00:00:00:00 – 00:00:45:18
Speaker 1
Welcome to conversation, the Belmont Abbey College podcast. This podcast aims to inform and transform our community so that each of us can reflect God’s image. Am brother Chrysostom, a former abbey. I’m the host for today’s episode, and today we’ll be talking about the monastic office in particular as it’s instantiated here. Our own office at Belmont Abbey. And today I’m joined by Father David, something of his apprentice, you know, learning chant and helping edit and complete our office, which has been a project since literally before I was born.

00:00:46:05 – 00:00:49:18
Speaker 1
So, Father David, if you could introduce yourself.

00:00:49:20 – 00:01:12:10
Speaker 2
I’m father David. I’ve been here at the Abbey for little over 50 years, and so I can speak to the office as it was when I came into the community. And as it is now, I can certainly claim not to be an expert in the office, but I do know about the office up here, and pretty much I’m about doing it and picking up tricks of the trade along the way.

00:01:12:11 – 00:01:32:11
Speaker 2
As we talk about the liturgy of the hours, I think it might be helpful to define some terms, since not everybody may be familiar with what are words that are sort of second nature to people in monastic communities? The word liturgy comes from a Greek word, as does the word office, and sometimes the liturgy is called the office.

00:01:32:12 – 00:02:06:19
Speaker 2
The Divine office. The office comes from the Latin word, but they both mean public service, a duty, something to be done. And these were secular words in Greek and Latin society. The church took them over to refer to the public worship, the public duty. It was up to the people in the church to worship God. And so the term Divine Office, or literally the hours, has come to mean the specific set of prayers prayed at specific times of the day, hence the term literally.

00:02:06:21 – 00:02:37:17
Speaker 2
It’s the term hours and liturgy and liturgy in a broader sense refers to the whole worship of the church to the entirety of the church’s worship, including the Divine Office. But both terms emphasize that the prayer of the church is the responsibility of all Christians, and not just priests and religious. For Brief history of the liturgy of the hours, we have to go back to Jewish time, in fact, to the time of Christ.

00:02:37:19 – 00:02:54:08
Speaker 2
We are not all that sure about what liturgy looked like in Jewish practice. We can kind of guess from little hints that we get in the New Testament. For example, we hear in John’s Gospel of Peter and John going up to the temple to pray, and off the top of my head I can’t remember. Third, that was the ninth that worked.

00:02:54:08 – 00:03:20:20
Speaker 2
But anyway, they went up to the temple to pray. And so they were they were practicing the Jewish custom of prayer at certain times of the day, as far as Christians were concerned, the first Christian liturgy, the hours, probably consisted of simply the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, at specific times and probably three times a day, morning, evening and midday.

00:03:20:22 – 00:03:50:00
Speaker 2
From the first centuries of the church, there developed three different kinds of prayer morning and evening prayers, daytime prayers, and by prayer. The Christian community generally prayed the morning and evening prayers, and sometimes the midday prayers as well the night prayers. They did not pray. All of these prayers consisted of hymns, prayers, orations, and readings, sometimes accompanied by a sermon or an exhortation, which also gives us the idea that this was something public.

00:03:50:00 – 00:04:16:01
Speaker 2
It wasn’t something done in private. Surprisingly enough, the Psalms weren’t added to the liturgy the hours until the third century. In any case, these hours of prayer were relatively touchable, and there was no set form for them, and depended in large measure on the local bishop and the local community as far as what was in the hours and the content of the structure.

00:04:16:02 – 00:04:44:22
Speaker 2
During the early fourth century, during the time of the Emperor Constantine, the church officially established the times of celebration and the content to be used to tradition spring up. Around this time, the so called cathedral office, so named because it grew up in cathedral churches and the monastic office which developed in but artistic communities, monks living in community, as opposed to hermits who had their own sort of structure for prayer.

00:04:44:22 – 00:05:04:21
Speaker 2
But monks living in a community were the first to organize a complete office with insert with determined times for prayer, and included the recitation of the entire Psalter of 150 psalms over the course of one week. And we see that in the role of Benedict. Benedict specifies in his office that the entire Psalter is to be recited in a week’s time.

00:05:05:02 – 00:05:17:13
Speaker 1
And he says that the fathers and their, bravery and courageousness could do all of that in a day. Exactly. Which might be something of an exaggeration. Yeah.

00:05:17:14 – 00:05:25:05
Speaker 2
Well, certainly monks and community probably didn’t, because they had other things to occupy their time to. But but hermits living in the desert, that may well have done.

00:05:25:07 – 00:05:33:09
Speaker 1
That because, you know, they’d recite, weave baskets and just recite the Psalter. You can probably get through the whole slaughter, if that’s all you’re saying. All day.

00:05:33:12 – 00:06:08:00
Speaker 2
Exactly. Especially if you know it by heart, is that the hermits did the day hours that developed were called terse, sext, prime? Well, first of all, prime terse sex known. And then the big hours were Lord’s Vespers and then another little hour called Compline. Most of these were named for the type of day that they took place. For example, terse, comes from the Latin word terzo pretentious, which means third heading was headed the third hour, which, according to the old Roman Empire method of counting time was 9:00 in the morning.

00:06:08:00 – 00:06:24:19
Speaker 2
That was the third hour of day six, with the sixth hour at noon, and so on. Lots of vespers came from partly from the time of day. Vespers, certainly for evening lights, came from the word for praise, which was basically what the office was.

00:06:24:21 – 00:06:50:21
Speaker 2
Nightmare, was so called because it was celebrated in the night, but mostly in monasteries. Very few people outside monasteries did the night office. This again came from the monastic office. Although Saint Benedict’s arrangement of the office. It’s not the oldest monastic monastic office. It’s still typical.

00:06:50:23 – 00:07:14:23
Speaker 2
The cathedral office, celebrated in cathedral and parish churches, were simpler and usually consisted of Lord’s or morning prayer and Vespers, or evening prayer. Over time, the other hours were added in, and gradually the cathedral office became the office for the entire church, except for monastic communities, which already had their own form of the office and.

00:07:15:01 – 00:07:49:13
Speaker 2
When it comes to question of reform, over the course of the church’s history, various reforms to the office have taken place. Generally speaking, these reforms, which were intended to make the office more prayerful and meaningful, unfortunately, had the unintended result of making the office heavier. So what was already an overloaded office became even more overloaded. And so, even before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 20th century, people had begun to realize that something needed to be done.

00:07:49:17 – 00:08:18:21
Speaker 2
That brings us up to sort of a modern at a time just before the council, the early part of the 20th century, in the United States, there was a book of Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota named for the virginal Michael, who is recognized now as the father of the Liturgical movement in the United States. And he had several of his colleagues had spent a great deal of time thinking about what could be done, not just with the liturgy hours, but with liturgy in general.

00:08:18:23 – 00:08:48:15
Speaker 2
To make it more prayerful, make it more meaningful for the person in the pew. Oh, and tied into other things in life as well. So the office and the and the sacraments don’t become detached from everything else. So they try to weave into the ideal reforms how to link the the liturgy of the church with things like the environment, things of that sort that would tie in with the people’s, ordinary everyday life.

00:08:48:17 – 00:09:22:02
Speaker 2
There was also the church, but in Europe, centered primarily again in Benedictine monasteries, but primarily at the Abbey of career life in Germany. All of these movies argued for a simplified liturgy and advocated, among other things, the use of indicator languages. So these movements were in some measure ahead of their time, because Latin was still the official language of the church and the Divine Office, and in fact, all of the liturgy of the church included mass and the celebration of the other sacraments was in Latin.

00:09:22:04 – 00:09:43:14
Speaker 1
And the other, the Divine Office in monastic communities was only prayed by people who were ordained. So lay brothers, monks who were not ordained would have their own separate little office that would have been largely vernacular, but was a lot it was, but was trimmed down. And so you had this kind of segregated stratified system.

00:09:43:15 – 00:09:54:18
Speaker 1
And another one of the goals of the liturgical movement was to kind of unite the whole community once again in praying the office, and so recognize it as the work of the whole church.

00:09:54:20 – 00:10:40:08
Speaker 2
And that was true here at Belmont Abbey as well. The the, priesthood, the abbey. We’re generally speaking of Irish descent for the brothers so called were of German descent. And so they had their own office separate from the, the priests, and which was paid in German for the most part. So, yeah, that was true here. The Second Vatican Council was convened in 1962 by Pope Mount Saint John, the 23rd, in a year later, in December of 1963, Pope Saint charged Pope Saint Paul the Sixth officially issued the the Council’s constitution, as it was called on the liturgy, which thoroughly revised every aspect of the church’s liturgical life, including the liturgy of the

00:10:40:08 – 00:10:44:06
Speaker 2
hours.

00:10:44:08 – 00:11:16:22
Speaker 2
As is the case with everything, things don’t just sort of spring out into space. And so the reforms of the Council depended in large measure on the reforms that had been suggested by these various international movements, which had taken place even before the Council, and probably again the most well known and probably the most far reaching in terms of the ordinary Catholic reforms was the switch from Latin to the vernacular by vernacular modern languages, the language of the people they speak.

00:11:17:00 – 00:11:56:19
Speaker 1
Now, at this time, monasteries received the right to create their own, to revise the old monastic office and create their own office for each particular community. But there was a lot of controversy in the congregation entered the broader church surrounding that. So there were, you know, kind of fights both about like things like a four week cycle as opposed to praying all the songs and one week and then a big kind of row about the use of English in the monastic office as opposed to, and, you know, a secular parish office.

00:11:56:19 – 00:12:09:19
Speaker 1
The argument was kind of, you know, well, monks are the experts, so monks can pray in Latin, but if a parish wants to do the liturgy of afterwards, they should do it in the vernacular. And American monks played a large role in that.

00:12:09:21 – 00:12:14:10
Speaker 2
They did,

00:12:14:12 – 00:12:38:10
Speaker 2
The Constitution, on the liturgy, which was very careful to insist that Latin be kept as the language of the of the liturgy. But at the same time they also insisted that the liturgy was to take into account the ordinary, everyday person and to make it available, you know, that they could understand and participate. And that was the key understanding and participation.

00:12:38:12 – 00:13:04:11
Speaker 2
And that’s where things began to get baroque. Because, again, the council was the Constitution was kind of going at it in different directions. On the one hand, yes, we have to keep Latin. On the other hand, we have to make it intelligible and understandable for everyone. So crash. Okay. But that’s a case of once the camel’s nose is in the tent, you can keep the rest of the camel from coming into, over time.

00:13:04:21 – 00:13:32:04
Speaker 2
This Brother Christmas imports out, things trickle down to the point that that in monastic communities, things began to shift in that regard to part of the problem was that the the congregation for Divine Worship, which sort of took over after the council again insisted on that. And they wanted monastic communities, particularly to keep Latin, because that was the the patrimony of the heritage of the church.

00:13:32:13 – 00:14:03:23
Speaker 2
But one of the arguments against that, was that that makes monasteries kind of a museum. And it makes it difficult for monks to understand and participate, because not every monk, in the 20th century could read and understand Latin. The Constitution revised the liturgy of the hours. And in doing so they said, among other things, that the library had become too heavy even for secular priests.

00:14:04:01 – 00:14:24:09
Speaker 2
So they as for other Christians, points out, instead of having to recite the entire the entire Psalter in one week, they spread it out over four weeks. And the council did that for the Roman office. And by room office. We can peer from a volume of it that comes in four volumes. And this is one of the ordinary talk volumes.

00:14:24:17 – 00:14:50:23
Speaker 2
But the Psalter was spread out over four weeks, and the Council actually promulgated that. Okay. They added a heavier scripture reading and patristic readings from the for the office. Interestingly enough, to the King, the Council recognized that over time, a lot of the readings for for feast days had become sort of pie and legends. And the council insisted, no, these readings have to be based on history.

00:14:51:05 – 00:15:20:21
Speaker 2
So a lot of the, the, the legendary part of it went out the window. But the Psalms, the Psalter was spread out of four weeks and therefore made it easier to recite longer scripture, longer patristic readings, and eventually the Council introduced this, this liturgy, the hours for the Roman for the Roman Rite. When it came to monasteries, the question then became, okay, can we do that too?

00:15:21:16 – 00:15:43:12
Speaker 2
And in the United States at least, and generally speaking across the world, but in the United States that became a real issue for monastic communities in the United States, there were communities that or at least monks in communities who wanted to keep the old office, Latin at all. There were other monks who said, no, but we have the chance to say it in our own language.

00:15:43:17 – 00:16:05:02
Speaker 2
Why don’t we, do we have to recite the whole Psalter in one week? I mean, even for monks, that becomes difficult. So, for example, here, when we. When I came into the community, we had to school the college to run. We also had parishes to take care of. And up until fairly recently, we had a farm to the cafeteria.

00:16:05:02 – 00:16:42:17
Speaker 2
So it became difficult to say the entire office in a day, especially in Latin and so many communities. What are you know, we need to have the liberty to shorten the office and make things more reasonable for ourselves to, one of the things that the, Constitution on the liturgy of the Council did was to while it insisted on Latin as the language, it also left to the national bishops conferences to decide how much and how quickly for that would would enter into because you put but there again that once that started there was there was no stopping it.

00:16:42:17 – 00:17:09:13
Speaker 2
So full steam ahead. In Benedictine communities in the United States and throughout the world for that matter, seeing that happen, began to discuss seriously what what we could do as well. Should each community develop its own office, or should there be a common office, as there had been before the Council? Every Benedictine in the world resided in the same office, no matter what community you belong to.

00:17:09:13 – 00:17:33:11
Speaker 2
It was there was you take it or leave it, and it was approved by Rome. But now is that still necessary? Can we can each monastery have its own office or do we have to have a common office in the United States? The decision was finally made that each community could develop its own based on its own needs, its own work, and things of that sort.

00:17:33:13 – 00:17:57:08
Speaker 2
I do know of two congregations in Europe, the German congregation or one of the German congregations, and the Austrian congregation that did develop a common office for all their monasteries. But that’s probably the exception to the room in the United States. I don’t know, I think I know of only two communities that have the same office. And one took the office lock, stock and barrel from another monastery.

00:17:57:10 – 00:18:33:02
Speaker 2
Every other monastery that I’m aware of has developed its own office. The other question that arose in the United States to was the question of language. Do we keep Latin or do we switch to English? And here even the Abbott private got involved. Back in the 1970s when all of this was happening again, going back to the congregation for Divine Worship, they insisted that the monasteries keep Latin, and they went so far as to tell Pope Paul the Sixth, who was pope at the time, that that’s what monasteries wanted.

00:18:33:04 – 00:18:59:12
Speaker 2
Well, the abbot primate at the time, Abbot, remembered Wheatland, in a meeting with the Pope, and he and the Pope took spins. The Pope thanked him for the monasteries willingness to keep Latin and Abbot private. Members looked at him and said, we didn’t, we didn’t. We don’t want to do that. Somebody misinformed you. And so the Pope said, right.

00:18:59:14 – 00:19:18:14
Speaker 2
And, basically they knew that it was a congregation because they had told him. So he said, I will inform the congregation and you will not necessarily be using Latin. And Abbot members said, no, don’t do that. Just let it live. But as long as we have your implicit permission, we can move ahead. And that’s exactly what happened.

00:19:20:02 – 00:19:42:01
Speaker 2
As a kind of footnote, this is a typically Roman way of looking at things, because the congregation, on the one hand, issued its edict. You will have Latin and the Pope, on the other hand, said, do what you want, and everybody’s happy congregation has issued its index. We got what we wanted to. Everybody went about their business, unlike sort of an Anglo-Saxon attitude where, oh, wrong we spoken.

00:19:42:01 – 00:20:08:12
Speaker 2
We have to do it. No. Okay, that’s kind of off the subject. But anyway, Another question that arose in the monasteries as well was what about this altar? How how are we going to adapt this solitude to fit our needs? Are we going to keep Benedict’s way of doing it and do the whole Psalter in one week, or are we going to spend hours out every four weeks as well?

00:20:08:20 – 00:20:26:19
Speaker 2
We’ll come to our own reform in a minute. But to sort of skip ahead for a moment, one of the trial revisions that we did actually spread the Psalter out of four weeks, but it became almost 2000. So we backed off from that. Some communities did spread it out in four weeks. Others kept the one week cycle.

00:20:26:21 – 00:20:45:17
Speaker 2
I know of at least one community, United States, that still to this day has a one week cycle. They say the office pretty much the way it was done in Benedict’s day, except just in English. Again, just as a kind of footnote habit. Remember, it had been the art chapter of Saint Vincent Abbey in Pennsylvania when he became when he was elected prime.

00:20:45:17 – 00:20:57:15
Speaker 2
And so we have an American habit to thank for being able to use English in the offices, at least in this country, and problem of languages as well.

00:20:57:17 – 00:21:20:16
Speaker 2
Coming down to our own office, when I entered the community in 1970, pretty much all of these issues had been settled. The form of the office that I knew in my first year here left a lot to be desired, and he was very thin. I can’t remember everything that we did, but in in those years, we still had the college survived, we were still staffing parishes.

00:21:20:16 – 00:21:47:11
Speaker 2
And so people were scattered pretty thinly, and we didn’t have all that many people in the community who were experts in the office to start with. So it became difficult to to do a revision. So when I entered the office consisted essentially in launch in the morning at 7:00 and vespers in the evening, and I can’t remember if it was 7:00 in the evening or 530, I think it was at 7:00.

00:21:47:11 – 00:22:13:11
Speaker 2
But anyway, that were basically those two hours and that was pretty much it. And they were both of these offices were recited except for the hymn which we sang, Vespers was sung mostly, but not entirely. And we depended on the Anglican sometimes, for the music. So we didn’t even have a room sometimes in the Anglican sometimes and not Gregorian.

00:22:13:19 – 00:22:22:15
Speaker 2
So we left that aside as well. And there were no that we absolutely did not use that at all, because people had kind of reacted against them.

00:22:22:17 – 00:22:42:03
Speaker 1
So you could kind of say that. And the wake of the council, you know, the office had been very heavy and, you know, very strict, but then it swung all the way, the other way. And you were left with a kind of unsatisfying, you know, it was actually, underdeveloped, weak office.

00:22:42:03 – 00:23:01:01
Speaker 2
Yes. That’s a fair way. Yes. The only other thing that we, the only other hour that we had was the opposite Compline, which is the library of the by night prayer here. I mean, they prefer the end of the day of the office in the middle of the night. But even that was in English, and we were expected to do it properly.

00:23:01:01 – 00:23:32:08
Speaker 2
And so there was no community recitation of Compline at all. In the mid to late 1970s, father and son Biggs, who was. Rather famous historian here, decided to revise our offer. So he’s the one who took on that to start with. He had bought a copy of the revised Roman office again, this, but in Latin, and he decided that we should more or less adopt that office.

00:23:33:15 – 00:23:55:01
Speaker 2
In English, but not in Latin. So he began to produce a translation of the office of the Roman Office. And got so far as to produce a psalter, which was spread over four weeks, just like the Roman office. He also invited him up from Saint Minor in Charge Abbey in Indiana, to come and demonstrate the system of Gregorian.

00:23:55:02 – 00:24:21:12
Speaker 2
Sometimes that they had developed, which we adopted, forcing the Psalms. The community did experiment with Father Anselm’s revision but after a period of experimentation, the community decided it wasn’t happy with it. So we we left that aside, the only thing that we did keep quite the same mother and sometimes which we substituted for the Anglican sometimes.

00:24:21:14 – 00:24:45:04
Speaker 2
When I returned from my theological studies in 1978, I was asked by the abbot to start working on another revision of our office. And that was easier said than done, because other than having left the office while I was at school in Latin, I had no real experience in the area at all. A real help came with a monk from Saint Vincent.

00:24:45:07 – 00:25:06:06
Speaker 2
Archenemy transferred here to Belmont, and he brought with it a lot of the offices they celebrated at Saint Vincent, which was probably the, at the time, the most advanced monastery in the United States, at least in terms of of its office. They’ve done a great deal with, with the chant and with, just developing the office in general.

00:25:06:08 – 00:25:28:19
Speaker 2
And I learned a great deal from him about what an office should look like, and also a great deal about adapting Gregorian chant to English. And that’s one of the problems when it comes to using chant. The Latin, like Richmond Gregorian chant kind of developed together, and they make sense together. But it is possible to adapt the chant to English.

00:25:29:03 – 00:25:58:11
Speaker 2
But it takes some work. This particular up eventually left the community, and so we were, in some measure, back to square one. But at least we had some idea of how to tell about developing our own office. After several false starts, we realized that we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. What I mean by that is that we decided to adopt the general structure of the Roman liturgy to the hours, which in essentials essentials was much like the old monastic Divine Office thing.

00:25:58:13 – 00:26:05:12
Speaker 2
The hours were the same. The structure was essentially the same. It was just that the texts were different.

00:26:05:14 – 00:26:30:00
Speaker 2
Like the Roman office, we decided to make Lords and Vespers the principal hours of the office, what the council called the hinge hours around which the rest of the day hangs. And we decided to add one of the so-called minor hours, that is two hours 6 or 9. The modern days with modern day names for those hours are midday, morning or so, mid-morning prepare, midday prayer and mid-afternoon prayer.

00:26:30:00 – 00:26:51:16
Speaker 2
And we decided to adopt the, the midday prayer. Since we said midday, more or less either before or after lunch, depending on where we are in our own history. We went through several some schemas. What do we mean by Psalms Keeper? I mean the order in which the Psalms were said. In Saint Benedict’s rule, you more or less just go straight through this altar.

00:26:51:16 – 00:27:18:15
Speaker 2
He sets aside certain psalms for vespers and certain psalms for, lords. But basically the rest of the Psalms are just one right after the other. All done within the course of a week. And there’s a fair amount of repetition in Benedict’s schema, especially at the little hours. Each of the schemas that we played with, had their strong points, but none of them proved to be completely satisfactory.

00:27:18:17 – 00:27:43:10
Speaker 2
And that brings us to where we are now. We now have a passage. Was elected Abbot. He began to work towards completing our liturgy. The hours we’ve made in his time as abbot. We’ve made several major decisions about the office. And these have been community decisions. They’ve been taken with the consultation. The community and meetings sometimes have been a little rough, but generally speaking, they’ve worked.

00:27:43:20 – 00:28:08:02
Speaker 2
We’ve arrived at a structure which seems to work well for us. And so coming to our offices, it as it exists now, and which I hope is its final form, we come together five times a day for prayer. The first is a vigil office, which is equivalent to the old monastic office of the, the, office that we celebrated at night.

00:28:09:05 – 00:28:30:05
Speaker 2
Going back to the very early days of metastases. And it’s equivalent to the modern day Office of readings in the, in the Roman office. The difference is that we celebrated at 6:00 in the morning, not the middle of the night. It’s also much shorter than the old night office in Benedict’s rule. Ordinary days and I think at least 12 psalms.

00:28:30:05 – 00:28:54:01
Speaker 2
Yeah. Samples. Plus other things. I mean, our, visual office has three Psalms or parts of South. Longer psalms are divided up, and they’re spread out over four weeks, not more. So basically, what we did was to take Benedict’s psalms that he used at his ritual office, spread them out over four weeks.

00:28:54:03 – 00:29:14:11
Speaker 1
So we more or less used the psalm schema that Benedict originally laid out, simply dividing it, for two of the officers over four weeks. And for the other three offices, we essentially use the exact same psalm schema that Benedict gives in his rule right.

00:29:14:13 – 00:29:35:15
Speaker 2
Know there again it was we felt that, okay, Benedict, it had been week or we didn’t have to reinvent it. And I mean, it worked for a bit from monastic communities for centuries. So, yeah, why not try it for ourselves? And so far it seems to work. The community seems happy with it. It’s doable. And so that’s what we’ve done.

00:29:37:23 – 00:30:02:15
Speaker 2
The visual office that we have now lasts roughly half an hour, but can go on for a little bit longer than that. On big days, on feast days, the second hour that we celebrate here is the Hour of Lords. Or morning prayer, which we celebrated at seven. We celebrated at 730 in the morning. This hour is the same hours in the Roman liturgy.

00:30:02:23 – 00:30:23:01
Speaker 2
The Psalms at this hour are the same each week. In other words, we didn’t look for four weeks. We kept it over a period of one week. It lasts about half an hour. And except for the Psalms, Lord’s is sung. And even on Sundays and feast days and solemnity as we sing the Psalms at large to, that’s one of the decisions that we’ve made fairly recently.

00:30:23:01 – 00:30:48:07
Speaker 2
We use not to recite it. You start to sing the Psalms at large, but we change that, at least for big days. The third hour is midday prayer, which we celebrate 440. Sorry, at 1125 in the morning. This again is spread over four weeks and it has a lot of repetitions in it. Simply because of the way the Psalms are laid out.

00:30:48:09 – 00:31:10:04
Speaker 2
This hour lasts about 15 minutes. This particular office is not long, 15 minutes, but it’s a kind of prayerful breathing space. So the middle of the day, it’s a sort of a time to sort of down two hours and relax for 15 minutes with prayer. The fourth hour is Vespers, or evening prayer, which we celebrate at 530 in the afternoon.

00:31:10:05 – 00:31:34:02
Speaker 2
In structure, it looks very much like Lord’s and like Lord’s. It lasts for about half an hour. Also like Lord’s, the Psalms and Vespers are the same each week. Yeah, they we don’t. Again, it’s not spread out in four weeks. It’s all in one week. Pretty much. It’s been prescribed when we sing vespers in its entirety every day.

00:31:34:04 – 00:31:55:04
Speaker 2
The fifth hour and the last hour is Compline or night prayer again. Night prayer in the sense of bedtime prayer. It’s meant to be the last prayer before you go to bed. In actual practice, it’s the last period of the entire official day. Not everybody goes to bed right after Covid. I don’t know anybody who is after a couple.

00:31:55:17 – 00:32:19:14
Speaker 2
It’s also short, roughly 15 minutes. And this whole office, the entire office repeats every day. There’s no change except for we use different hymn tunes, according to the seasons of the year, but otherwise it’s the same. It’s the same every day. And because that. So, folks, after a very short time, can memorize the office that even have to book in from, when we can say it by heart.

00:32:19:16 – 00:32:59:12
Speaker 2
And that’s a good thing because it gives you a chance, rather than concentrating on what you’re saying, is your chance to concentrate on thinking about what you’re saying, which even I’m not sure that I’m making myself clear. But anyway, it becomes easier to pray the obvious rather than to say the obvious. As far as the structure of the office is concerned, the visual office, has an introductory verse, then an entry for an antiphon and invites you to a song, and that changes according to the date when the season which is followed by him, then the three psalms and the offerings or sections of long psalms.

00:32:59:14 – 00:33:23:22
Speaker 2
Then it’s essentially a, an office of of listening in a real sense, because the longest part of the visual office is listening to a long scripture reading, generally from the Old Testament, not always. And then a response really goes with that. And then a patristic, reading, which is usually a commentary on the on the scripture being followed by a response.

00:33:23:22 – 00:33:45:20
Speaker 2
B and then on weekdays that second response re is followed by the prayer or the duration of the day, and a concluding verse on Sundays and solemnities, we extend that a little bit by adding an Old Testament canticle. Then followed that with a short hymn of praise, and then the oration and the.

00:33:45:22 – 00:33:46:15
Speaker 1
The gospel reading.

00:33:46:16 – 00:34:17:20
Speaker 2
And the gospel reading. Right. I’ve got that, the gospel reading of the day. And then there’s a, the second reading, which actually comes before the gospel is a commentary on the gospel reading and think for the other hours. The structure is pretty much the same. We have an opening verse followed by him, followed by the Psalms of the hour, followed by a generally short scripture reading, and then followed by C concluding rights in a sense at Lord’s and Vespers.

00:34:17:22 – 00:34:42:07
Speaker 2
After the reading, there’s a response re followed by the Magnificat. Had the been in the gospel at the conference? At large. Benedictus said Vespers, the Magnificat, which are taken from the Gospels with their own utterance, and then the Lord’s Prayer in the creation of the day, and a conclusion, at midday prayer, which is shorter.

00:34:42:09 – 00:34:54:09
Speaker 2
There’s a short reading followed by a very short response. It’s just a critical response, the Lord’s Prayer and a concluding personal and conclusion.

00:34:54:10 – 00:35:00:22
Speaker 2
At Lord’s, in Vespers, there’s also a set of, general intercessions, pretty much like everyone who has.

00:35:02:23 – 00:35:18:01
Speaker 1
Is there anything that sticks out about our office that makes it particularly unique, that you’d want to, like, include, that makes it stand out from other monasteries, but especially from the Roman office.

00:35:18:03 – 00:35:41:20
Speaker 2
There are a couple of things as far as other monastic concerns, that I think the thing that makes it unique is that that very unique, I mean, two other cities in the United States are the same. And the question here, perhaps arise, could our office be used by some of the community? I suppose it could, but it probably wouldn’t work as well as it does here, because they’re about the same community.

00:35:41:20 – 00:35:53:17
Speaker 2
So in that sense, our office is unique and it fits our needs. And it was developed for us, by us, in fact. And so from that standpoint, I think it’s unique. And the problem was, is.

00:35:53:19 – 00:35:54:15
Speaker 1
What about the Roman.

00:35:54:15 – 00:35:55:18
Speaker 2
Office, I.

00:35:55:20 – 00:35:58:07
Speaker 1
Think is contrast with the Roman office. I think the.

00:35:58:07 – 00:36:19:13
Speaker 2
Biggest contrast with the Roman office is that, again, they kind of went from one extreme to the other. They, as we did here, at least, they took something which was very elaborate and very complicated and made it very simple and essentially very short. A secular priest can recite most of the office in 15 minutes, given whatever I always recited.

00:36:19:15 – 00:36:30:08
Speaker 2
That’s not true for us. So our office is in some ways richer than the government office. Same structure, same general outline, but it has more, more meat to it. So we said.

00:36:30:10 – 00:36:53:23
Speaker 1
Okay. Yeah. So Father David’s done most of the work on the office before I entered. So basically the, the biggest, the biggest thing that we have to do now is we don’t have all the volumes completed. We’re going to have a four volume office for, you know, multiple volume office. And we haven’t finished the Saints volume.

00:36:54:01 – 00:37:21:11
Speaker 1
So every time a feast or solemnity comes around, Father David has to go in and print, print out the, And once I’ve gone in and edited, change some of them up a little bit, and I’m helping with the process of putting together the actual book. Father David could speak a word to what it was like when we didn’t have any of that structure that you had to like, where you’re composing into, like, every day or.

00:37:21:20 – 00:37:43:06
Speaker 2
Basically, yes. In the early days, it was, it was difficult, actually, because of, you know, you can’t I didn’t know how to compose sound effects. And for a feast day tomorrow, for example, we had the feast of the Transfiguration, that required at events for, for all of the officers, which had to be done from scratch.

00:37:43:08 – 00:38:06:22
Speaker 2
And I would literally spend hours working on putting the office together, just putting the pieces together and then about to talk about pretty much doing it. Once that’s done, it’s done. So again, it just becomes a case of a question of paying it out for a particular day. But in the beginning to compose that was difficult because I didn’t really have any experience doing that.

00:38:07:00 – 00:38:22:10
Speaker 2
But like most things, you know, the more you do it, the better you get at it. And some of the entities that we wrote early on were pretty rough. But they’ve been smoothed out over the time. And nowadays, if I have to sit down in person and, and it doesn’t take me all that long to be.

00:38:22:12 – 00:38:50:05
Speaker 1
And another one of the cool things about our offices, Father David more or less adapted the old monastic antiphonal into our current office. So a lot of times you can open up the monastic, to family to a particular feast or day, and you can recognize, when you look at our office, one of the same, you know, a similar tune, the same text.

00:38:51:07 – 00:39:13:03
Speaker 1
And so you can really see the continuity and the tradition. So, you know, it was, you know, after Vatican two, it was kind of like a lot of places just said, okay, we’re going to start from scratch, from the ground up. That kind of fell everything else out. But here now you can say, well, we’ve taken the tradition and modified it to our place, but there’s a real.

00:39:13:05 – 00:39:55:17
Speaker 2
Real continuity when he’s looking for an attitude. One of the things that springs to mind if you look at the office that we have for the, the tradition, that is to say, the three days to Good Friday or Saturday, Easter Sunday. And you look at the music in the old antiphonal and look at the music that we have now, it’s in English, but it sounds pretty much the same because we’ve adopted the, that was one of the difficulties in, in adopting or adapting is trying to make the chant fit English words because the, the accents in English are different from Latin, and having them trying to fit the chant to that becomes

00:39:55:17 – 00:40:25:23
Speaker 2
somewhat difficult. The other thing we step in the old antiphonal, especially on weekdays and on the endurance. We’re extremely elaborate and without putting the community down. We don’t have all that many great singers in the community, so we had to adopt, and adapt, the, the Czech to fit our capability of singing it. But you still recognize the underlying tune and some of the, some of those big dates like that to me or some of the for some of the best things that we do.

00:40:26:01 – 00:41:02:05
Speaker 1
Well. So for instance, the for Easter Sunday at large, the first attempt to farm. What a theme. On here was to, Domine, an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. Alleluia. And our offices and an angel of the Lord descended from heaven. And so you can hear, you know, that, I’m jealous.

00:41:02:05 – 00:41:13:22
Speaker 1
Out and meaning an angel of the Lord. But it’s a very similar tune, just simplified and adapted to fit the English language. Right.

00:41:14:00 – 00:41:15:12
Speaker 2
Exactly. Yeah.

00:41:15:23 – 00:41:17:05
Speaker 1
So.

00:41:17:07 – 00:41:46:09
Speaker 2
Yeah, we do do a couple of things. And again, these, these are some of my favorites, but I can’t claim any credit for them. We have a response free that we sing on the beautiful, which came from the Abbey of Gethsemani, which is an absolutely gorgeous, response to, And then for Christmas, the visual of Christmas, we have two responses, which again, I’m guessing which are fairly elaborate, but which are eventually beautiful.

00:41:46:11 – 00:42:18:15
Speaker 1
Yeah. So, for Christmas, do we have up and, I want, joy for mass and joy to this. I, and it goes on for a bit, and then it gets to this elaborate part that the canter alone would sing that goes something like left up. You have, oh. And, left it up. You here.

00:42:18:17 – 00:42:43:09
Speaker 1
That’s we had so you can see how the words are kind of being painted. You know, the music is expressing what the words are saying. You know, go up on a high mountain, lift up your voice and shout, and, you know, that’s that, you know, that loud. That was that was that was really bad. There we go.

00:42:43:21 – 00:42:53:05
Speaker 1
And so it accompanies and those are two of my personal favorite response. That’s one of my favorite responses as well, because the words and the music go along so well.

00:42:53:21 – 00:43:14:14
Speaker 2
I think that speaking of the chat, I think there’s a misconception of for many people, that chant is emotionless, and it has never been, you know, it doesn’t speak to the person. It’s just kind of music. But that’s not true. Now, obviously not every point is going to be, you know, something that you take away from, you take away from the office.

00:43:14:14 – 00:43:39:01
Speaker 2
But but a live chat really does touch the emotions. And it’s meant to, you know, it’s meant to touch not only your mind but your heart. And part of that, too, which took me a while to learn, is that, you know, you begin to say, okay, you have to fit the words to the chant. So, for example, if he if the words say he descended, then you want the music to descend as well.

00:43:39:03 – 00:44:01:02
Speaker 2
So again, he doesn’t move in opposite directions at the same time. The chant can be very like very words, static, but at the same time you filled. A good example of that is The Passion on Good Friday. There are three parts in the passion, three speakers of the passion, and each one has his own pattern of music.

00:44:01:04 – 00:44:17:03
Speaker 2
And it’s the same over and over and over and over again. But the words that go with it are John’s Passion, the crucifixion, the rest, crucifixion and death of Christ, which is packed with emotion. But the music doesn’t get in the way of that.

00:44:17:05 – 00:44:40:18
Speaker 1
And in a way, the restrictive nature of the music makes it feel like the textures I was trying to break out and it adds to the power. Another example is in our federal federal office on Holy Saturday and Good Friday, we sing the last, one of the readings is some reading from the Lamentations, and the tune has been called The Saddest Tune in the world.

00:44:40:18 – 00:44:56:04
Speaker 1
But it’s very simple. Just a few lines. You have to come here to experience, I guess, it’s, you know, at the 6 a.m. office, but that’s that’s another one of my personal favorites. It brings me to tears. Yeah. Almost every. Yeah.

00:44:56:06 – 00:45:17:13
Speaker 2
Yep. Exactly. Yeah. Just one final thing from my point view, you know, how do you judge if an office is, in fact, working? And I think. To give the community a stir. I mean, people vote with their feet. If they don’t like it, they’re probably not going to come unless you have it. Just hard times and forces him to do that.

00:45:17:14 – 00:45:35:01
Speaker 2
But he doesn’t have to because people show up for it. And we have, students who, believe it or not, show up at 6:00 in the morning for the vigil office. And they certainly don’t have to be here. And visitors as well come. So I think the office speaks not only to us, but to other people, too.

00:45:35:02 – 00:45:40:01
Speaker 2
Well, it’s always open to anybody who wants to come, but people do come.

00:45:40:02 – 00:46:06:18
Speaker 1
So yeah, as we conclude, we want to thank our audience for joining us. And thank brother David, especially for joining us for this great conversation. Especially history. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and tell your friends about Vizio. It’s available on Spotify, Apple and Google Podcasts, as well as on YouTube. Until next time, God bless.

00:46:06:19 – 00:46:18:21
Speaker 1
You.