Evening prayer from Maria Laach
As a Benedictine monastery, we invite people to come to us, to spend days of contemplation or silence with us as guests and to celebrate the various services of our monastic community with us. True to the words of St. Benedict, that in everything God may be glorified (RB 57,9), we also want to share our prayer life with people beyond the confines of our abbey church.
Evening prayer aims to be a short form of what we monks do five times a day: Listening to the word of God, bringing his word into our daily lives and bringing thanks and petitions before him. Every one of us, including us monks, experiences many ups and downs in the course of a day; St. Benedict invites us to integrate God into our everyday lives, not to exclude him from anything we experience. He teaches us: God is there, always and everywhere. We can trust him, we should approach him in life and grow in love. All joys and hopes, but also all sadness and fears (GS 1) have a place in his love.
Pater Philipp Meyer OSB, born in Braunschweig, was a member of the Braunschweig Cathedral Singing School from an early age. He studied church music in Heidelberg and Cologne and joined the Benedictine Abbey of Maria Laach in 2006. After the novitiate, he studied theology in Salzburg and Rome, made his solemn profession in 2011 and was ordained a priest in 2015.
In Maria Laach, Father Philip is, among other things, choir director of the Cappella Lacensis and is responsible for the abbey’s youth and vocations ministry. He is the author of several spiritual books and has been in charge of the daily “Evening Prayer” on katholisch.de since 2017.
