Top Ten Reasons for Praying the Divine Office
Posted by DariaSockey in Faith on Friday, March 11, 2011 9:00 AM
1. You get daily Scripture reading and prayer done at the same time.
2. It takes less than ten minutes each for morning, evening, and night prayer if you’re reading it by yourself rather than chanting it in a monastery.
3. If you can’t get to daily mass it’s the best substitute because just like the Mass the Divine Office is also the liturgy of the Church.
4. By praying the Divine Office you are joining in the universal prayer of the Church being offered by your brothers and sisters in Christ all over the world.
5. You will be praying the exact same prayers Pope Benedict prays every day.
6. You will be participating in a tradition that is old as the Church itself. (In the book of Acts, the apostles went to the temple to pray at specific hours of the day.)
7. If you pray the Office on a regular basis, you will find that you have memorized lots of the psalms and other scripture passages painlessly.
8. Once you are accomplished at flipping about in a breviary, your fellow Catholic geeks will be impressed.
9. You will acquire a cool vocabulary that includes words like breviary, vespers, Te Deum, compline, and antiphon.
10. You will be praying “with the same words used by Jesus, present for millenia in the prayer of Israel and of the Church.” (Pope John Paul II)
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