Friday, May 16, 2008

Protestants praying the Liturgy of the Hours

Very cool! That's from boundless.org, a site for college students that's put out by Focus on the Family. I think I would have loved the Hours myself as a Protestant. I always wanted to know more about church history and how past Christians thought, and the great majority of the non-Biblical readings in the Office of Readings are from before AD 500 (though there's a fair selection of medieval authors and a very few from more recent times.) The one thing that drives me crazy about the breviaries is that they don't print the dates of those non-Biblical readings. In most cases they're so old; it would be great if people knew that!

My mom's another Protestant who likes praying the Hours. I don't think she stresses about doing all the prayers, readings, antiphons and hymns in exactly the prescribed order on the prescribed day. It's pretty hard to work out by oneself, though Googling will turn up some sites that can help. I learned by following the priests and other parishioners at my church, where we have the Office of Readings and Morning Prayer every weekday morning. (The two of them together only take us about 25 minutes.) That way I was also able to look on with someone else who owned the breviaries, until I was certain I'd actually do it consistently and I dared to spring for the four-volume set myself. One can also find most of the readings for each day at universalis.com; that would be another way to start praying the Hours without paying $140. Anyone getting the four breviaries is gonna wanna get a St. Joseph Guide for the current year as well; that tells what pages you're on for each day.

1 comment:

liturgy said...

I hope you'll visit my site "Liturgy" www.liturgy.co.nz
where at http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/blogsearch?q=liturgy%20of%20the%20hours&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enNZ252NZ252&um=1&sa=N&tab=wb
I try & encourage the ecumenical praying of the Liturgy of the Hours.
I hope you might link to these.
Let me know so I link back.
Cool site!