This week brings an added dimension to our monthly features, with a focus on “Liturgy.” The term “liturgy” is related to the Greek term ergos, “work,” and through this connection replaces our monthly category of “Works.” The Greek leitourgia connected laos (“people”) to ergos in a special kind of work, a “public service” associated with offering a variety of services and resources on behalf of the community. In the western Christian tradition, the term came to be applied to worship, to service offered in the church, as distinguished from private devotion. Liturgical life in the church now takes a variety of forms, both sacramental and non-sacramental, and our monthly column is intended to explore this central dimension of experience at the Abbey. This exploration will include seasonal liturgies, liturgical elements, even some of our liturgical history here at Portsmouth.  

Matins reading , prepared for the acolyte for the week

It seemed appropriate to take our inspiration in introducing this column from St. Benedict’s well-known admonition: “First of all, every time you begin a good work, you must pray to him most earnestly to bring it to perfection.” (Rule, Prologue) As all liturgy is fundamentally rooted in prayer, we begin this monthly column by turning to prayer. Specifically, we look this month at the variety of ways in which petitionary prayer is offered here. The Catechism teaches: “The vocabulary of supplication in the New Testament is rich in shades of meaning: ask, beseech, plead, invoke, entreat, cry out, even ‘struggle in prayer.’ Its most usual form, because the most spontaneous, is petition: by prayer of petition we express awareness of our relationship with God. We are creatures who are not our own beginning, not the masters of adversity, not our own last end. We are sinners who as Christians know that we have turned away from our Father. Our petition is already a turning back to him” (Catechism 2629).  

A central locus of the Church’s petitioning and “turning back” to God we may place in “The Universal Prayer” that is taken up in our offering at Mass each Sunday. It is a petitioning that finds its echo throughout the week in the daily conventual Mass. Br. Sixtus Roslevich, Director of Liturgy, is tasked with providing these petitions. He receives input from many sources, and is guided by the publishing house, Faith Catholic in Lansing, Michigan, which produces a small binder that includes weekly petitions. Since 1967, the company has provided resources, now used in many parishes and religious communities, that include prayers and commentaries for daily and weekend Masses, universal prayer opening and closings for the presider, a “focus statement” about the readings, together with the Universal Prayer (petitions). Br. Sixtus supplements or tailors these prayers for our own Sunday petitions, adapting them to our own community. Participants at our Sunday Mass will see the lector receive a large binder in which are found the principal prayers of petition for the week. At our daily morning Mass, the celebrant may read from the smaller binder containing the prayers to be read during the week. The most recent practice has been to either offer a homily at the morning Mass or to turn after a brief meditation on the readings directly to these petitions. 

Binders for Matins and Lauds (below are other binders for the Divine Office); produced by Br. Joseph Byron

 There are, of course, many strands of petitionary prayer woven into the monastic week, and one may consider the Universal Prayer just the conscious capstone of this whole movement of petition. Once one begins to peel the layers of this onion one realizes that accounting for the entirety of these requests is not possible. The monastery’s prayer request page opens with this scriptural quotation: “And this is the confidence which we have in him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us.” (1 John 5:14). Br. Benedict reports that the online page generates 10-15 requests each week, whose intentions are brought to the monastic community prior to Compline. 

To capture some more of the scope of this petitionary spiritual “life-breath” of the community, we offer this limited, partial outline of practices: 

• The monastery maintains the practice of mentioning special requests at evening recreation, which are taken up there as well as in private prayer of the monks. A small bulletin board near the slype reminds monks of some of the latest petitions to keep in prayer. Monks may place here any ongoing or emergency petitions they may have or hear of, which are thus brought to the attention of the monastic community. 

• Some readers may recall that the “roll call” of the day’s deceased brothers and sisters of the English Benedictine Congregation was once offered at each morning conventual Mass. The practice of reading the necrology remains firmly in place, though now it is placed after Lauds. And our readers may be heartened to realize it includes petitions for “all the deceased members, relatives, friends, and benefactors of the English Benedictine Congregation.”

• Each November, our prayers for the deceased take on a visible form, with the placement of a silver box or “casket” on the main altar, containing written slips provided by whoever would like to have their loved ones so remembered. This beautiful and powerful reminder of the departed remains present at the front of the altar for the entire month, beginning with the Commemoration of All Souls. Its contents are taken up in prayer with each Mass.

• The monastic and extended community of the School have maintained a First Friday devotion of adoration, which has included a conscious request to pray for vocations to the monastery. With gratitude we have seen some regeneration within the community, and continue to pray for its growth. 

• A distinctive ongoing petition of the community has been the cause of Dorothy Day, a Benedictine oblate who for many years was connected to the community at Portsmouth. Br. Sixtus notes that the monastery’s oblates recently received an invitation to join 27 other oblate groups in the Dorothy Day Canonization Prayer Network (we will have more on this in upcoming issues). 

• Expanding beyond a technically “liturgical” petition, private devotion becomes visible for all in the church in lit votive candles at the altar of Our Lady, as before the Blessed Sacrament. We see such prayers also in the candles of the Lourdes grotto, all serving as a shared visible expression of our need for God.

Necrology binder, listed by date, showing additions of recently deceased EBC members

The Catechism includes the beautiful reminder: “When we share in God's saving love, we understand that every need can become the object of petition. Christ, who assumed all things in order to redeem all things, is glorified by what we ask the Father in his name. It is with this confidence that St. James and St. Paul exhort us to pray at all times” (Catechism, 2633). Certainly this exhortation to constant prayer touches on the center of Benedictine life. May you be heartened to realize that such a petition enlivens the practice of faith at this abbey, and be encouraged to consider and reconsider how to express such prayer in your own life.