Yesterday was the Feast of St. Cecilia. As I have said, this weekend I have been on the diocesan youth conference in Ocean City with 600-plus high school kids, sharing faith and prayer together. It is a truly awesome experience. All weekend long we have been giving the young people verious experiences of prayer that are part of our Catholic tradition: Ignatian imaginative prayer, the Rosary, traditional morning offering, and this morning, the Liturgy of the Hours.We sometimes do an abbreviated form of this prayer for meetings and such, but this morning, we wanted to go all the way - all the psalms, all the readings, all the canticles. There was a question as to whether or not the kids would "get it" or catch on to the rhythm of the prayer, but all that ended when we heard the room full of kids easily praying back and forth in the antiphonal format of the prayers. They got it. And I got it too. One of the kids said to me, "This is what you priests pray all the time, right?" One of the adults chimed in that this was, in fact, the "prayer of the Church." It's their prayer too.
The young people are hungry for ways to express their relationship with God, and they are willing to enter into new expressions from time to time. There was energy in those psalms this morning; there was joy.
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