Archbishop of Sydney

Morning Prayer Week One

Malta

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
19 October 2004

It is good for us to be here together in Malta, united by our common Catholic faith, by our priestly identity, and by our solidarity one with the other.  We should thank God for all these blessings.  Last night it was very encouraging to me at least, to be swept up into the strength and faith of the response, common prayers and hymns.  As we all know it is good to pray with a Church full of believers.

So we gather for the official morning prayer of the Church, and insert ourselves into an ancient Christian and Catholic tradition, which the Early Church took over from the Jews.  Many Jews had prayed at fixed hours of the day and the night for hundreds of years before Christ’s birth.

The monks of Palestine, Egypt and Gaul were the first to organise a cycle of prayers using all the psalms, while Cathedrals and parish churches used a simpler ritual of morning and evening prayers.

Late in the fifth century the Roman basilicas compiled what became the traditional seven prayers for day-time as well as the “night office” or early morning office of Matins.  St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, used these for his prescribed round of daily prayer, which he called “Opus Dei”, the work of God.

This spread through Western Europe during the following centuries and remained basically unchanged until the reforms of 1971, which we still follow today.

From the beginning the Old Testament psalms have provided the backbone of the Liturgy of the Hours, the Divine Office.  Part of the official Old Testament canon of Scripture, these psalms were composed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit by many authors at different periods of history.  Some might go back to the time of King David, many were written after the exile, while today’s canticle of Tobit, probably written about 200 B.C., purports to tell of a young man when the Kingdom was divided after the death of King Solomon.

Not just this canticle, but the psalms generally, were not written as scientific or historical treatises, but as religious poems, to be sung in the praise of the one true God.  Their imagery has helped form the Christian imagination and has contributed to the development of all European literature and those other literatures touched by European influence of East and West, Latin and Greek.

Naturally we pray these ancient prayers as Christians with the benefit of revealed truths then hidden in the old dispensation.  Therefore it is important that as we pray we find Christ in the psalms, because He provides the key to the poetry of these beautiful prayers.

The psalms are accessible to many types of person of any and every race, educated and uneducated, even the irreligious.  They can offer us something, bring us to God, when we are well or sick, when we are exhilarated or depressed, feeling benevolent or battling black feelings of resentment, even revenge.  A number of priests struggling through deep personal crises have told me how they were strengthened and helped by praying the psalms.

Thomas Merton has written that the psalms are the simplest and greatest of all religious poems (Bread in the Wilderness 1961. p48) and my Old Testament lecturer in Rome who guided us through the psalms as seminarians had made a similar claim that they had no equal in any religious literature.  I was then sceptical of this, but have found nothing in my reading to disprove his thesis.

It should also be a consolation to us that not only have Christians been nourished by these psalms for two thousand years, but that Our Lord himself prayed them from his earliest years until his last moments on the Cross.  He too was consoled and challenged by their praise and supplication, by their rhythm and imagery, which became part of his own preaching.  He quoted them more frequently than any other part of the Scriptures.

Time and again even in todays psalms we have that semitic parallelism, the repetition of a basic thought in a similar image to reinforce the message.

Benedicite, omnia opera
Domini, Domino
May the heavens bless
the Lord, the waters of the deep,
the sun and moon, the stars,
night and day, frost and snow.
All bless the Lord.

is only one example of a technique which Jesus himself was to adopt. 

Think of chapter seven in St. Matthew’s gospel, a text which is particularly appropriate for meditation by those of us ordained as priests for many years perhaps even more than for young priests: “ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you” (Mt. 7:7)

Is there any one request which might be appropriate for every one of us as priests, gathered from every continent in the world and representative of nearly every age group?

I have one suggestion from Psalm 23.  May we always be men who regularly seek the one true God, priests “who seek the face of the God of Jacob”.

I do not want to suggest for a moment that we priests do not know the one true God and His only Son.  We would not be here if that was the case.  Some time ago a well known architect in Australia said that a Catholic Church was a place for those searching for God.  I felt that was profoundly wrong, because overwhelmingly a Catholic Church is for those who have found the one true God in His Son, Jesus Christ.  But we do not see clearly and often we struggle to convey to others what little insight has been granted us.

“Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord?
Who shall stand in his holy place?
The man with clean hands and pure heart
Who desires not worthless things,”

These lines present an unescapable challenge to each and every priest.  We fill a multiplicity of different practical roles as parish priest, assistant,/ or teacher, administrator, builder/ or organiser, academic or bishop.  No doubt the list could be continued.  But each of us is called to be a man of God, because each of us is a priest, called to stand in God’s holy place, called to be a formator of Saints for the New Millennium.

C.S. Lewis claimed that a vocation such as ours is a terrible thing; not simply because we are priests, but because priests, like religious, like some lay Catholic leaders are called out of nature into the supernatural life.  This is a costly honour, the call to reject natural claims, to prefer God ahead of father, mother, children and life itself (Mt. 10:37-9).  (C.S. Lewis Reflections on the Psalms (1958) pp 109-10).  Ministerial priests are not only called to the service of all the People of God, but we are called to be listed among the pure of heart, who shall see God (Mt. 5:8), one of the beatitudes from the sermon on the mount which Our Lord developed from rich Jewish teachings, such as psalm 23.

Paul’s personal history and conversion should always remain an encouragement to us in our work and in our personal struggle towards God.

We are regularly tempted to reduce Paul into our own manageable categories, to reduce the scope and drama of his conversion.

N.T. Wright is now the Anglican Bishop of Durham in England.  I believe (I’m no expert in Scripture) that he is the best Scripture scholar writing in English today.  He said that he understood what Paul was really like when he saw on television the face of the young man who assassinated the Jewish Prime Minister, Rabin. 

Paul too was a persecutor of Christians, present at the martyrdom of Stephen, a zealot and a fanatic ja man of violence.

God’s grace turned him from this dead end, this hate and slowly turned him into our greatest missionary; a spiritual giant who truly climbed the mountain of the Lord.

Whether we are young or old, fit or arthritic, we too can climb the mountain of the Lord.  I am now convinced that technique is much less important in these things of the Spirit, than persistence.  If we persist, especially if we use a spiritual director, God will help us.  If God occasionally brings us down to Hades, He also brings us up again and none of us can escape from His hand.

No decline in our energy, no series of hurts and disappointments for us can mean that God himself is diminished, or beaten or uninterested.  God is always faithful, His works are to be trusted, He does fill the earth with his love, even when we see this darkly, and even when we might not feel it at all.

In faith and as the years pass, may we always acknowledge with gratitude and enthusiasm that

“The Lord is our help and our shield.
In him do our hearts find joy”

and may we always be able to pray

“May your love be upon us, O Lord,
as we place all our hope in you”.