For Lent this year, I decided to do something which I hadn’t done since I was in college: I wanted to reinvigorate my languishing prayer life, and so I pulled from my bookshelf a four-volume set of books, my old set of the Liturgy of the Hours, also known as the Divine Office. Some of the books’ ribbon bookmarks showed that I had stopped using the books abruptly and had just put them away, where they gathered dust for years. If I had wanted, I probably could have figured out the exact date when I stopped using the books based on the locations of the bookmark ribbons. Instead, I just moved and adjusted them so that they were in place for the start of the Lenten season, which was coming up soon.
So what is the Liturgy of the Hours?
Many factors played into the development of the Liturgy of the Hours, a liturgy with a long, rich history, but the main idea is this: as St. Paul exhorted the Thessalonians in his first letter to them, we must “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). By capitalizing upon the ancient Jewish custom of praying at certain times of the day, the early Christian Church developed a system of praying the psalms and scriptures at various times of the day, so that, at any given moment, in theory someone somewhere was praying, and thus the whole Church would fulfill St. Paul’s command. Eventually, after various changes to the prayers which became known as the Liturgy of the Hours, the Second Vatican Council tried to revitalize and reform it so that anyone can pray it. (For more details about Vatican II’s decisions and desires regarding the Liturgy of the Hours, along with a very brief reflection on the meaning of the Liturgy of the Hours, check out chapter IV of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the council’s document on the liturgical reforms.)
How I learned to love the Liturgy of the Hours
Up until I included the Liturgy of the Hours in my Lenten efforts this year, I had always had a love-hate relationship with this form of prayer. I liked the emphasis on the psalms, but I couldn’t stand how the timing of the hours always seemed to get in the way of everyday life. It always seemed like, no matter how much I tried to like the Liturgy of the Hours, it was just “too much” and disrupted the rhythm of everyday life. I realize now that my disdain for this liturgy as “too much” came as I lived in a very Catholic environment during my college years, when prayer was almost forced upon me; now, far removed from any sort of idyllic Catholic world, I began to realize the importance of setting aside intentional time to pray during the day, especially as the months of the pandemic stretched onward and began to blend together. I realized that the perfect answer for engaging with the cycles of the seasons and preventing feeling lost in time sat undisturbed on my bookshelf: the liturgical year, specifically in the form of the Liturgy of the Hours. As I looked more closely at the liturgical year, I began to see how each component of the liturgical year works together with the other parts and the whole of the year: penance on Fridays is balanced by the feasting of Sundays and solemnities, and the Easter season, with its constant use of the word “Alleluia”, reminds us that the Lord engages with us in our own lives.
The Liturgy of the Hours allows us to engage with the liturgical year through its selection of psalms, other Scripture passages, and writings from and about the saints. On the days of Easter, for example, the joyous nature of the season shines through the readings from the letters of St. John; on the feast of St. Charles Lwanga, which is today, June 3rd, we read from Pope Paul VI’s homily at the canonization Mass for that saint and his companions, who were martyred in Uganda in the 1800s. Thus the Liturgy of the Hours links us in an almost tangible way to the liturgical life of the Church.
Easy ways to start praying the Liturgy of the Hours
If you’re interested in the Liturgy of the Hours, you have several options for getting started with it. Firstly, we as lay people have no obligation to pray it, so we can pick and choose which hours we wish to pray. I highly recommend Night Prayer (also known as Compline), because Night Prayer has a one-week cycle of psalms and prayers, making it easy to pick up on the rhythm of the liturgy before you dive deeply into it. Also, once you start moving forward, you can look at praying Morning or Evening Prayer (or both, though they’re longer than Night Prayer!), known as Lauds and Vespers, respectively. These three hours of Morning, Evening, and Night Prayer are the primary hours of the day.
So here are some ways to get started, from cheapest to more expensive:
1. Use the iBreviary app. (“Breviary” is another term for the books of the Liturgy of the Hours.) iBreviary is free to use and can be downloaded in your app store. The biggest benefits of iBreviary: you don’t have to pay for it, and it has all of the prayers and psalms laid out for you already. No need to flip through the sometimes confusing books!
2. If you’re not such a fan of praying on your phone, you can use a website which uses a different name for the Liturgy of the Hours: the Divine Office. Again, the big benefit of that website is that it has everything set out for you, making it very easy to use.
3. If you want a small book of the Liturgy of the Hours, you can buy one called Shorter Christian Prayer. It’s small and doesn’t have every single hour (it has Morning and Evening Prayer, along with Night Prayer, but not the Office of Readings or Daytime Prayer), but it is much cheaper than any of the larger book versions of the Liturgy of the Hours.
4. Finally, if you’ve decided to take the full plunge, you have two main options for book forms of the Liturgy of the Hours: either the single-volume Christian Prayer book, or the full four-volume Liturgy of the Hours. If you can justify the expense, I highly recommend the four-volume version, as it has all of the different prayers, liturgical cycles, and readings in it with nothing skipped for the sake of size. However, if you’re looking for something a bit cheaper, Christian Prayer has Morning, Evening, and Night Prayer, along with a limited selection of saints’ days prayers too.
Ultimately, if you’re ready to take your liturgical life to the next level, you have many options for getting involved with the Liturgy of the Hours. Don’t let the initial complexity scare you: once you get the rhythm down, you’ll find yourself liking it a lot!