A few questions for phyllis tickle

Phyllis Tickle, founding editor of the Religion Department at Publishers Weekly, is a highly respected authority on religion in America. She states in the introduction to her new book, The Night Offices: Prayer For the Hours from Sunset to Sunrise, that “The Office of the Night Watch, as its name suggests, comes into human reckoning during those hours when sleep is upon almost all of us. For those who are restless or sleepless, however, the office is often a personal balm and an easing, as well as an act of worship.” Below, Tickle was kind enough to answer a few questions about her book.

OUP: Which prayer in this book is your favorite?

Phyllis Tickle: The mind’s favorite prayer is often not the heart’s favorite, and vice versa. Likewise, the circumstances of temporal life always come with us into prayer and shade and shape what we find as we enter into an office. Saying that is not an attempt to avoid answering your question, but simply a statement of my own inadequacy fully to do so.

At times, the hymns here–which are, of course, prayers metered and sung–move me most. “Breathe on me, Breath of God,” seems always to me to be the consummate, yearning request of the soul. But the litanies–ah, the litanies! They, right down to the very last one of them, move me to sweet quiet and to communion as does no other form of prayer incorporated into the nighttime prayers.

Were I to have to choose the sweetest prayer within those appointed for the offices of the dark hours, however, I would choose: “Now guide me waking, O Lord, and guard me sleeping; that awake I may watch with Christ, and asleep, I may rest in peace.”

OUP: Do you ever find it difficult to observe fixed-hour prayer?

Tickle: No, for, after almost forty years of living them, I can imagine no other way of being. Time for me now is measured out in the even, three-hour pacing of the offices and in the easy grace of moving in and out of prayer with my fellow Christians around the globe. Ours is the privilege, and we share it there. But that was not always so for me.

In the beginning, as a young woman with three of our seven children already here, I was drawn to this way of praying with the Church within disciplined time; but I was also at first awkward and inept and, at times, frustrated, caught up more in the mechanics than the doing. Because I had not been reared to the Offices or their observance, I also tended to break away from myself at times in order to look from a distance at what I was doing and ask if all of this praying were a matter of obedience or simply of religiosity.

There was also a time early on, as I think there probably is for everyone entering as an adult into the practice of fixed-hour prayer, when I laid the whole business aside and said to myself, “This is silly.” That interruption lasted, if I remember correctly, about five days before, like a starving animal prowling the woods, I fell with relief and gratitude back into the patterns of observance.

There is one other thing that might be pertinent here, namely that I am a great deal more flexible and forgiving than once I was. That is, now if I am traveling in a car with family or friends and the hour of prayer is approaching, I no longer ask that we stop for a few minutes in order that I might observe the office. Nor do I any longer interrupt the conversation of friends or associates who, it seems to me, have something they need to talk about then and without any break in the flow of their thoughts. Such occasions, and others like them, are rare obviously, but being able to accommodate to them does seem to me to be the great part of right practice.

OUP: What is your advice to someone who has just started observing fixed-hour prayer?

Tickle: The best single piece of advice about observing the hours that I ever heard came from a rabbi. (All of the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam observe daily prayers at fixed times, so it is entirely reasonable that a rabbi would be able to speak from the greater perspective of greater experience.) What he said was that he always tells his congregants it is not the prayers we do not pray that God cares about. Rather, what He cares about are the prayers we do say. What the rebbe means, of course, is that fixed-hour prayer is not a performance sport, a test of one’s spiritual fervor, a means of self-evaluation. The temptation, in entering into the practice for the first time, is to make of fixed-hour prayer all these things. Don’t!

Fixed-hour prayer is a gift coming from God as a privilege of access to Him. It is likewise a gift of adoration from the creature to the Creator. Because it is fixed in time, as the name indicates, it is also the one way provided for the believer to move quietly into worship with thousands of his or her fellow believers throughout his or her time zone. It is, in other words, the communion of the saints fully realized and enjoyed, not some goal to be achieved or some notch to be cut into one’s metaphorical belt.

And last, I want to say that despite the fact that fixed-hour prayer is one of the seven ancient disciplines of the faith and despite the fact that it has always been part of Christian practice from the New Testament on, it is still not for everyone. There is no shame–no “I’m-less-than”–in trying for a few weeks and then deciding that the keeping of the hours is more annoyance than worship, or more stress-filled than praise-filled. Tortured prayer can not be good for anyone, and it must most surely offend the ears of the Almighty. Fixed-hour prayer is, as I have said, a gift; but it is not one to be either received or given under some kind of self-imposed duress.

OUP: Aside from the fact that The Night Offices prayers are for nighttime and The Divine Hours™ prayers are for daytime, how do these two sets of prayers differ?

Tickle: There are two principal answers to that, the first being more practical or logistical than theological or religious.

When we got ready to complete the The Divine Hours ™ set of manuals by compiling the offices for the hours from sundown to sunup, there was a strong sense on all our parts that this manual, or final portion of the whole compilation, needed to be physically accessible. It needed, as an object, in other words, to be one volume, easy to handle and easy to set without trouble on a night stand beside one’s bed. It needed also to have, within one set of covers, everything needed for observing any of the night offices at any season of the year. An observant needed, we felt, the comfort of one volume that was always the appropriate one and that, over the years, would become like a familiar companion in one’s quiet hours. Thus the prayers for Monday, for example, in October are the same for every Monday in October in The Night Offices; whereas, in the manuals for daytime observance, the prayers for Monday in October are different for each Monday in October. The difference, in other words, is that which accrues between one volume or a requisite three, between what is most cordial to nighttime use and what to the more active hours of the day.

The second, and probably more obvious, answer is that of content. That is, the night prayers are more “set” or, to put the matter another way, more affixed to one office where they occur consistently. The offices for night observance are likewise more shot through with the consolation and peace of litany and the warmth of canticles. The offices of the nighttime, in other words, reflect and honor the hours and diurnal patterns of those who enter into them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Office of Dawn where the words, like the heart, swell upward in gratitude and joy and praise for the returning day. Nothing else can quite touch the fullness and beauty of that office in this or any other prayer book.

OUP: Can you talk a little about the various places the prayers in this book came from and why you chose those sources?

Tickle: Because fixed-hour prayer is one of the seven ancient practices of our faith and has, as a result, been around for millennia, the materials–readings, prayers, etc.–for its observation are almost as “fixed” as are the times of its occurrence. Thus, the Canticles, which constitute the beating heart and soul of the Office of Midnight, have long since been identified and titled by the Church…The Song of Moses, The Third Song of Isaiah, The Song of the Three Children, etc., etc.. The Canticles of Midnight, in other words, are not subject to the caprices of any compiler, at least not in terms of the pool from which one may draw.

The writings of the early Church Fathers, which are truly voluminous, have been vetted by the centuries for orthodoxy and spiritual utility, of course. None the less, because they are voluminous, any compiler–or at least this compiler–has the problem of surfeit. There, I think, the call about what to include and what to omit becomes one of the ear and the spirit. There were days…whole working days, in fact…when I could not decide from among such a wealth of riches. I would insert, and then remove and replace, only to come back again half the time to my original selection. Always one mourns the clippings on the cutting room floor, I suspect. I at least do.

The hymns are easy, because they too have a very practical side…or two very practical sides, perhaps. First of all, they must be in the common domain. That is, they must be work that may be freely quoted, may be adapted without penalty to contemporary usage, and susceptible to publication without musical notation. The public domain issue would be a problem were it not for another element of our times and place.

In contemporary or present day Christianity, there is a great yearning back toward the ways and the means of the earlier Church. One of the most active expressions of this almost home-sick desire to revisit with reverence what we have come from is a renewed joy in singing the old hymns of former times, the songs of our fathers and mothers, so to speak. Since the laws of copyright are such that older work usually passes out from its restrictions in due time, most of these beloved hymns are now free to be incorporated into collections like The Night Offices. It is a benison I am very grateful for; but as with the Church Fathers and Mothers, so here. There was overabundance upon overabundance, and the deciding what to leave out could at times be far more painful than was the decision about what to include.

OUP: What were the challenges in writing this book?

Tickle: Space….more than anything else, space and clarity. The desire is always there, when one is dealing with sacred literature, to include just a bit more…one more sentence here, one more comment there. That kind of indulgence is far easier than is the business of determining when one sentence more overburdens than honors the page allotment or when it more dilutes the impact and clarity of what is being said than illuminates it.

I also had–and always have had–painful difficulty in excerpting and editing sacred materials, primarily those from the early Fathers and Mothers. Judicious snipping here and there to make what they are saying clearer or more accessible to contemporary ears does not seem, at first blush, to be a difficult thing. It certainly would seem to be less difficult than making the actual selections to be edited or excerpted. Unfortunately, for me the selecting was far easier than the presumption of having to decide where to lift out a lovely digression or gratuitous aside and then insert the ellipses to mark the site of the surgery. Obviously I survived, but that does not mean I do not have an occasional moment of mourning or biting twinge of guilt.

OUP: What are your favorite books?

Tickle: This is the most difficult question always, I think, for a writer to answer…or at least it is for me as a writer. But were I to be forcefully limited to one title and only one…that is, as the old conversational gamut says, if I were to be stranded for the rest of my life on a desert island, what book would I want to have with me? Put that way and assuming that Scripture is not what is meant here by “book,” the answer is easy: The Norton Anthology of Poetry.

In circumstances less dramatic and less limited than living out one’s life alone a deserted island, the answer becomes infinitely more diverse. Categories are a bit easier, though. I read little fiction nowadays, for non-fiction titles in popularly accessible science and history seem to me so much more gripping. They certainly lead me more readily to amazement and to internalizing the intricate and interlaced connections and possibilities of the human condition than does fiction. Having said that, however, let me hasten to say that such was not true in my youth.

While at fifteen I still would have taken the Norton to that desert in preference to anything else, I would have, and did, spend the great bulk of my normal young reading life in fiction. Age-appropriate titles ranging from Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson to In This House of Brede, taught me more about how one lives Scripture than did any priest or pastor. I shall always be grateful.