Questions about Daytime and Night Prayers

[Cor_ad_Cor]

I’m hoping someone can help me with LOTH. I’m using Christian Prayer, and I have morning and evening pretty well down. I’m a little lost on daytime, and I want to confirm that I correctly understand night.

For night prayer, it’s just a one-week cycle that repeats rather than the 4-week cycle for morning/evening, correct?

Is daytime prayer also done in a one-week cycle?

Assuming I’m right about the one-week cycle for daytime, does this mean that I use all 3 psalms for the current day in the daytime prayer if I’m only praying once during the day, without ever using the complimentary psalms?

If I’m dividing into midmorning, midday, and afternoon, how do I know which current psalm or complimentary psalm to use when? Are three psalms used per ‘hour’, and if so, doesn’t that mean that I’ll repeat the complimentary psalms a second time in the day? (I guess I’m thinking there should be 9 psalms between the current and the complimentary, but there are only 6.)

 

[OraLabora]

I’m hoping someone can help me with LOTH. I’m using Christian Prayer, and I have morning and evening pretty well down. I’m a little lost on daytime, and I want to confirm that I correctly understand night.

For night prayer, it’s just a one-week cycle that repeats rather than the 4-week cycle for morning/evening, correct?

Is daytime prayer also done in a one-week cycle?

Assuming I’m right about the one-week cycle for daytime, does this mean that I use all 3 psalms for the current day in the daytime prayer if I’m only praying once during the day, without ever using the complimentary psalms?

If I’m dividing into midmorning, midday, and afternoon, how do I know which current psalm or complimentary psalm to use when? Are three psalms used per ‘hour’, and if so, doesn’t that mean that I’ll repeat the complimentary psalms a second time in the day? (I guess I’m thinking there should be 9 psalms between the current and the complimentary, but there are only 6.)

Night prayer is a 1-week cycle, but there’s also the option to use the Sunday (after Evening Prayer 1 and 2) psalms every day. This is to facilitate recitation from memory as was done in monasteries for many centuries.

For daytime prayer, you say all the psalms for mid-day prayer at whichever of the 3 hours you choose. You only use the complementary psalter if you say one or more of the other daytime hours. You say the psalms from mid-day prayer at one of the hours and the appropriate complementary psalms at the others.

I’m not sure about Christian prayer as I don’t use it, but I think it has an abridged mid-day 1-week cycle. The full LOTH has a 4-week psalm cycle for mid-day prayer.

There are no rubrics about what to do with complementary psalms repeated elsewhere. Therefore you can repeat them, or move mid-day prayer around to avoid repeating them.

Traditionally in the Monastic Divine Office, those complementary psalms were used for all of Terce, Sext and None from Tuesday to Saturday (three psalms of the 9 at each hour) again because they were short, easy to memorize and thus the Office could be recited from memory when working in the fields.

 

[Magdalen2013]

Night Prayer is a one week cycle.

Daytime Prayer in the one volume Christian Prayer from CBP is one week. The Daughters of St. Paul LotH’s Four Week Psalter has the Psalms for Daytime Prayer as well as Morning and Evening.

If you only have time to do one of the Little Hours in Daytime Prayer, you use the Psalms for that Day. If you have time to do more, you use the Complementary Psalms for the other hours. It IS three psalms for each hour.

If you’ll look at the Complementary Psalms, you’ll see that there are three series, 1-Midmorning, 2-Mid-day, and 3-Midafternoon.

In the BCP edition of the LotH, there are three psalms under each heading. So with the psalms listed in the actual Day, there are 12 psalms available for you to use.