I am, I'm sorry to admit this, only now starting to discover the joy of daily liturgical prayer. I have copies from the library of the Common Worship:Daily Prayer and Celebrating Common Prayer (plus my own beloved Evangelisches Gesangbuch).
I wonder if anyone has any recommendations or thoughts about the various liturgical prayer books they may have used? What did you like/dislike about them? What have proven to be the most useful for you and why? I would appreciate opinions as I am rather new to this.
Here are the best links I've uncovered in my research:
- Celebrating Common Prayer: A version of The Daily Office
- The best of all: the Church of England Daily Pray feed, including The Book of Common Prayer and Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England.
- Schott's Messbuch Tagesimpuls
- Universalis
- The Jesuit Sacred Space
- Phyllis Tickle's Divine Hours
- The Confessing Evangelicals reviews
11 comments:
Welcome! :-)
I use the BCP of the Episcopal Church for the Office. The Psalter is based on the Coverdale one and is quite beautiful -- very few modern translations live up to it. It looks like Common Prayer also uses a seven-week Psalm cycle. I think that makes sense for most folks.
I used the Tickle books back in college, but there's just not enough Psalmody and not enough Scripture. The BCP Office does a much better job of getting a good balance.
Traditionally, there were seven or eight hours -- Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. I did use the traditional books for a while (the Anglican Breviary, which is a translation of the pre-Vatican II Roman Breviary), but getting all the Offices in is very difficult if you're not a monastic. But Noonday Prayer in the American BCP is easily adapted for Terce, Sext, and None, so I use the first Psalm and first reading from Noonday prayer at 9am, the second at noon, and the third at 3pm. It looks like the Common Prayer stuff can be similarly adapted if you decide you want to expand to a fuller, more traditional regimen.
The Mission of St Clare has the American Office online.
Forget the liturgy. You should get haircut!
Anonymous said...
Forget the liturgy. You should get haircut!
Now see here anonymous; you go too far. Especially now that he's put up his new dashing and scholarly photo. If you really want to complain about something, read his poetry! Oy Gevalt!
Hello Chris,
I love praying -- and chanting -- the Liturgy of the Hours. I can't imagine a day without it.
Personally, I use the Catholic Four Volume set according to the Roman Rite. Though I would imagine that the Anglicans have some very nice versions that might be more to your taste. At any rate, I think you'll end up loving the practice.
Regards,
John McBryde
In my community, we have a copy of "Celebrating Common Prayer" that we use regularly and we have found it to be quite wonderful. I highly recommend it. Even to just do one of the offices (say with you and your wife) on a daily basis is very transformative.
Grace and peace.
I have used Saint Augustine's Prayer Book before. There are used copies of this prayer book at Amazon.
It is one of the older devotional prayer books used by the Episcopal Church.
Hi Chris,
I have been using a German booklet called "TeDeum" for a while, available from the Katholisches Bibelwerk. It offered morning and evening prayer for each day with a compline for each week as well as some kind of liturgy for mid-day. What I loved about it was that it was small and easy to use. No browsing and searching of psalms or anything. All the readings came with the day, so you had it all together. The booklets came each month and were not too expensive, about 5 EUR per month. What annoyed me slightly were the prayer impulses they were giving, I found them, well, rather stupid.
I am now back to the good old BCP for Morning and Evening prayer (i use them in a shortened form and do only one reading) and must say I quite enjoy the simple structure and the repetition of the same prayers and canticle. Think I will try Common Worship Daily Prayer at some stage, but am not there yet.
No luck - don't know why its doing that, and you probably don't want to listen to Dutch anyway but in case you do go to www.katholieknederland.nl and click on mediapastoraat and then getijden...
This is all brilliant, many thanks people!
I'm glad to hear you're enjoying the daily praying of the Office. Fr. Francis Martin recounts his wonderful formation in the monastic hours in the introduction to his book, "Sacred Scripture: The Disclosure of the Word." I just read it a couple days ago, and it's a great reflection on the romantic view of such a life lived for the opus Dei.
I ran across a small book the other day called, "The School of Prayer: An Introduction to the Divine Office for All Christians" by John Brook written for the four-volume Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours. It gives general commentary on the liturgy of the week and the day, as well as the individual psalms/canticles used for the hours. Very helpful.
I like the Sacred Space site, but it tends to be more of lectio divina than liturgy of the hours...but a great way to pray as well.
Thanks so much the book recommendation, Jeremy!
I'm Congregational, not "high church" and I like the Eugene Peterson books "Praying With_____" and The Valley of Vision. There've been evangelical attempts at daily devotionals but I haven't found much to my liking.
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