Let All the Day Be Thine
Anthony Esolen
When I was a boy, many television stations would open their day with a “sermonette,” a five-minute talk by a local priest or minister or rabbi. The idea was clear. The whole day belongs to God, and so it’s good to begin it by giving honor to the very fount of existence, to the God who said, Let there be light, and there was light.
I rise before dawn and cry for help, sings the psalmist in the longest of all the psalms, the great prayer of confident and grateful meditation upon the law of God (119:147). The morning is filled with hope: My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning (130:6). For weeping may last for the night, but joy comes with the morning (30:6). Indeed, morning is itself what God promises to all those he has blessed forever. I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright morning star, says Jesus in his last and consummate words to Saint John (Rv 22:16).
Then of course we should pray to God in the morning, but in this we find that people who rose while it was still dark to tend to the cattle had an advantage over us. They rose earlier than we do, but they weren’t rushed. You can miss the bus, but you can’t miss the cow. They went to bed earlier also, with the sun, and their bones were tired from hard work, so they slept more soundly, and rose with more strength. Ask a farmer if you doubt it. But we’ll be stumbling to get some coffee, or hurrying to beat the traffic, and so our prayers can become haphazard and foggy too.
The Morning Offering
It’s a fine thing, then, to have a morning prayer by heart, one that properly dedicates to God the whole of the coming day. There are several I have heard and seen, and all are strong and worthy prayers, but I will choose the one I believe is the most keenly focused on the beginning of the day.
At the back of my old copies of the Saint Joseph Missal, there’s a section called “Treasury of Prayers,” and the title is apt. In those days, a lot of people brought their missals with them to church, to follow the prayers and the readings. That meant that they saw these prayers all the time, and in fact my several copies, one of them in French, are all well-worn. Under the title “Morning Offering,” I find this beautiful prayer:
Most Holy and Adorable Trinity, one God in three Persons, I firmly believe that Thou art here present; I adore Thee with the most profound humility; I praise Thee and give Thee thanks with all my heart for the favors Thou hast bestowed on me. Thy Goodness has brought me safely to the beginning of this day. Behold, O Lord, I offer Thee my whole being and in particular all my thoughts, words, and actions, together with such crosses and contradictions as I may meet with in the course of this day. Give them, O Lord, Thy blessing; may Thy divine Love animate them and may they tend to the greater honor and glory of Thy Sovereign Majesty. Amen.
It’s a true drama, isn’t it, this beginning of a day in the sight of God? We affirm, wherever we may be, that the most holy Trinity, God in three persons, is present, here. He is at your side as you kneel at the prie-dieu, or as you lie quietly upon your bed, looking at the crucifix on the wall, or as you bow your head at the table before breakfast. He is there. And you adore him “with the most profound humility.” That too is a powerful gesture. It is more than a bend of the knee, more than a slight and self-satisfied nod. It is a gesture not of pleasant affability, or of contentment, but of deep and mysterious love. We acknowledge that all we have and all we are comes from God. In its gratitude, the prayer resounds with the glory of creation itself.
Let us be found faithful today
How did we arrive at this morning? The whole of our past is summed up when we say that God’s goodness alone has brought us safely to this moment, this rising of the sun over the horizon. I might have died yesterday. I might have died a year ago. I did not; I am here; and it is all by God’s grace that I am here. Then I must dedicate the day to God.
Notice that the prayer does not encourage me to think about the rest of my life. Somehow it’s a lot easier to do that, to wander off into pleasant abstraction, than to think about this one day, with its duties that we should not defer. It is easy to say you love mankind. It is hard to put up with the next-door neighbor. It is easy to say you want to “make a difference” in “the world.” It is hard to keep your own room clean, let alone someone else’s.
Our Lord too encourages us to think about eternity and the day, and leave the misty interim, the worldly future, to the providence of the Father. He commands us to pray for our daily bread, and he urges us not to be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself, and the day has enough troubles of its own (Mt 6:34). That is another thing I find admirable in this morning prayer. We do not pray that the day will go well for us, in the ordinary way of looking at things. Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t, and in any case, there must come a last day for each one of us, the day of our sunset in this life.
Crosses and contradictions
Instead, we offer to God everything we are and everything we are going to think and say and do. The little word “behold” suggests that we are like someone offering a sacrifice before the altar, something that can be seen and touched. And we do more. For we cannot determine what will happen to us today. We do not beg God to spare us all trouble. We expect that trouble will come, for man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward (Jb 5:7). Mister Bluebird is not always on our shoulder! The prayer spares us the bleakness of Optimism, that confidence-man with the toothy smile and the shifty hands. It turns us toward Hope, a true daughter of God.
Only someone filled with hope can say more than “I will believe, even if the day is troubled,” but rather, “I offer you all my troubles, because in you and you alone they are blessings.” And they are more than simply troubles. My French rendition of the prayer reads “les peines,” that is, sufferings, while the English reads “crosses and contradictions.” Again, how quietly dramatic that is!
Today, I may in some fashion, small or great, be called to walk the sorrowful way up the mount of Calvary. Today, I may, as I am a Christian, become, by participating in the suffering of Jesus, a sign of contradiction to the world, because the world wants to go its broad and pleasant way to destruction, and it will not brook dissent. But I may (and I probably will) have to do with crosses and contradictions that are not so dreadful, but that are still occasions for sin, or for slow and steady growth in the life of the Spirit: a difficult child, a disappointment at work, a flat tire, an unexpected bill, an unjust rebuke, an ungrateful friend, even a headache or the common cold. You’ll bear the heavy cross on your shoulders, but not a splinter in the finger?
But it is not up to us to make these things good. We pray that God may animate them with his love. The word is to be understood precisely. Think of the moment when God made Adam from the dust, and then breathed the breath of life into him, and he became a living soul (Gn 2:7). Man, of himself, can make things that move, like windmills or tanks, but only God can truly endow creatures with a soul. Think, then, that without God’s divine love, everything we do and everything we suffer during the day is like dust, inert, lifeless, and subject to every wind that blows. God alone gives life.
Trinity and majesty
The life God gives comes from him and returns to him, so that when we offer the day to him, we pray that everything we do will serve to glorify him and his sovereign majesty. So the end of the prayer returns us to the beginning. For the majesty of God is a veritable plenitude of being, the three divine Persons in one God, the most holy and adorable Trinity, as my English rendition has it, and the très sainte et très auguste Trinité, in the French. As modern man is starved for beauty, and is given the picturesque at best, and the drab or hideous at worst, so is he starved for the beholding of majesty, and is given a worldly impressiveness at best, and swaggering foolishness at worst. But when I consider the majesty of God, I am raised up in humility, and I bask in the sunlight of glory.
If that sunlight comes and goes, the fault is mine and not God’s. And as I pray this morning prayer, I hope to see at last the great morning, the eighth day of the resurrection of the flesh, for which there is only morning and no evening.
Anthony Esolen is professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in N.H., translator and editor of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House). [Magnificat]
