’m offering these prayers—all the sacrifice that I need to make, all the difficult Psalms I need to just push my way through, all the things that I don’t understand that I need to study and figure out, or ask for help with. I offer all of this. And if we look to the intentions: we offer it for the intentions of Christ’s Sacred Heart. We offer it in reparation for our sins. We offer it for the intentions of our relatives and friends. We offer it for the intentions of the Holy Father—all united to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass offered everywhere in the world. We unite the Liturgy of the Hours, our daily prayers, to the Liturgy of the Mass, and make that our offering to God. Tell me that’s not beautiful.
And the more difficult it is, the more precious it is. The more sacrificial it is, the more valuable it is. That’s what makes the Liturgy of the Hours click. And that’s how we can use the Liturgy of the Hours as a means of seeking perfection, and actually live according to our Lord’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. We can pray penitentially, sincerely, and we can offer that prayer knowing that it’s acceptable, because the Church tells us that it’s acceptable. And so that’s how the Liturgy of the Hours can make us perfect.
Closing
I hope that’s helpful. As I said, this is a concept that I’ve wanted to talk about. It’s still kind of raw in my mind. I just made my perpetual promises as a Dominican, and I’m really digging into the Liturgy of the Hours, because this is my life. And as I do so, I find so many helpful things in my Dominican formation study materials and resources. And for some reason this one quote—that the greater part of our penance consists in the recitation of the Divine Office—stood out to me, and I said, “Man, that’s got to be something I focus on. That’s what will motivate me to pray daily, to pray without ceasing.” Not that it’s fun or cool, but that it’s difficult and it’s penitential and it’s perfecting me. That’s why I need to do it.
So I hope that’s helpful. If there’s anything else that you’d like to talk about, I’m always available. You can send me a message or a comment. I’d prefer that you send me an email; you can write to me at mail@classicalliberalarts.com. That’ll get to me. But if you’d like to talk about this, or if there are any other thoughts of yours that are stirred up by this topic, I’d love to talk about it. I’m working to understand this more and more, because I know the Liturgy of the Hours is such a treasure, and I want to make the most of it. So if there’s anything you’d like to share, I’d love to hear it.
I hope that’s helpful. God bless.