Tag: Liturgy of the Hours

null

Holy Week in the Liturgy of the Hours

franciscanmomLeave a comment

Don’t miss the beauty of Holy Week liturgy—including the Liturgy of the Hours!

While Holy Thursday and Good Friday rightly get lots of attention, the earlier days of Holy Week shouldn’t be overlooked.

A few observations and tips to get you through this week of praying:

Morning Prayer includes readings from the prophets who foretold Christ’s suffering.

Evening Prayer’s readings focus on Christ’s sacrifice and its implications for us.

If you attend the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday, you do not also pray Evening Prayer.

If you attend the liturgical celebration of the Passion on Good Friday, you do not also pray Evening Prayer.

Highly recommended: the Second Reading in the Office of Readings for Holy Saturday.

Holy Saturday pro tip: pray Evening Prayer before you head to the Easter Vigil.

 

Get ready for the Easter Octave with a FREE downloadable bookmark!

Download and print my Easter Antiphons bookmark and save yourself a whole lot of page-flipping during Morning Prayer for the Octave of Easter.

 

This week on Instagram, I’m highlighting one beautiful element from each day’s Liturgy of the Hours.

Ask for The Handy Little Guide to the Liturgy of the Hours at your local Catholic bookstore, or order online from Amazon.com or the publisher, Our Sunday Visitor.

 

null

 

Copyright 2023 Barb Szyszkiewicz
Images copyright 2023 Barb Szyszkiewicz (created in Canva), all rights reserved.
This post contains Amazon affiliate links. Your purchase through these links supports the work of this website at no additional cost to you. Thank you!

null

You Won’t Need This Page This Year

franciscanmomLeave a comment

Your Liturgy of the Hours Tip of the Day: what to do when St. Joseph’s Day falls on a Monday

March 19 is the Solemnity of St. Joseph, unless March 19 is a Sunday or falls on certain days within Holy Week or Easter Week. This year, since March 19 is a Sunday, the Catholic Church in the USA will celebrate St. Joseph on Monday, March 20.

That means there’s a page you’re not going to need this year.

 

null

 

Sundays in Lent are of a (slightly) higher liturgical rank than Solemnities. So tonight, pray Evening Prayer II for the Fourth Sunday of Lent. Tomorrow, celebrate St. Joseph all day!

If you have a St. Joseph Guide to the Liturgy of the Hours, which is an excellent resource for putting you on the right page for each day’s prayers, you’ll be all set. Find this at your local Catholic bookseller or online at CatholicCompany.com.

If you’re praying through the Divine Office app, you may have noticed that they have the prayers for St. Joseph’s feast today (Sunday, March 19), which is not applicable to Catholics in the USA. So you’ll need a book today, not an app, to be praying the prayers for this liturgical day.

Are you interested in praying the Liturgy of the Hours, or learning to use the breviary for these prayers instead of relying on an app? Get my new booklet, The Handy Little Guide to the Liturgy of the Hours.

 

null

 

Copyright 2023 Barb Szyszkiewicz

Photos copyright 2023 Barb Szyszkiewicz

Amazon links are included; your purchase through these links supports the work of this website at no additional cost to you.

null

Ease In to the Liturgy of the Hours this Lent

franciscanmomLeave a comment

Have you ever tried praying the Liturgy of the Hours?

Have you ever given up praying the Liturgy of the Hours because it seems too complicated? Too many pages, too many ribbons, too many ways to go wrong?

What if I told you that you can pray one part of the Liturgy of the Hours without needing to flip around in the book—all you need to know is what day of the week it is?

For real.

This Lent, try praying Night Prayer.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a saint’s feast day or the season of Lent or anything like that: there’s only one week a year that Night Prayer is different, and the instructions for that are right there in the book.

In my new book The Handy Little Guide to the Liturgy of the Hours (available now on Kindle; the print version releases March 27), I emphasize that for Liturgy of the Hours beginners, Night Prayer is a simple introduction to the cadence of the prayers.

Is it worth the effort? Yes. Is it doable? Yes! Start small, both in building the habit of prayer and your skills in navigating the breviary. Night Prayer is a wonderful way to begin, because it’s shorter and less complex than Morning and Evening Prayer. Take all the time you need to build up your prayer muscles. (21-22)

 

If you’re using Christian Prayer, you’ll find Night Prayer beginning on p. 1034.

 

null

Copyright 2023 Barb Szyszkiewicz
Photos created in Stencil, all rights reserved.

This article contains Amazon links; your purchase through these links supports the work of this website at no cost to you. Thank you!

Holy Cross Cathedral Boston 2019

At Simply Catholic: Prayer as Liturgy

franciscanmom1 Comment

I have a new article up at Our Sunday Visitor’s SimplyCatholic.com: Prayer as Liturgy.

A few highlights:

Liturgy, which includes but is not limited to the Holy Mass, is considered “formal” prayer because it follows a certain pattern, or rubric. Liturgical prayer is also “common” prayer, meant to be prayed by the community as a group.

The liturgy of the Church includes the Mass, the Liturgy of the Hours, and the celebrations of the sacraments.

Liturgical prayer invites us to engage in praise, blessing and adoration, thanksgiving, petition and intercession as a community.

Read the whole thing: Prayer as Liturgy.

This is the second in a series of eight articles on prayer. A new one will be published each Tuesday at SimplyCatholic.com.

 

Boston's Holy Cross Cathedral, copyright 2019
Boston’s Holy Cross Cathedral

 

Copyright 2021 Barb Szyszkiewicz
Photo copyright 2019 Barb Szyszkiewicz, all rights reserved.

3 Handy Little Tips for Praying the Liturgy of the Hours

franciscanmomLeave a comment

Welcome to this series celebrating the launch of my booklet from Our Sunday Visitor, The Handy Little Guide to Prayer! I’ve asked some friends and colleagues to share prayers and tips to supplement the information in this booklet.

The Liturgy of the Hours follows a daily rhythm of prayer throughout the liturgical year. If Scripture is inspiring to you and structure is helpful when you pray, this type of prayer is a perfect fit. I’ve prayed the Liturgy of the Hours since my college days, and it’s not a practice you pick up overnight. It takes time to get used to following the format of this prayer, and it’s easier when you learn it in a group rather than on your own.

Are you interested in praying the Liturgy of the Hours? Try this advice from Daria Sockey, author of The Everyday Catholic’s Guide to the Liturgy of the Hours. I asked Daria what beginners to this form of prayer need to know.

What 3 tips would you share with someone who’s just beginning to pray the Liturgy of the Hours?

  1. Start small. Choose one or at the most two liturgical hours and stick with that until you are comfortable. My choice for a beginner would be Night Prayer, a.k.a. compline. It’s the easiest to follow, since it’s a seven-day repeating cycle with no fancy variations for the liturgical seasons. No ribbon flipping required.
  2. Use a breviary app before investing in a four-volume breviary. Everything is all laid out for you, no guessing or worrying that you are on the wrong page. Also, you can experiment with adding the other hours until you’ve figured out what works best for you.
  3. Join a Facebook group of Liturgy of the Hours fans. There are several good ones with lots of members who were once rank beginners and are now eager to help other newcomers. (Or buy my book to learn the how-tos and the why-tos.)

How would you encourage someone who finds the Liturgy of the Hours too complicated?

If you try the fairly uncomplicated Night prayer for two weeks running and still don’t like it, then maybe this is not for you. That’s okay — there are many other ways to pray! But if those lovely night time psalms grab your heart like they did mine so many years ago, then find someone to help you get over the complicated parts. It’s like learning to ride a bike. Awkward at first, but once you’ve got it down you’ll never forget.

What do you love about praying the Liturgy of the Hours?

For me it’s the best way to do those two things that we all say we want to do and know we need to do: to pray often, and to immerse ourselves in the Word of God. I don’t have to separate my spiritual schedule into separate chunks of “now I’m going to pray” and “now I’m going to read Scripture.” Instead, I pray Scripture!

Daria Sockey writes at Coffee and Canticles, a blog about all things Breviary, and is the author of The Everyday Catholic’s Guide to the Liturgy of the Hours.

Share The Handy Little Guide to Prayer with someone you know. It’s now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, BooksAMillion.com, and OSVCatholicBooks.com!

Copyright 2021 Barb Szyszkiewicz

Support Franciscanmom.com by purchasing books mentioned here through my Amazon affiliate links.

Living in the (Prayer) Moment

franciscanmom2 Comments

This Lent I decided to give up a prayer app. I’d been using the Divine Office app to pray the Liturgy of the Hours for several years, and I saw someone post on Twitter about using only the breviary books during the season.

I made an exception for a few days while I was traveling for work, but otherwise I went the whole season with the books I’d barely opened since I found the app all those years ago.

The person who originally posted the idea (I can’t remember whose idea it was just now) said he wanted to combat laziness. I’m plenty lazy, which originally attracted me to try this practice during Lent, but I discovered something else this season that I need to combat even more.

I don’t live in the moment.

During my twice-daily Lenten ribbon-flipping with the big breviary, I found myself looking ahead to the next time I’d be using the book – and setting the ribbon in the right place before I moved on. I’m not meditating on the psalms during Lauds if I’m flipping two pages ahead to mark the ones for Vespers.

LOTH 2
Copyright 2019 Barb Szyszkiewicz, OFS. All rights reserved.

But that’s what I’m doing. It’s not even like I’m saving any time or doing something I can’t do at the start of prayers the next time.

It’s a way I can indulge my tendency to always worry about what comes next. Whether it’s meals or clothing or having gas in the car, I want to be prepared for whatever’s coming – and that comes at the cost of savoring the here and now.

While this tendency is definitely an asset in my editorial work (it’s April, and I’m currently collecting magazine articles for the fall issue and assigning articles for winter), it’s not necessarily a good thing in other areas of my life.

During the second half of Lent, I actively concentrated on not moving those ribbons to the next section during (or even immediately after) prayer. It just about drove me nuts, but I managed it.

Switching from app to book didn’t turn out to be too penitential, but leaving those ribbons alone definitely was.

Will I go back to the app, starting tonight? I don’t think so. I like using the book, actually. And it’s good for me to have the twice-daily reminder that I don’t always need to be looking ahead.

Except the part where I’m looking ahead for the sake of my eternal soul.

LOTH 3
Copyright 2019 Barb Szyszkiewicz. All rights reserved.

Copyright 2019 Barb Szyszkiewicz

Prayer Should be Free

franciscanmomLeave a comment

Yesterday my friend, Liturgy of the Hours expert Daria Sockey gave me a heads-up that my favorite Liturgy of the Hours app was being removed from the App Store and Google Play Store because of copyright issues with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

We have been a ministry dedicated to bringing the Liturgy of the Hours to everyone everywhere for many years. We grew out of an RCIA Committee to become facilitators of thousands of people who pray together. I have dedicated more than 10 years in God’s service to this work. In that zeal to serve and naivety we acquired some permissions, but we are missing some key ones. —Dane Falkner, producer of Divine Office

Daria kindly gave me permission to share her article on the subject at CatholicMom.com, encouraging readers to purchase the app at a discounted price before it would be removed from the stores today.

And then, overnight, the app was pulled from the stores early; it appears that pressure was brought to bear by the USCCB.

I’m all for giving credit where credit is due and for obtaining permission before using text or images that belong to other people.

But the USCCB’s policy of requiring complicated permissions on their translation of Biblical texts is absolutely ridiculous and counterproductive. Divine Office’s app and website are there to help people pray.

This is not the first time this has happened; see Matthew Warner’s comments on Daria Sockey’s original post on this subject.

The USCCB and LEV need a serious wakeup call when it comes to this stuff. They are literally requiring you to pay them money in order for you to share the bible, catechism and other liturgical texts with people FOR FREE. It’s insane and the definition of scandal. They are literally SELLING CHURCH TEACHING. This is not like selling a book or some material (where clearly the physical item and those who produce, market and distribute deserve just compensation). But even if I want to take the most basic and essential church teachings, do ALL of the work myself to share it with somebody, give it to people FOR FREE…the USCCB and LEV STILL demand somebody pay them huge amounts of money (royalties), all for helping them do the work of the Church! It’s insane and we should be ashamed. Bishops should be outraged the the organization that represents them is going around threatening to sue the good guys and implementing policies that don’t stop the bad guys. —Matthew Warner

What can you do to help save DivineOffice.org?

Daria has some good ideas. I’ve summarized them here, but go to her blog for full information.

  • register as a user on their website (it’s FREE) while you still can
  • respectfully write to your Bishop and to Bishop Serratelli (of the Paterson, NJ diocese)
  • donate to DivineOffice.org to help with the legal expenses they will undoubtedly incur as they fight to keep their site open and their app available

And please spread the word. I’ve seen hashtags #prayershouldbefree and #freetheword and #savedivineoffice — and the USCCB is on Twitter @USCCB. Find Divine Office on Twitter @DivineOffice.

Divine Office for FI prayer should be free

Breviary Notes 3/18

franciscanmom1 Comment

Breviary NotesThe Reading for today’s Morning Prayer was Deuteronomy 7: 6, 8-9.

It includes the phrase, “…faithful God who keeps his merciful covenant…”

Merciful.

God’s covenant is merciful.

Of course it is–what else would it be? But I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before! God wants what’s good for us, because He loves us. And that’s what mercy is all about: wanting the good for others.

Today, may we be a sign of mercy in the world in which God has placed us.