CHAPTERS 15: Concerning the Occasions When ‘Alleluia’ Should be Said

Then from holy Easter until Pentecost let the Alleluia be said without exception—with the psalms and with the responses.  However, on all Sundays outside of Lent, let the canticles, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, and None be said with Alleluia. Let Vespers be said with the antiphon; but let the responses never be said with Alleluia (except from Easter to Pentecost).

Saint Benedict devotes a whole chapter to this one word: Alleluia.

During Easter especially, the monks sing Alleluia like it was going out of style.  We sing it during the opening prayers and during the psalm responses, in hymns and before the gospel, at all the hours of the Divine Office and even before we go to bed at night.  There’s Alleluia all over the place.  It’s like a big truck of Alleluia overturned in our driveway and we’ve been swimming in it ever since.  “Of all the Christian mysteries,” says Saint Leo the Great, “we know that the paschal mystery is the most important.”  So we respond with the Alleluia, which is our song of triumph and joy.

            There is time, of course, for meditating on the sufferings of Our Lord.  After all, Saint Paul instructs us always to keep our eyes fixed on Christ crucified.  And to be sure, no Christian church—no Christian home—is complete without a crucifix.  But adoration, thanksgiving, praise, and blessing are what it’s all about, and these, Saint John the evangelist tells us, will be dissolved into a single expression of religious devotion:  “I heard what sounded like the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven saying: "Alleluia!  Salvation, glory, and might belong to our God…then a second time: "Alleluia!” …then the twenty-four elders and the four living creatures fell down and worshiped God who sat on the throne, saying, "Amen. Alleluia." …and a voice coming from the throne said: "Praise our God, all you his servants, and you who revere him, small and great." And I heard something like the sound of a great multitude or the sound of rushing water or mighty peals of thunder, as they all said: "Alleluia!”

This is why Holy Mother Church repeats this word throughout her liturgy.  She would have us all be living Alleluias—souls fundamentally ordered to God—obsessively, compulsively God-centered in everything we do.  So the monks repeat this Alleluia again and again throughout the Easter season.  Then we repeat it some more when it’s not the Easter season.  We repeat it and repeat and repeat it until our whole life becomes a hymn of praise to the glory of the Father.

CHAPTER 14: Concerning Saints Days

         On the feasts of the saints and on all solemnities, let the night office be performed as it would be on a Sunday; except that the psalms, the antiphons, and the lessons proper for that day should be said.

I used to worry that being a monk would be boring.  I was wrong.  In fact, I often wish it were more boring than it is.  Even so, the prayers can feel repetitive at times, so the Church in Her wisdom has arranged the liturgical year in such a way that it is punctuated by feasts, fasts, seasons, and solemnities, all of which are accompanied by special devotions and patterns of prayer.  So a ‘normal’ day in the life of a monk turns out to be rather uncommon.  That’s actually pretty great though, because it keeps us on our toes and focused on what we’re doing, which is, after all, the Work of God.

The important thing to remember is that venerating the saints is a way of celebrating the mystery of Christ’s Body.  It is a way to acknowledge that we are all in this together—we, the living members of the Church, but also the deceased members of the Church together with all those who have made it to Heaven.  Traditionally, we refer to these three groups as the Church Militant (us living folk), the Church Suffering (the folks in Purgatory), and the Church Triumphant (the saints in Heaven).

In this way, we remind ourselves of the consoling truth that we are never alone.   We don’t fight this battle in isolation, nor are we saved in isolation, nor do we enter Heaven in isolation.  In other words, it’s not enough merely “to accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior.”  We humans are social beings.  God Himself is a social being.  We need the support of all our brothers and sisters in Christ—the living ones as well as the dead, who intercede for us even now.[1]

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[1] Here are some of my favorite, though lesser-known saints:  Saint Hilarius, Saint Mamas, Saint Blathmac, Saint Radbod, Saint Mungo, Saint Olav the Thick, Saint Wigbert, Saint Wilibald, Saints Boris and Geb, Saint Lando, Saint Rudolph, Saint Barfhion, and my all-time favorite, Saint Tron.  You can go with Anthony or Francis, of course, but I like to think that, since these saints don’t have all that many fans, they’ve got more time to spend listening to me…

CHAPTER 13: How the Office of Lauds is to be Sung on Weekdays

      No community is without friction.  Therefore the morning and evening office should never end without the Lord’s Prayer.  The superior himself should say it in front of everyone so that the brethren will be reminded of their promise when they say “Forgive us as we forgive others.”  In this way, they will cleanse themselves of such failings.

      Saint Benedict insists on saying the Our Father at the beginning and at the end of the day.  Because when you’ve got this many guys living together, there’s bound to be disagreements—even very serious ones.  We need, therefore, to remind ourselves to forgive one another before the day even starts.  Then we need to do it again at the end of the day to be sure we’ve lived up to that promise.  This is an easy monkish practice for anyone to adopt, and I highly recommend it.  As Saint Paul says, “Do not let the sun set on your anger” (Ephesians 4:26).  At the end of the day, take an inventory of all the people who have angered you, and forgive them. Then you can go to bed.
      Mind you, forgiveness doesn’t mean hiding your anger or covering it up with pleasant feelings.  Forgiveness is an act of the will, so whether you feel like it or not, you have in fact forgiven your enemies the moment you ask God for the strength to do so.
      A few years ago, I was asked to preach at my best friend’s wedding.  I find it fairly easy preaching to strangers, because they don’t know what a hypocrite I am.  But my friends know about all the trouble I’ve caused.  It’s hard to think of anything serious to tell them.  So I did what I always do when I’m running low on wisdom: I went looking for the oldest monk in the monastery.  I found him asleep in a chair in the Calefactory (that’s monkish for living room).  “Wake up, Father,” I said, “I need something to tell my buddy at his wedding.”  Father Patrick opened his eyes, looked around the room for a moment, then said, “Tell him that there will come a day when he will want the window open and she will want the window closed.”  Then he went back to sleep.
      It took me a while to figure out what he meant, but the longer I live in community, the more I get it.  You see, when it comes to living with someone, everything boils down to forgiveness.  “Love is patient and kind,” says Saint Paul, “it is not arrogant or rude. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things" (1 Corinthians 13:4).  So true love is more about endurance than it is about chocolates and teddy bears.  We prove our love at precisely those moments when the people we love test our patience, put a strain on our kindness…tempt us to anger.  “Love,” says Saint Paul, “Is not irritable,” but how would we know this if the ones we loved were not so irritating?  Love is truly love—and not just infatuation—when it proves itself in the crucible of suffering.

CHAPTER 12: Concerning the Office of Lauds

  Let Psalm 66 be said without an antiphon, drawing it out a little, that all may arrive for Psalm 50, which is to be said with an Alleluia. After this let two other psalms be said according to custom.  Then let the psalms of praise follow; then one lesson from the Apostle, the response, the Ambrosian hymn, the verse, the canticle from the Gospel, the litany, and it is finished.

The name, ‘Lauds’ comes from the Latin laus meaning ‘praise’ or ‘glory’.    Once the night is over and the sun has risen, the monks come back to church and sing another set of psalms.  We do it right after dawn to celebrate the victory of light over darkness—the rising of the Sun (and the rising of the Son).  Remember that the office of Vigils began with “How many are my foes, O Lord.  How many are rising up against me” (Psalm 3).  But Lauds begins on a completely different note with Psalm 66: “Shout for joy to God, all the earth!  Sing to the glory of his name!”

The sun has risen.  The battle against evil is won. 

But the Rule of Saint Benedict is no feel-good self-help book.  No “I’m okay.  You’re okay” here.  Sure, Benedict wants his monks to be happy, but he wants real happiness, not the lollipops-and-glitter happiness that you see on TV; because there is no true happiness without penitence.  Until we have a really accurate understanding of our sinfulness, until we recognize the depth of our unworthiness, we can’t possibly appreciate the miracle of our redemption.

And this is where guilt comes in.  Folks are always criticizing Christians for their sense of guilt as though it were something that keeps us repressed and miserable.  But I’m not convinced that guilt is such a bad thing.  After all, if you do something bad, you should feel guilty about it, just as when you see something evil, you should feel angry about it.  Perhaps our parents’ generation spent too much time feeling guilty about stuff, but I don’t think that’s our problem.  We may indeed have problems with low self-esteem (the popularity of reality television suggests as much), but I have to wonder if that’s because we don’t feel guilty enough.  Think about it: why do you feel guilty when you do something bad?  Because you have done something unworthy of yourself.  Get rid of that guilt, and what do you have?  Someone who does something bad and is okay with it because that’s the sort of person he is.[1]

At Lauds (as at Mass), we start off our celebration by first acknowledging our sinfulness and unworthiness—by coming face-to-face with our guilt—only then can we start the party.  Why?  Because we know that all of creation and life itself is a gift.  We doesn’t deserve any of it, and we doesn’t have to earn it either.  So we sings, “Shout for joy to God, all the earth!  Sing to the glory of His name!”

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[1] One proviso: There’s a difference between guilt (feeling bad for doing a bad thing) and shame (the self-punishment and self-hatred that comes from obsessing over it).  When you feel guilty, you say to yourself, “I did a bad thing.”  When you feel shame, you say to yourself, “I’m a bad person.”   Guilt is a good thing.  Shame—of the sort I’ve described—is not.

CHAPTER 11: How the Office of Vigils is to be Said on Sundays

      The monks should wake up even earlier for the night office on Sunday.  And this should be done the same way in all seasons.  After the usual lessons and psalms, three canticles should be chanted with Alleluia; once the Abbot has given his blessing, four passages from the New Testament should be read, followed by the Te Deum.  Then the abbot should read a lesson from the Gospel, while the rest of the community stands in fear and trembling.
      If—God forbid—the brethren should rise too late, some of the lessons or the responses may have to be shortened. But try to be sure that this never happens. If it does, let the monk responsible make due satisfaction to God in the oratory.

    Saint Benedict only foresees one occasion when the monks should cut short the Sunday prayer: when, by some accident, they fail to wake up on time.  And whoever is at fault needs to make an apology to everyone in church—including God.  Prayer, you see, is fundamentally an act of justice.  We owe God our prayer.  It’s not something we do for ourselves (though of course there’s a lot to be gained), and it certainly isn’t a favor we do for God (though of course it pleases Him).  When we neglect our prayers, we are actually cheating God out of something that is His due.  Truly, Jesus has a right to a personal encounter with each of us.  And the privileged time and place for that is Sunday at church.
    Obedience, however, shouldn’t be our only motive for going to mass on Sunday.  Our true reason for being there is gratitude.  The Eucharist is God’s gift to us, and the church is the most powerful locus of prayer at our disposal.  In fact, those who really understand this make a point of going to church more than once a week.  They realize that, since humans are built for prayer, the more we pray, the more powerfully human we become.  Moreover, when we pray together in Christ, we are ‘no longer strangers and guests, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the capstone.” (Ephesians 2:19)
    When Saint Benedict reflects on how his monks should say their Sunday prayers, he uses this unusual phrase: cum honore et tremor—“with honor and trembling.”  Benedict wants his monks to feel the importance of the Sabbath.  Sure, we’re obliged to be there on pain of our immortal souls, but more importantly, we are privileged to be there.  We are honored to be there, and we tremble at the magnitude of that honor.  Of course, that’s hard to do when you’re sleepy or the music doesn’t suit your taste or the congregation is obnoxious and lukewarm.  At times like these, we have to try to see with the eyes of faith.  Whenever I want to get psyched up about going to mass, I reread this quote from the Anglican monk, Gregory Dix:
    “For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the government of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to superstition because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna…for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God" (The Shape of the Liturgy, p.744).
     Is that awesome or what?

CHAPTER 10: How Vigils is to Be Said During the Summer

      From Easter until November, let the whole psalmody be sung just as we described it in the previous chapter.  However, because the summer nights are shorter the readings from the book should be omitted.  Instead, let one reading from the Old Testament be said from memory. Let a short response follow this, and let all the rest be performed as described earlier; namely, that never fewer than twelve psalms be said at the night office.

      In this chapter, we see again how Saint Benedict is willing to make concessions to human weakness.  The summer nights are short.  The monks will need their sleep.  And even if they are the “Spiritual Special Forces of the Church,” still no good can come of mistreating the body.  Our lives need to be suited to prayer, but without a certain amount of rest, comfort, and nourishment (and I might add beauty), real contemplative prayer is impossible.  As much as Benedict loves the liturgy, he agrees to cut it short for the sake of our health.
      There is, of course, a larger issue at stake here as well.  Human beings have a tendency to go to extremes, especially when we get excited about something.  In the spiritual life, this can be especially dangerous because so much more is at stake, and if the Devil can’t get us to do the wrong thing, he’ll try to get us to do the right thing in the wrong way.  In monk circles, we call this “the fervor of novices”—that tendency of rookies to want to do everything straight away.  I have a similar problem with my rugby players.  They always want to scrimmage on the first day of practice.  But until you have learned to tackle correctly, it’s downright dangerous to play the game.  And this holds true for prayer as well.
      The day I entered Saint Louis Abbey as a postulant, I swore to myself that I would never again have a lustful thought. That resolution lasted all of fifteen minutes, so I decided to postpone it until my novitiate.  When that time came, however, I found that I was still bothered by the same lustful thoughts.  I had been reading a biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, and I came across a passage that said when he had lustful thoughts, he used to go roll around in a rose bush; so I said to myself, if Saint Francis can do it, so can I.  And I went out into the garden behind the monastery and jumped into one of our rose bushes.
      Unfortunately, I had failed to take into account three important differences between Saint Francis and me:  First, that Saint Francis jumped into a wild rose bush, which has considerably smaller thorns than the cultivated variety; second, that Saint Francis was naked when he did it, so he didn’t get his clothes tangled up; and third, that Saint Francis was a saint.  Rolling around in a rose bush might be a good thing for a saint to do, but for the rest of us, it’s kind of stupid.
      To make a long story short, I got stuck in that rose bush and spent a very uncomfortable hour and a half trying to get out—then another awkward twenty minutes or so trying to explain myself to the monk that found me there.  Once my novicemaster had finished laughing at me, he explained to me about the fervor of novices and added that in the future, I would do well to check with him before attempting any further feats of asceticism.  Of course, I ignored that advice as well, and wound up giving myself ulcers by fasting too much.  But that’s another story.
        What I learned from this particular humiliation was that prayer, like any human endeavor, requires practice and moderation.  It also requires a certain amount of discipline, and if you really want to make progress and avoid hurting yourself, you do well to find a spiritual director—someone old and wise enough to let you know when you’re selling yourself short, or just as importantly, when you’ve gone too far.

CHAPTER 9: Concerning the Psalms at Vigils

      Having first said the verse: “God, come to my assistance; Lord make haste to help me,” the monks should then say, “Lord open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise” (Ps 50[51]:17). Next the third psalm and the Gloria are added. After this the ninety fourth psalm with its antiphon should be chanted. Then follow it with a hymn, and six more psalms…

      Saint Benedict really loves the psalms.  He says that monks should pray all one hundred fifty of them as often as possible.  In fact, in the old days (and by ‘old’ I mean fifteen hundred years ago) some monks used to say the entire lot of them every single day.  At my monastery, it takes us two weeks, but we repeat several of the psalms daily.

      These short prayers from the Old Testament are especially important because they are the prayer of the Church.  Along with the Eucharist, they are the most comprehensive, most perfect, most beautiful prayers we can offer to God.  They span the entire breadth of human spirituality, from gratitude and joy to loneliness and rage.  Moreover, they are the prayers that Jesus himself said throughout his ministry, the prayers he said on the cross, and they are the prayers that he continues to say to His Father.  So any time you want to be most intimately united to Jesus and His Body, the Church, all you have to do is pick up the psalms and start reading. As Saint Athanasius wrote in a letter to his friend, Marcellinus, “All Scripture teaches virtue and true faith, but the psalms give us a complete picture of the spiritual life… Therefore it is possible for us to find in the psalms not only the reflection of our own soul’s state, together with rules and examples for all life’s twists and turns, but also the perfect words to please the Lord for each of life’s occasions, words both of repentance and of thankfulness.”

      Then let the Abbot give the blessing. Once everyone is seated, let three lessons be read alternately by the brethren from the book on the reading stand.  In between each reading, let three responses be said. Let the inspired books of both the Old and the New Testaments be read at the night offices, as the commentaries of our most eminent Catholic Fathers.  After these three lessons with their responses, let six other psalms follow, to be sung with Alleluia. After these let the lessons from the Apostle follow…
     
      Notice the scrupulous attention Saint Benedict pays to the arrangement of the psalms, responses, lessons, commentaries, meditations and readings.  There’s some debate among smart people as to where exactly he got all this.  Clearly part of the arrangement comes from the pre-Christian synagogue, where psalms and readings alternated with blessings, petitions and so forth.  Other parts appear to have originated in Rome and Milan.  He seems to have adapted other parts from the Rule of Saint Basil, and still others from the writings of Saint Athanasius and the desert monks of earlier centuries.  One way or another, Benedict found a balance between the rigor of the Desert Fathers and the elegance of Rome.
      You can, of course, find this pattern reflected in the layout of the Liturgy of the Word during Mass, with its two readings, responsorial psalm, and gospel.  It is an ancient and very powerful rhythm of worship, which progresses from Old to New Testament, linking them in such a way that each enriches the other.  And since the world is so big and so full of monasteries, you can be assured that at any given moment there is a monastic community somewhere praying in this way.
       Go ahead, then.
       Join them.