Offer up your priestly prayers for peace

By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi
Rome

As adults, elders, priests, we need, as Scripture puts it, "to make prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, for ourselves and for the people." All of us, lay and cleric alike, need to offer up priestly prayer each day.

But how do we do that? How do we pray priestly prayer? We pray as priests, as Jesus prayed in the 17th chapter of John's Gospel, every time we sacrifice self-interest for the good of others. That's priestly prayer in its widest sense.

However, we pray that prayer, formally and sacramentally, whenever we pray the prayer of the Church, namely, the Eucharist or the Divine Office. This kind of prayer, called liturgy, is what keeps incarnate the priestly prayer of Christ.

In priestly prayer, we pray not just for ourselves, nor ideally by ourselves, but we pray as a microcosm of the whole world, even as we pray for the whole world.

In this kind of prayer we lift up our voices to God, not as a private offering, but in such a way as to give a voice to the earth itself. In essence, when we pray at the Eucharist or at the Divine Office, we are saying this:

"Lord, God, I stand before you as a microcosm of the earth itself, to give it voice: See in my openness, the world's openness, in my infidelity, the world's infidelity; in my sincerity, the world's sincerity, in my hypocrisy, the world's hypocrisy; in my generosity, the world's generosity, in my selfishness, the world's selfishness; in my attentiveness, the world's attentiveness, in my distraction, the world's distraction; in my desire to praise you, the world's desire to praise you, and in my self-preoccupation, the world's forgetfulness of you.

"For I am of the earth, a piece of earth, and the earth opens or closes to you through my body, my soul, and my voice. I am your priest on earth.

"I offer to you all the pagan beauties, pleasures and joys of this life, even as I stand with you under the cross, affirming that the one who is excluded from earthly pleasure is the cornerstone of the community. I offer you the strong and arrogant, along with the weak and gentle of heart, asking you to bless both and to stretch my heart so that it can, like you, hold and bless everything that is. I offer you both the wonders and the pains of this world, your world."

To pray like this is to pray liturgically, as a priest. And we pray like this each time we go to the Eucharist or when we, with others or alone, pray the Divine Office of the Church. It is particularly this latter prayer, the Divine Office (also called Breviary or Liturgy of the Hours), that is available daily as the priestly prayer for those of us who are not ordained ministers in the Church.

And this is especially true for two of those liturgical hours, Lauds (Morning Prayer) and Vespers (Evening Prayer). They, unlike the other hours, which are more the particular domain of monks and professional contemplatives, are the ordinary priestly prayer of the laity.

And what is important in praying them is to remember that these are not prayers that we say for ourselves, nor indeed prayers whose formulae we need personally to find meaningful or relevant.

Unlike private prayer and contemplation where we should change methods whenever praying becomes dry or sterile, Lauds and Vespers are prayers of the universal Church that are in essence intended to be communal and priestly. They don't have to be relevant for our private lives. We pray them as elders, as baptized adults, as priests, to invoke God's blessing upon the world.

And whenever we do pray them we take on a universal voice. We are no longer just a private individual praying, but are, in microcosm, the voice, body, and soul of the earth itself, continuing the high priesthood of Christ, offering prayers and entreaties, aloud and in silent tears, to God for the sake of the world.

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