c. Religion News Service “Sing psalms and hymns and inspired songs among yourselves, singing and chanting to the Lord in your hearts, always and everywhere giving thanks to God who is our Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Ephesians 5:19- 20

(UNDATED) The first major literary and liturgical reworking of the Benedictine rule of “fixed hour” prayer traces its origins to the Judaism from whence Christianity came _ a history explored and explained in the introduction to the second volume of Phyllis Tickle’s trilogy of prayer manuals.

Centuries before the birth of Jesus, a Hebrew psalmist wrote of praising God seven times a day. While scholars disagree on the hours of early Judaism’s set prayers, the ritual soon took on specific characteristics, Tickle writes in “The Divine Hours” (Doubleday).

In fact, Tickle said, the Old Testament figure Daniel was thrown to the lions for refusing to give up praying in the middle of the work day. For Jews across the Roman empire, fixed prayer times were a natural rhythm.

Drawing on that history, early Christians kept a similar tradition, Tickle said. Their discipline was strengthened by the Roman empire’s practice of ringing forum bells at 6 a.m, midday and 6 p.m. In keeping with that schedule, the daily offices of Christians are said at morning, midday, early evening and bedtime.

Tickle’s organization of this ancient tradition will be a pleasure for readers. Rather than putting prayers in one place, psalms in another, she groups each day’s readings, prayers, psalms and refrains together.

Both the structure and the style of the book spring from her own experience as a writer, a layperson and the mother of seven grown children.

Practicing fixed hour prayer, she’s slipped away to pray in ladies’ rooms in the middle of luncheon engagements and pulled off on road sides when making a long car trip.

“This was a constant and remains a constant,” Tickle said in a telephone interview. “You make some interesting adjustments. Judaism has an interesting thing where it says it is better to pray when one can than to not pray at all because one can’t always.”

But she never envisioned being asked to compile a manual for people who pray. The project grew out of the vision of Eric Major, head of religion publishing for Doubleday. Tickle said Major sees the three-volume prayer trilogy as a logical accompaniment to the New Jerusalem Bible, also published by Doubleday.

The first volume in Tickle’s series was released earlier this year.

In the second volume, “The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime,” Tickle stresses tradition and expands upon it, drawing the reader into a prayer rhythm that dates to desert-dwelling monks in the third century. Those early Christians sought to live out the apostle Paul’s admonition to “pray without ceasing.” For modern Christians, fixed hour prayer can build a sense of connection and continuity.

“Christians today, wherever they practice the discipline of fixed-hour prayer, frequently find themselves filled with a conscious awareness that they are handing their worship, at its final `Amen’ on to other Christians in the next time zone,” Tickle writes. “Like relay runners passing a lighted torch, those who do the work of fixed-hour prayer create a continuous cascade of prayer before the throne of God.”

Tickle’s prayer series is actually a breviary for observing the daily offices, but one with a contemporary feel. This series takes into account the difficulties present-day Christians may encounter in trying to observe the hours, especially during the regular work week.

While the book might be used by small or large groups, it should work particularly well for individuals keeping the hours alone. The regimen, while traditional in so many ways, is flexible and slightly shortened. It also integrates contemporary language into the worship form, changing traditional terminology such as invitatories and antiphons to terms more easily understood such as “The Call to Prayer” and “The Refrain.”

In early Jewish tradition, the prayers were “set or fixed into something very close to their present-day schedule and they had begun to assume something very close to their present-day intention,” writes Tickle.

Compiling this series, while time-consuming and energy-depleting, “is the love of my heart,” Tickle said. “It is what every writer dreams of, that project which is so congenial, so cordial, so fulfilling, that it exercises everything you know and care about.

“Even when I was mad at it, it was an alive thing in my hand.”

Tickle, contributing editor in religion for Publishers’ Weekly, has written more than two dozen books including the popular “God-Talk in America.” She lives in the rural community of Lucy, Tenn., but travels often, appearing frequently on the Odyssey Channel and as a regular guest on PBS’s “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.” She has practiced fixed-hour prayer for decades.

“I’ve kept the hours for over 35 years and deliberately tried to not make that a well-known fact,” she said. “I hadn’t hidden it, but I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I truly believe that Christ meant it when he said go into your closet and pray in private.

“Any kind of spiritual discipline _ if made public _ can become piety or religiosity and they’re not attractive in any way.”

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Her own attachment to the practice developed almost by accident.

“I fell into it, rather like I fell into this project,” she said. “Or I wandered into it. I left Presbyterianism and became an Episcopalian in college. The Episcopalians came equipped with the Book of Common Prayer. They didn’t call it the daily office, but I began that simply, using those morning and evening offices.

“I hadn’t been doing that long _ I was 30, 31 _ when, having intellectually figured out that St. Benedict really did live and what the rule was, it was just such a natural easy slide over into keeping the fixed hour prayer.

“I found an old breviary at a bookshop. It was somewhat simplified,” she said. “All it took was a modicum of Episopcal exposure to the liturgical year. From there, then it became the discipline that I assumed and obviously was my vocation as a layperson.”

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Not everyone will embrace the practice, partly because Benedictine wisdom is “paradoxical to moderns,” Tickle said. “The Benedictines teach that the only way that they can accomplish as much as they do is they spend so much time in prayer.” Translate that to mean that the benefit of a spiritual discipline is that one values and governs the rest of one’s time with much more care.

“You’re anchored,” Tickle said. “You also know what it is you’re trying to do. If you stop every three hours for fixed hour prayer, it keeps you in touch with the boss. You know what you’re trying to accomplish. You don’t get distracted by side issues. I think that is the heart of Benedictine living.”

DEA END HOLMES

(Cecile S. Holmes, a longtime religion writer, teaches journalism at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C. Her email address is:

cecile.holmes(at)usc.jour.sc.edu)