Welcome to daily prayer for Thursday. For Wednesdays and Thursdays between now and Ash Wednesday on February 17, the daily prayer podcast will feature prayer from The Divine Hours, compiled by Phyllis Tickle (and available for purchase in book form.) Because familiarity is a plus with this form of prayer, we’ll use the same daily office for two Wednesdays or two Thursdays in a row.
The Divine Hours, also called The Daily Offices, is the most common form of prayer at intervals through the day, in use for millennia, in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim forms. Though we include one or two short meditative portions in these podcasts, it is a stripped down Divine Hours and that means a series of short portions of Scripture—Psalms, especially—and a few prayers, mostly from the Book of Common Prayer. Each portion begins with a title like, The Greeting, or Request for Presence, or The Refrain. Think of The Divine Hours as a structured conversation between the pray-ers (as a spiritual community) and the divine. The Divine Hours begins with a Call to Prayer followed by The Request for Presence and then The Greeting—as conversations do: let’s go talk to God (the call to prayer); God, is now a good time? (the request for presence); and The Greeting (hello!). Sometimes the pray-er is speaking, as with a Psalm, and sometimes the divine is speaking through inspired words, say from Moses or one the other Prophets, or the words of Jesus. This structured conversation ends, as many conversations do, with a parting blessing, a good-bye until we speak again.
Okay. Let’s give it a go: The Divine Hours for Thursday.
To access the online version of The Divine Hours, they are available day by day on explorefaith.org: http://www.explorefaith.org/prayer/prayer/fixed/pray_the_hours.php