Times of the Divine Office

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Martin15

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Hi all

I’ve a question regarding the timings of Morning Prayer:

When I say ‘timings’ I’m actually after two things:

Firstly, how late is too late to say Morning Prayer? I have a young daughter so often our getting up is dictated by her waking up - so saying Lauds before getting out of bed isn’t going to happen. Usually she has breakfast and I drive to work before saying Lauds in the chapel at work. However on the days when I don’t go to work I find it difficult to find the time once I am up and about in the house.

Also, there are some days when I am able to go to morning mass at my church. However I am often faced with the decision of saying morning prayer and being late for or even missing mass, or getting to mass on time. My preference has always been to go to mass, for obvious reasons, but should I then say morning prayer when I get back from mass? or even in the church after mass?

I couldn’t remember finding any reference to such a problem in the instructions at the front of the breviary, so I thought I’d ask here.

What do people think?

All the best

Martin
 
Friend,
I’m borrowing a quote from member Deo Volente responding to a thread at: forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=699619&highlight=sanctifying
who wrote,
“Whatever you choose, the important thing is your commitment not to praying all of the hours every day, but to sanctifying the day. From personal experience, it’s just not possible for me to pray all of the hours. But praying Lauds and Vespers is pretty easy and straightforward (and gradually adding Compline is a terrific way to really end the day).”
It would be nice if I could anchor my daily life around the the Hours of the breviary but as a family man some days it’s just not possible. I took comfort from the quote above in that no matter what time in the morning I pray the Office for that hour, someone else is likewise praying the breviary at the right time somewhere in the world. Once I remember going into the church at 11am to pray before the noon Mass and at that late hour I prayed the LOTH using my iPod Touch. One night I went to bed and prayed both Evening Prayer and Compline back to back–I skipped EP by accident earlier in the evening.

Just do your best,

Joe
 
In my experiences with asking this question to priests, any time if it is before noon is fine, but obviously 8 is better than 1150…just doesn’t feel right talking about the sun rising when its already lunch time! lol i do morning, evening, and night prayer most nights, and sometimes i add a daytime prayer. Like the other poster said, it’s about sanctifying the day!
 
datritle said:
In my experiences with asking this question to priests, any time if it is before noon is fine, but obviously 8 is better than 1150…just doesn’t feel right talking about the sun rising when its already lunch time! lol i do morning, evening, and night prayer most nights, and sometimes i add a daytime prayer. Like the other poster said, it’s about sanctifying the day!
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I just try and do it at my personal morning. If I get up at noon once and a while, I’ll do it then, and do midday prayer a little later.
 
From the General Instructions of the Liturgy of the Hours:
  1. The purpose of the liturgy of the hours is to sanctify the day and the whole range of human activity. Therefore its structure has been revised in such a way as to make each hour once more correspond as nearly as possible to natural time and to take account of the circumstances of life today. [57]
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Hence, “that the day may be truly sanctified and the hours themselves recited with spiritual advantage, it is best that each of them be prayed at a time most closely corresponding to the true time of each canonical hour.” [58]
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“It is best…” is of course not a hard-and-fast rule, however I’m inclined to agree with it. The prayers, intercessions and psalms of Lauds for instance, don’t make a whole lot of sense if celebrated at noon when half the work day is past. Many of the intercessions ask to sanctify the day.

My own preference is that when ordinary life interferes with an Office, to simply skip it and offer whatever task needs to be done as a special offering to God. I learned early on, when I had young kids and was learning the LoTH, that family needs and obligations trump prayer time, and in fact carrying out those tasks is prayer. My own preference for Lauds is anytime between sunrise and 8:30 am. Beyond that, it tends to lose its meaning. For me, the canonical hours also mark pivot times in my day:

Office of Readings (Vigils): 6 am immediately after rising;
Lauds: 7 am, immediately prior to getting in my car and commuting to work; this marks when I leave the family and start my work obligations;
Terce: 9 am, immediately upon arriving at work and starting the actual work day;
Sext: 11:45 am, just prior to the noon break;
None: 3 pm, as a breather before the home stretch of the work day;
Vespers: variable, when I arrive home (my commute time can vary), usually around 6:30 or 7 pm, marking the transition back into family life (we usually have dinner at 7-7:30 pm);
Compline: just before retiring for the night, usually at around 9:30 pm.

Obviously some things can derail this pattern: for Terce, Sext and None, arriving at work late, meetings or emergencies at work can force me to drop one or two of those hours (when that happens I do mid-day prayer only, sometimes after lunch instead of before); having to leave earlier than usual to meet a client means that sometimes I have to combine the OOR and Lauds into “Matins” and recite rather than chant the Office; and for Vespers arriving home very late causes problems on occasion. I just skip Vespers if that happens. On weekends my wife and I often go cycling (summer) or hiking (winter) together; I only do the mid-day hour during the day and skip the other two.

The thing I really like about the LoTH is the rhythm it gives to life. It has several built-in rhythms that I find very useful: the rhythm of daily life, the rhythm of the seasons (liturgical year), the parade of saints and special feasts that spice up the Office in order to inspire us and break the monotony, yet on the other hand, the constancy of the ordinary ferial office also gives rhythm, predictability and pace to life. The LoTH is a comforting presence that gives structure to the day and year!

(As an aside, the prior and sacristan of the abbey I’m affiliated with, which does a very thorough job with the liturgy, jokes that he has a very great devotion to St. Feria! Some feasts can be quite a bit of work to celebrate in Gregorian chant and with all the extras!)
 
I’m a layman with no canonical obligation, but I tend to follow what diocesan priests would observe, namely:

Pray Lauds and Vespers when possible. Since diocesan priests are bound to only one daytime hour, I would favour Lauds any time in the morning, up to just before noon, then one daytime hour, appropriate to civil time, then Vespers any time before Compline.

However, unlike diocesan priests (who would still probably be bound to recite Lauds in the afternoon if for some just reason, they could not do so in the morning), I would simply skip Lauds if I slept in, or Vespers if I couldn’t get to it. As I said, I have no canonical obligation. But I would have no trouble praying Lauds at 10:00 or 11:00 AM if need be, and then pray Terce for the daytime hour, or Vespers at 8:00 or 9:00 PM if Compline were to come at midnight.
 
Thanks for all the replies.

A lot of what has been said makes a great deal of sense, and is I think what I had in my mind already, but it is very nice to find that others have the same difficulties.

OraLabora, you have an amazing dedication to the LoTH in order to pray the whole office, I wish I had the time, unfortunately as a teacher I tend to work constantly between 8.30am and 4pm.

A few people have mentioned Lauds being the more difficult one to say out of its time-slot, given the references to dawn and so on; I fully agree with this, but also think it is good to remember that it is still sanctifying the day, so if one gets up late, it would still be appropriate. What do people think about those days when I go to mass in the morning - it wouldn’t seem to be appropriate to say Lauds after that if we are seeing Lauds as sanctifying the start of the day.

Thanks again.

Martin
 
Martin15 said:
Thanks for all the replies.

A lot of what has been said makes a great deal of sense, and is I think what I had in my mind already, but it is very nice to find that others have the same difficulties.

OraLabora, you have an amazing dedication to the LoTH in order to pray the whole office, I wish I had the time, unfortunately as a teacher I tend to work constantly between 8.30am and 4pm.

A few people have mentioned Lauds being the more difficult one to say out of its time-slot, given the references to dawn and so on; I fully agree with this, but also think it is good to remember that it is still sanctifying the day, so if one gets up late, it would still be appropriate. What do people think about those days when I go to mass in the morning - it wouldn’t seem to be appropriate to say Lauds after that if we are seeing Lauds as sanctifying the start of the day.

Thanks again.

Martin
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Thanks,

I think for me, having a strong affinity for monastic tradition, one important factor in the celebration of the canonical hours is the hour’s relationship with light.

In early monasticism, there was no sure way to regulate time other than the sun. In the abbey I’m associated with, the very modern conventual chapel was designed to take advantage of natural light; the church faces east (in both the liturgical and geographic sense), and the quality of light at the different hours is very different. However the day is still regulated by the clock so that in addition there are seasonal variations.

In monastic days, Vigils (aka “Matins”, but I prefer the term “Vigils” as it monastic times it was really a vigil, a “night watch”), was started in the depths of the night, but arranged to finish at daybreak, when Lauds was chanted; in those days Lauds actually referred to the three “Laudate” psalms at the end of what we know as Lauds today: 148, 149 and 150. These are still in the monastic Divine Office every day for abbeys using Schema A (the original Benedictine arrangement). Alas in the Roman Office, Pius X broke with that tradition in 1910 and these three psalms were split from each other and distributed over different days of the week, something the modern LoTH perpetuates (many of the alleged “shortcomings” of the 1970 LoTH actually had their precedents set by Pius X in his 1910 reforms to the Divine Office). So Lauds does have a very special connection with sunrise and the transition from night to daylight. There was a ritual around the extinguishing of the lamps at this time.

Similarly Vespers has an early evening quality. There would also be a ritual for the lighting of the lamps at Vespers.

In our abbey today, regulated by a clock, we have lost much of this connection, however not entirely. Vigils is recited at 5 am finishing at around 5:50 on weekdays and 6:15 on Sundays. In summer this is in fact daybreak and for Lauds at 7:30 the morning is in full blaze. However in the depth of winter, Vigils is entirely in the dark. Vespers in summer is bright but the western light has a warm glow due to the architecture of the chapel. In winter, it’s in the dark. Of course in St. Benedict of Nursia’s Italy, the differences between summer and winter are less. Nonetheless recognizing the shorter night, St. Benedict called for shorter readings in summer. The original offices of Terce, Sext and None were intended to be very short and invariable on 5 days of the week, using the short Gradual Psalms; the reason, so that monks could memorize them and recite them from memory working in the fields.

So though we’ve lost a great deal of the symbolism of the Divine Office when it went from being regulated by a clock instead of the sun, I do think it’s best not to stray too far from the original meaning. That’s why I’m more inclined to skip an office than recite it way too late. But it’s not a hard-and-fast rule; it’s preferred in the General Instructions, and obviously many folks have to make adjustments or they would miss out on an important chunk of the Office. I’m just fortunate that I can arrange my day around the canonical hours.
 
Ora, do you know what the equivalent of “morning prayer” is in the Breviarium Romanum?
 
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