Published March 22, 2025
During this season of Lent, we make it a point of discipline and charity to pray, fast, and give alms. It has long been my practice to make a special effort during this season to pray, with more consistency than I manage during the rest of the year, the Liturgy of the Hours.
For anyone looking to structure his day around prayer – rather than being content to fit prayer within the allowances of a busy day – the Divine Office is particularly beneficial. To pray this prayer is to join the countless priests and religious (and a growing number of lay men and women) for whom the praying of the Divine Office sets the rhythm of daily life throughout the year. It is a privileged way of praying, as St. Paul exhorted, unceasingly.
The Second Vatican Council touched on this point in Sacrosanctum Concilium: “[W]hen this wonderful song of praise [the Divine Office] is rightly performed. . .then it is truly the voice of the bride addressed to her bridegroom; It is the very prayer which Christ Himself, together with His body, addresses to the Father.”
At the heart of the Office are the Psalms, which have been the hymns of God’s people since the days of the Old Covenant. We sing from the Psalms at every Mass, of course, but I never appreciated the beauty and power of the Psalms until I learned to pray the Liturgy of the Hours. There is something about the recitation of the verses, and the repeated recitation of the verses, which I have long found more conducive to meditation and prayer than listening to a cantor or singing only a response, as at the Mass.
That said, the Psalms are meant to be sung. Chanted with reverence, or set to an appropriate melody, the Psalms take on an entirely different dimension. Anyone who has heard Allegri’s haunting polyphonic setting for Psalm 51 will understand this.
Perhaps more than any other book in the Bible, the Psalms are meant to be prayed or sung not just heard. St. Athanasius, the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria and great opponent of Arianism, was particularly eloquent in his advocacy of praying the Psalms. His Letter to Marcellinus concerning the Psalms is a neglected classic. “The whole divine Scripture is the teacher of virtue and true faith,” writes Athanasius, “but the Psalter gives a picture of the spiritual life.”
There is a Psalm for every purpose and occasion, as St. Athanasius notes: “We are bidden elsewhere in the Bible also to bless the Lord and to acknowledge Him: here in the Psalms we are shown the way to do it, and with what sort of words His majesty may meetly be confessed. In fact, under all the circumstances of life, we shall find that these divine songs suit ourselves and meet our own souls’ need at every turn.”
Herein lies another particular beauty of the Psalms. Not only is there a Psalm for every occasion – from rejoicing to desolation – but these inspired hymns are the self-same hymns of the People of Israel, of Moses and Solomon, of King David, and of the Lord Jesus Himself. In praying the Psalms, their words become our own, and our prayers become as their prayers.
When we pray or sing the Psalms, we are singing and praying in our own voice, from our own perspective. The Psalms are, in this sense, Scripture in the first person. There is tremendous power in that. St. Athanasius elaborates on this point:
In the other books of Scripture we read or hear the words of holy men as belonging only to those who spoke them, not at all as though they were our own; and in the same way the doings there narrated are to us material for wonder and examples to be followed, but not in any sense things we have done ourselves. With this book, however, though one does read the prophecies about the Savior in that way, with reverence and with awe, in the case of all the other Psalms it is as though it were one’s own words that one read; and anyone who hears them is moved at heart, as though they voiced for him his deepest thoughts.
Surely it is no coincidence that Athanasius, the great defender of the Incarnation against the Arian heresies of his day, should find such inspiration in the Psalms – the hymns that spring as readily from our own lips as from the lips of the Incarnate Word. These great hymns, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and sung by men, are prayed again by God-made-man, and return again to the Father with all the full, suffering humanity of God’s only begotten Son: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
With these words, Jesus is not merely quoting Scripture, but praying the prayer of His own People. In praying these same Psalms – whether in the Liturgy of the Hours, or at Mass, or as a Lenten discipline – we not only imitate Jesus, we join in his prayer as brothers and sisters of the same Father.
“And so you too, Marcellinus,” concludes Athanasius, “pondering the Psalms and reading them intelligently, with the Spirit as your guide, will be able to grasp the meaning of each one, even as you desire. And you will strive also to imitate the lives of those God-bearing saints who spoke them at the first.”
No doubt this advice is as sound for each of us today as it was when Athanasius first gave it to Marcellinus. What better time to take up that advice than during this season of Lent? And what better discipline to retain beyond this penitential season?
Stephen P. White is a fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. White’s work focuses on the application of Catholic social teaching to a broad spectrum of contemporary political and cultural issues. He is the author of Red, White, Blue, and Catholic (Liguori Publications, 2016).
