The Divine Office - Night Prayer

This is the next installment in a series of posts on how to get started with the Liturgy of the Hours, also known as the Divine Office. These posts will be of most interest to Catholics, but may contain useful information for Christians of other denominations.

Hopefully, you've been doing the daily readings from the Office of Readings. If so, you've not only become more familiar with the Proper of Seasons. For the next step, I'm going to suggest adding Night Prayer to your daily routine, but first I want to talk about feast days. Feast days are days we Catholics set aside to celebrate the lives of saints and important events in Christianity. I'm sure you celebrate Christmas and Easter, but there are plenty of other feast days. I think I should clarify something about saints for Christians of other denominations. Saints are simply people who we know have gone to heaven, and the way we know is that the Catholic Church has documented at least of two instances of miracles that have occurred as a result of asking the saint in question to pray for us.

These feast days have three categories: 

• Solemnities: This is the highest category of feast days, and take precedence over any of the others. By the way, Sunday counts as a solemnity. One unique thing about solemnities is that they actually start the evening of the previous day. This will come into play shortly. This is the only category of feast day that will alter how you do Night Prayer. 
• Feasts: This is the next category and has precedence over the next.
• Memorials: This is the last category, and some of them are optional. The ones that aren't optional have the word "Memorial" listed in the Proper of Saints; the optional ones don't.

Most of these days are listed in the Proper of Saints, but some of them will be in the Proper of Seasons, so you have to look in both places. You're already looking in the Proper of Seasons every day if you're doing the daily readings, so you would just have to also check the Proper of Saints as well. 

You can look through the section for Night Prayer in the Ordinary if you have the four-volume Liturgy of the Hours set (there's no section for it in the one-volume Christian Prayer), but I will outline the basic structure here: 

• Introduction: This is pretty much the same every night. The only thing is you don't say the "Alleluia" after the "Glory to the Father..." during Lent.
• Hymn: There are several hymns to choose from. You can just pick your favorite or whichever one you feel like using that day. 
• One (or sometimes two) psalm(s) with antiphon. An antiphon is just a sentence. Say the antiphon, then read the psalm, say the Gloria, and finally, say the antiphon again. If there are two psalms given, do the same for both. 
• Reading 
• Responsory: The important thing about this is the the Gloria is not said in its entirety. You only say "Glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit".
• Gospel Canticle: The word canticle literally means song, but most of the ones I've seen are really more like speeches. Anyway, the important thing is that for Gospel Canticles, you should stand up before saying the corresponding antiphon and make the Sign of the Cross when beginning the canticle.
• Prayer: say the Our Father before this, but do not say Amen, then say the Prayer from the breviary and do say Amen. After that, the ending is: "May the All-powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death. Amen.". Make the Sign of the Cross when you say the ending.
• Marian Antiphon: There is a tradition of which one of these to day based on the season, but you can just pick one. 

There's one more thing before you get started. There's no entry for Saturday in the Night Prayer section. This is because Sunday is a solemnity, so it actually starts Saturday evening. So Sunday has two evening prayers, Evening Prayer I, which happens Saturday evening, and Evening Prayer II, which happens Sunday evening. The night prayers for Saturday and Sunday are labeled "After Evening Prayer I on Sundays" and "After Evening Prayer II on Sundays". Solemnities have the same schedule, so you would use the section "After Evening Prayer I on Sundays" the night before the solemnity, and the section "After Evening Prayer II on Sundays" the night of the solemnity, even if the solemnity occurs on a Saturday. This would be a good time to mention that the instructions say that the Sunday Night Prayer can be used on other days, so if you want you can just do that every night until you get used to the structure. 

Speaking of night, what time should you do Night Prayer? Laypeople aren't under any obligation to say any of the Divine Office at particular times. There is a traditional time of 9 pm, so you could do that, or you could pray Night Prayer before bedtime.

So let's get started. If you have the four-volume breviary, Night Prayer will be included in the Ordinary so you should look through that first. Also, the four-volume breviary includes four cards with commonly used parts. One of them will be for Night Prayer, and will save you flipping some pages, as the hymns are in the beginning of the Night Prayer section. Once you are done, you can place the ribbon where you are in the book and it will be ready for the next night, unless it's Friday, in which case you would put it at the beginning of Sunday Evening Prayer I. 

Stay tuned for my next post, which will cover Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. That may seem like a lot to cover, but they have almost identical structures. 

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. 

The Divine Office

Disclaimer: this post will be of most interest to Catholics. It describes one of our methods of daily prayer. That said, we don't claim a monopoly on it and there's nothing stopping you from also using this method if you are a Christian who isn't Catholic. In fact, the Anglicans (Episcopalians in America) even have their own version of it. I am a layman, so if you happen to be a Catholic priest or religious reading this, please let me know in the comments if I've left anything out or got something wrong. 

In this blog post, I will be talking about the Divine Office, also known as the Liturgy of the Hours. A probably oversimplified description of it is that it's the official prayer book of the Catholic Church. I will describe it in more detail, discuss why you should use it, and tell you how to decide which form to  use, and how to get started.

Let's start with more details about the Divine Office. The Divine Office gives you prayers for various times throughout the day. It includes prayers, Bible passages, and writings of the Church Fathers (for non-Catholics, these are prominent early Christians), but is centered around the Psalms. There are two forms in the Catholic version; one will include most of the Psalms every four weeks, the other will include all of the Psalms once a week. 

If you're Catholic, you may be thinking "Why do I need this? I already pray the Rosary every day." My short and probably oversimplified answer is that they are two different types of prayer. The Rosary is a personal devotion, while the Divine Office is what I'll call collective prayer. The real term for it is liturgical prayer, but it really boils down to the same thing: you're not just praying by yourself, you are praying with the entire Church. People around the world are saying the same prayers and celebrating the memory of the same saints. 

Still with me? Great! Now let's talk about which form to use. There are two if you're Catholic: the Liturgy of the Hours (also knows as Ordinary Form), which is prayed in the vernacular (I have the English version), and the Roman Breviary (also known as Extraordinary Form), which is prayed in Latin. If you're religious, you don't need me to tell you about the Divine Office, but for the benefit of the rest of my readers, some (maybe all, I'm a layman so I don't know) of the religious orders have their own versions. The Liturgy of the Hours is the form that most Catholics should use, but if you go to Traditional Latin Mass, you may want to consider using the Roman Breviary.  

If you want to try it, you may want to start with one of the apps that are available in Google Play or the Apple Store that will lay out everything for the day for you. I don't have any specific recommendations for the Liturgy of the Hours, but I can without reservation recommend divinumofficium.com for the Extraordinary Form.

If you prefer working with a physical book, it will be more work because you have to navigate through the book yourself, and the books can be expensive. I have the four-volume Liturgy of the Hours set, which cost $130 US, and the Roman Breviary, which cost $400 US. The Roman Breviary comes with a little instruction booklet, and a set of more detailed instructions at the beginning. The Liturgy of the Hours books also has a set of instructions at the beginning of the first volume, but if you want to use that, I would recommend also picking up The Divine Office for Dodos, which is the book I used when I got started with it last year. You can also ask questions at https://www.reddit.com/r/divineoffice/, and there are both priests and experienced laity who post there and can help you.

That's my introduction. I hope you'll try it, and continue to pray the Rosary. I'll post again with more details about the Liturgy of the Hours.

The Dominicans

I came back to the Catholic Church last year after spending most of my adult life as an atheist. On returning, I found that the Church has many treasures that I never knew about growing up, the most noteworthy for me being the Liturgy of the Hours, Traditional Latin Mass, and a small but vibrant Eastern Catholic tradition including the Divine Liturgy and Saturday evening Vespers. The Dominicans are another group I didn't know about growing up, and I would like to talk about them today. I do want to talk about the Liturgy of the Hours, the Traditional Latin Mass, and the Eastern Catholics, but I will cover them in future posts.

I found the Dominicans when I was learning the Liturgy of the Hours, which is the official Catholic prayer book. The daily prayers include Psalms, which can be recited or chanted, so I wanted to learn about Gregorian Chant. I looked for a video about it. The guy in the video mentioned that he was a lay Dominican. I was intrigued by that, and did a google search. It turned out there was a group of Lay Dominicans that met monthly a few miles down the street from me. I put in an inquiry through there website, and the formation director responded and invited me to a retreat they were having. I'm currently in the process of inquiring with them. If everything goes well in the next year, I will be joining the order as a layperson.

So who are the Dominicans and what do they do? The Dominicans are a religious order. All of the religious orders have a heavy focus on prayer and religious community life, but the Dominicans also specialize in study and sharing what we've learned with others. Famous Dominicans include St. Thomas Aquinas and Fra Angelico.

I'm Back!

Hello everyone!

It's been a while since my last post. While I was gone I converted (reverted actually) to Catholicism. Now I will be dedicating this blog to explaining basic Catholic concepts and explaining why they are relevant in today's world. Stay tuned.

Oprah, Designer Fashion and Groupthink

I was in the local laundromat a few days ago, and Oprah's talk show happened to be on television there. They were doing a segment where they dress identical twins in the same outfit, one from a top-name designer, the other off-the-rack from wherever, and the audience is supposed to guess which one was designer.

The models were wearing the "little black dress" under a fake fur stole (I guess that's what it's called, it looked like a vest). My eyes were drawn instantly to the model on the right, who looked shapely and confident, as opposed to the other model, whose dress looked, for lack of a better term, flat. Remembering that they were identical twins, it was obvious that I was missing something. I noticed that the shading on the "shapely" model's dress happened to have lighter or darker areas apparently placed for strategic highlights, where the other dress was the same shade throughout. So, you'd think we have a clear winner, right?

Wrong. Oprah then asked the audience to vote by applause for which model was wearing the designer outfit. There was roughly the same amount of applause for each model. The conclusion was that there was no difference, that off-the-rack is just as good as custom design.

At this point, it's all I can do not to start yelling in the laundromat: "You people are nuts! I'm just a guy and I can tell the difference! Look at them! The curves! The shading! Oh, never mind..."

So we have an example of groupthink. It wasn't just Oprah. This was the entire audience deciding that there wasn't a difference, even though the difference was readily apparent. At least that's the charitable interpretation. The worst part is, it's quite possible that all of those people can vote.


I just had to get that off my chest. Thanks for reading.

Whatever Floats Your Boat

Item: a recent article on yourtango.com described things that women wear that annoy men. Apparently single men don't like women who wear outfits that show excessive cleavage, because they're "slutty." Well, I beg to differ. Anyone who has been to a bar more than once knows that what you see isn't necessarily what you get.

Item: I was having lunch in a local sports bar and overheard a conversation between two of the waitresses. They were talking about what types of men they like, and the question arose: "What about chubby?" That this question would even be asked indicates that there's no obvious consensus. That brings me to the point of this article.

We all have our own preferences. Hopefully, we honor those preferences, as opposed to going after what we think we should have. When we deny our preferences in favor of the accepted norms, bad things happen. First, we approach potential partners who don't fit our preferences, but do fit the norms. When this happens, we lose, especially if the potential partners are also interested. Second, because we deny our own preferences, we implicitly deny that others have their own preferences, so we pass up potential partners who would be interested because we assume they wouldn't be, and we lose again.

So what's the answer? Take out your laundry list of qualities you're looking for in a partner, and examine each one to see if it reflects what you really want, or what you think you're supposed to have.