Trinity Sunday Alert! Plus Q&A

For those of you who use a print breviary, thus not having a personal digital servant to find the correct page for you:

Trinity Sunday begins with Evening Prayer I tonight. So, although we've been using the psalter alone for the 8th week of ordinary time, you'll be going back to the proper of seasons to do a special office for Trinity Sunday. This is page 641 in the one volume "Christian Prayer" breviary, and page 572 in the four volume breviary. (volume III)

You'll be doing the same sort of thing next Sunday for Corpus Christi, and also on June 12th for the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart.

Feel free to ask any questions about the Liturgy of the Hours by making a comment below. I will try to answer in a timely fashion.

Enjoy these lovely spring/summer days that seem to be here to stay at last.

Don't forget, you may add extra intentions to the intercessions at Evening Prayer. Don't forget to include help and healing and courage for all who have suffered in recent floods in Texas.   

Airtime for the Liturgy of the Hours

I just noticed an article about the Liturgy of the Hours in the latest print edition of the National Catholic Register.  I hope that link will open for non-suscribers. Let me know.  

Next,  I found something even better: this podcast of the latest Register Radio program, in which the author of the article, Celeste Behe, talks with Register director Dan Burke all about our favorite scriptural prayer.

Both Dan and Celeste make many good points about the impact of liturgical prayer in their lives, and it's significance in our troubled times.  They bring up several instances of Catholic workplaces where the staff pray one or more of the hours together each day, and the positive effect that this has had on interpersonal relations.

They also plug my book several times during the discussion, and I am grateful for that.

This part of the podcast starts at around 14:20, in case you don't have time to listen to the earlier guest during the first half of the podcast.

As always, please feel free to make any comment or ask any question related to the Liturgy of the Hours in the comment section below.

Hymns and hymn tunes for Christian Prayer

Lay people who pray the Liturgy of the Hours at home often find the hymns that open each hour to be troublesome and confusing.

I'll deal with confusing first.

 You notice that the hymn for, say, today's Morning Prayer is  one thing at DivineOffice.org, but two different selections at Ibreviary.com; that in volume II of the four-volume set it is still something else; and that in the Christian Prayer breviary you are free to choose one of any 11 Easter hymns in the guide.
Which kind of makes you wonder how "official" these hymn choices are when they differ so widely among the various breviaries, both print and digital.

The answer: not very official at all. If you wanted to, you could choose a different Easter season hymn whether it appears in your breivary or not. My Easter hymn of choice is the sequence from the Mass of Easter Sunday, "Christians Praise the Pascal Victim" , so I sing it nearly every morning from Easter until Ascension.

Now for troublesome. What happens when you don't know the hymn? There are several options:
1. Just read the lyrics as if you were reading a poem. There's no strict requirement to sing it.
2. Substitute another hymn that you do know.
3. You really want to sing the hymn that appears in your breviar? Then look it up on one of the very helpful blogs:

Breviary Hymns, where the ever helpful Kevin Shaw  tells you about the history of each hymn in a separate post and then links you to a YouTube video performance of it.

OR:
Christian Prayer Hymns, where the equally helpful "Jim" give you a single page of links for every single hymn in the Christian Prayer breviary.

These two guys have done a tremendous work for the musically challenged among us.