Vespers/Evening Prayer

 


General Instruction Liturgy of the Hours

39. When evening approaches and the day is already far spent, Evening Prayer is celebrated in order that “we may give thanks for what has been given us, or what we have done well, during the day.”

[5] We also recall the redemption through the prayer which we send up “like incense in the Lord’s sight,” and in which “the raising up of our hands” becomes “an evening sacrifice.”[6] 

This “may be understood also in a deeper spiritual sense of that true evening sacrifice which, as is handed down to us, was offered in the evening by the Lord and Savior, at supper with the apostles, when he instituted the most holy mysteries of the Church, or of the evening sacrifice, that is, the sacrifice at the end of the ages, in which on the next day he was offered to the Father as he raised up his hands for the salvation of the whole world.”[7]

 Again, in order to fix our hope on the light that knows no setting, “we pray and make petition for the light to come down on us anew and ask Christ to give us the grace of eternal light.”[8] 

Finally, at this hour we join with the Churches of the East in calling up the “joy-giving light of holy glory, born of the immortal, heavenly Father, holy and blessed, Jesus Christ; now that we have come to the setting of the sun and seen the evening star, we sing in praise of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit as God…”