The Divine Office - Structure and Getting Started

 My last post was about the Divine Office (also known as Liturgy of the Hours), what it is, and why you should, as a Catholic, pray it. But you may need more details about how to get started. This post is dedicated to the Ordinary Form Divine Office. If you go to Traditional Latin Mass and therefore want to pray the Extraordinary Form, that's another post, which I don't feel I know that form enough to write at this moment. 

Before I do that, I need to tell you about the daily structure of the Ordinary Form Divine Office, with the approximate time it will take you to complete each section, because it has a bearing on your first step. This is the full list of daily prayer sessions. 

• Office of Readings (10-15 minutes)
• Morning Prayer (around 10 minutes) 
• Daytime Prayer (around 5 minutes each)
• Midmorning Prayer 
• Midday Prayer
• Midafternoon Prayer
• Evening Prayer (around 10 minutes)
• Night Prayer (around 5 minutes)

For laymen, all of the above is optional, so how much of it you want to do is your decision, but, like most things, you'll get more out of it if you put more into it. 

One option is buying a physical book (also called a breviary) or set of books. There are two basic options for this. You can buy the four-volume set of Liturgy of the Hours books, and that will give you everything you need to pray all of the Ordinary Form Divine Office. There is also a one-volume Christian Prayer, which will give you the complete schedule for Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Night Prayer. If you don't plan to do Daytime Prayer or the Office of Readings, this will be the most economic option. I bought my four-volume Liturgy of the Hours set on Amazon for $130US. I also have the Christian Prayer book that I use when traveling, that I got for $35US on Amazon. Depending on where you buy it, a little booklet called the St. Joseph Guide may be included. This booklet is basically a calendar for a year that tells you what the feast days are, and which pages of the breviary to use to start each office. It's very handy, especially when starting out, so if your breviary doesn't come with one, you may want to purchase one from Amazon for about $1.50US.

If you want to pray the Extraordinary Form of the Divine Office, the 3-volume Roman Breviary set retails for $400US on Amazon and includes everything you will need, plus a little instruction book. 

If you don't have the money for a breviary, go ahead with one of the free applications or websites, but there are more resources included with the hard copy books that will help you understand the structure of the Divine Office. If you decide to go with an app or website, you can just do what it says, but you may want to keep reading anyway to become familiar with the structure of the office and understand where what you are praying comes from.

A good first step would be just to open your breviary and look around, starting with the table of contents. You should see 6 major sections: 

• Proper of Seasons: this contains parts of the office that vary according to the time of year.
• Ordinary: this contains parts of each office that are the same every day, along with some brief instructions. Selections from the Ordinary may be duplicated on cards that come with your breviary. If you have them, they can save you some flipping through pages.
• Psalter: This contains the variable parts of each office. 
• Night Prayer: Because it's the same every week (with an exception I'll cover later) and relatively short, the entirety of Night Prayer is given here and you don't have to flip between sections. 
• Proper of Saints: this contains parts of the office that vary according to feast days. 
• Common of Saints: this contains parts of the office for feast days that are shared between the feast days of different saints. 

You'll also notice that your book has several colored ribbons. Those are very handy for keeping your place when you flip between sections. For now, put one ribbon in each of the sections above except for the Common of Saints. Because which part of the Common of Saints you will use tends to jump back and forth, it's better to use a bookmark or prayer card for that section instead.

You probably noticed when paging through your breviary that there is both red and black type. The red text is indications and general instructions. The general rule for praying the Divine Office is "Do the red, say the black." If you have the Christian Prayer book, there will be more detailed instructions in the front. If you have the four-volume Liturgy of the Hours, the detailed instructions will be in the front of Volume I.  

Entire books have been written on how to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, so I won't be able to cover it in one blog post, so I'll just suggest one thing you can do right now if you have the four-volume breviary. What you will do is once a day, read that day's readings from the Office of Readings. You will get a Bible passage and a sermon per day. Some of the sermons (we call them homilies) are over a thousand years old. If you're reading this, and you're not Catholic, the sermons will give you an idea of what we Catholics have always believed. If you have the one-volume Christian Prayer book, it won't have the full Office of Readings, so stay tuned for the next post in which we'll get started on Night Prayer, or you can use one of the apps. The readings will be in the Proper of Seasons.

The first thing you'll need to do is figure out which of the four books you should use. 

• Volume I is for Advent and Christmas season. Advent starts on the fourth Sunday before Christmas. You will use this book until the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which is the Sunday after January 6. You'll need to pay attention to the days because there you will switch sections in the Proper of Seasons on December 17 and Epiphany (generally January 6, but in the US it will be the Sunday between January 2 and January 8; if you are Catholic, check with your parish and do the Epiphany reading the same day they do Epiphany Mass, otherwise just use January 6 for Epiphany).
• Volume II is for Lent and Easter season. You will use this book from Ash Wednesday until Pentecost. There will be section switches on Palm Sunday and the Ascension. 
• Volumes III and IV are for the rest of the year, which we call Ordinary Time. You can go straight through until you hit the first Sunday of Advent or Ash Wednesday, when you'll need to switch to either Volume I or Volume II. When you get to the end of the Proper of Seasons in Volume III, it will tell you to switch to Volume IV. Ordinary Time is organized by weeks. How do you know what week it is? If you're a Catholic, save the handout from Sunday Mass; it should be on the first page, or you can go to your parish website, or just call and ask. In any case, you can go to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops website (http://www.usccb.org/) and look for the Daily Reading section. It will tell you what week you're in there. If it's a feast day, it will give you that instead, so you may need to click through on the "Read More" link and go back or forward a day or two.

Now that you have the right book in hand, turn to the Proper of Seasons and find the page for the current day. Next, find the Office of Readings section. The first thing there should be the first reading. Read that, skip the responsory afterward for now, then read the second reading. Place one of your ribbons at the Office of Readings for the next day, then come back tomorrow and repeat. 

This, of course, isn't the entirety of the Office of Readings, and there will be a couple of other wrinkles later, but it's a good place to start. Stay tuned for my next post, which will cover Night Prayer.