An Ancient Practice Finds Modern Popularity

by Donna Freitas, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 11/1/2006

Between wifi, the Treo, and the Blackberry, it is easy for days to become a perpetual electronic blur. Perhaps this modern-day illness of living without structuring our time— with periods devoted to work and rest, day and night, office and home—accounts for the popularity of Phyllis Tickle’s trilogy The Divine Hours (Doubleday), which introduces readers to the Benedictine Rule of fixed-hour prayer from morning through evening. Now Tickle ventures into the darkness with The Night Offices (Oxford, Nov.), which includes prayers for midnight, the wee hours of morning and dawn.

“Back in the ‘60s when I began this discipline, one felt self-conscious if caught praying—it was like being caught ‘religious,’” said Tickle, who has been a lay Benedictine for almost 40 years now. “Fixed-hour prayer gets conspicuous, so I learned to hide it. I probably celebrated the offices in the ladies room more than any other Christian.”

Both The Divine Hours and The Night Offices are prayer manuals for the “liturgically challenged” said Tickle, who was PW’s first religion editor. Tickle divides The Night Offices into the twelve months with prayers for each weekday. Her intent is to make fixed-hour prayer accessible for those who hunger to return to this type of ritual. “I’m inordinately fond of the midnight office,” Tickle explained. “The midnight hour is the moment that comes nearest to being a rift in time, when the soul can briefly escape from today and tomorrow.”

Eamon Duffy’s Marking the Hours: English People & their Prayers 1240-1570 (Yale, Nov.) is not a practical prayer manual, but instead an engaging historical exploration into the many surviving Books of Hours (over 800 from England) from the Middle Ages—especially the scribbles and lovingly penned ideas, messages and even correspondence in their margins. The manuscripts are not only beautiful, but are also “an instantly recognizable symbol of recollectedness, interiority and prayer,” writes Duffy.

The Books of Hours held many attractions for Duffy. “The role of women in the commissioning and use of these books, the glimpses of intimacy in the messages people left in them and the ways in which the books were used as gift exchanges, as well as the impact of official religious change on people’s private lives are all of interest,” Duffy said.“And I was simply struck by how many of them had marginalia, added material, glued in pictures and so on, and I soon realized that these were the traces of lives.”

Whether readers seek to re-ritualize their days or step back in time through the many illustrations of English illuminated manuscripts, both Tickle and Duffy provide satisfying windows into the ritual of fixed-hour prayer.