I said that the basic idea behind the Divine Office is common sense. We need to step back a little from what we are doing, from our emotional engagements, from our mental associations. We need to get our heads above the water and to breath. We are like people being held under water. We get lost in the world and our activities. The Divine Office was developed by the Church, possibly by analogy with the Jewish hours of prayer in the Temple, but these themselves were based on common sense: the need for prayer at regular times in the day to interrupt the momentum of life. And that leads to another question: how should we usually pray? And here I wish to speak about the Divine Office. The answer is, I suggest, to pray as you always do pray, but with more fervour, more humility, more openness to whatever God will grant you, more willingness to accept His Will. Now, after that preamble, we come back to the question of how to pray in times of special need. But the Our Father forms a pattern or template for all prayers. I have written about this elsewhere, and shall not repeat it here. He then taught a form of prayer which was carefully structured. The Lord said to intend what we pray, and to pray with all sincerity. Our Lord indicated as much when he taught His disciples how to pray the Our Father. If I have seen that I am weak, and that I need strength, my prayer is more likely to be similar to that of the repentant tax gather, rather than like that of the self-congratulatory Pharisee of Luke 18. ![]() That is, the very fact of having a great need for divine aid may lead us to pray from a truer, more sincere, less selfish place in ourselves. I don’t doubt for one moment that such prayers and novenas can be of an unusual force in one’s life, and bring extraordinary graces, but it is not – I venture to think – because of the form of the prayer, or because a particular saint has some special power, but because of the urgency with which they made that prayer or kept that novena. ![]() From time to time people ask me about some form of prayer in difficult circumstances: they sometimes want a sort of “super prayer.” They have heard, for example, that a particular prayer or a particular novena is of special efficacy.
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