Today’s Chapter: Our Lady, A ‘Living Prayer’
Chapter 18: In what order the Psalms are to be said (vv. 1-6)
First of all let this verse be said: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me,” and the Gloria, followed by the hymn proper to each Hour. At Prime on Sunday four parts of the hundred and eighteenth Psalm are to be said. At the other Hours, that is, Tierce, Sext and None, let three parts of the same Psalm be said. At Prime on Monday let three Psalms be said, namely, the first, second and sixth and so in the same way every day until Sunday let three Psalms be said at Prime in order, up to the nineteenth; the ninth and seventeenth, however, being divided into two Glorias. It will thus come about that at the Night-Office on Sunday we shall always begin with the twentieth Psalm.
As we begin the last of Saint Benedict’s chapters on the arrangement of the Divine Office, we give here Madre Cànopi’s comments on these chapters:
After the three fundamental chapters dedicated to obedience, silence, and humility, in which Saint Benedict shows the monk the ascetical way of daily conversion, now there opens before us the boundless horizon of prayer, which is both the support and the reward of asceticism.
To this important theme he dedicates a large section of his Rule: Chapters 8-20; in addition, Chapters 47 and 52 and frequent allusions in other chapters, with reference to the various subjects treated, as in the case of work, of hospitality, of the welcoming of novices, of fraternal correction, of journeys, etc.
In all these passages we glimpse, as in a watermark, the figure of Mary, who, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, lived according to the dispositions proposed by Saint Benedict in the Rule for maintaining the climate of prayer. For this reason Mary can be considered by the monk as the model to look to in order to learn the ‘art of prayer’, so as to become like her not only a ‘person who prays’, but a ‘living prayer’. For Mary is, first of all, praise to God, Who willed her to be so beautiful, perfect, immaculate. A masterpiece always honours the artist who made it!
In Chapter 8-18 the holy father Benedict establishes a true and proper lex orandi, tracing a very detailed set of norms: this reveals to us his love for prayer and his concern that nothing be left to improvisation, because that would not give praise to God, nor help the one praying.
The Liturgy of the Hours—with its psalms, canticles, readings, and orations which characterise the days and the hours, the times of the year and the individual feasts—moulds the monk’s existence on the chant of the praise of God and on the memory of sacred history, so that his life presents itself as one single great musical score, with those variations of tones and rhythms which constitute its beauty and with that harmony which actualises and transmits in a way never seen before the mysteries of faith and of salvation.
Mary wove her entire existence with prayer in unceasing dedication of herself to God. The Magnificat, a canticle laced with the golden notes of the Sacred Scripture, gushed from the strings of her heart, which, touched by the fingers of the Spirit, made to resound externally the harmonies of that silent and uninterrupted colloquy which the Virgin held with God, even while she was intent on all the humblest and simplest household tasks. (Anna Maria Cànopi, Nel ‘Sì’ di Maria, translation by a Benedictine monk, pp. 52-53)
While the Magnificat is the most obvious place where we encounter Our Lady in the Divine Office, she is in fact always near to us. Since Mary was born clara ex stirpe David [of the bright stock of David], as the Liturgy of her Nativity sings, and raised, according to ancient Christian tradition, in the precincts of the Temple, we can be confident that the songs of her forefather David were very dear to her and that she would have committed them to memory.
Surely this was the case with the longest of the Psalms, Psalm 118, whose privileged place in the weekly cursus Saint Benedict describes today. Approached from a purely rationalistic standpoint, Psalm 118 can seem terribly repetitive and uninteresting. Prayed with the heart of a lover, it is instead an expression of a love for God which causes us to gush forth in ceaseless praise for every utterance of His mouth, every indication of His holy will. As we begin the Little Hours each week with the words Beati immaculati in via (‘Blessed are those spotless in the way’, Ps. 118:1), we should do so in union with the Immaculate One, asking her for the grace to enter into the sentiments of her Immaculate Heart and those of the Heart of her Son, the Son of David, to Whom she was so perfectly united.
