Customer Reviews

Christmastide: Prayers for Advent Through Epiphany from The Divine Hours

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The Christmastide book is the perfect book to use for those who are starting to learn about the Liturgy of the Hours. We used this book at my parish throughout the Advent Season before weekday morning mass. We have since adapted to the regular morning prayer, but this book is a great way to start before going to the full version. I would recommend this book to anyone! The only con is the small print.

I was extremely disappointed in the Kindle format of this book. It has almost no table of contents, and the different days for prayers are not numbered, delineated by weekday, or anything. For example, you cannot look for "First week of advent", or "Monday" or anything like that. There are just a bunch of prayers run together in sequence: morning, daytime, evening, morning, daytime, evening. How can anyone find the prayer for the right day of advent when there are no date markings or references of any kind? In contrast to the Pocket Edition of the Divine Hours, by the same author which has beautiful formatting and is easy to use, this book is totally unusable.

Simple order of personal worship for each day in Advent and Christmas.
This is not a book to be read for pleasure, but instructions for those of us who did not grow up in churches that taught fixed hour prayer.
It is done in an easy way to follow.
Not quite liturgy for dummies, but close.
Very useful.

I bought this for my Kindle. I like the Divine Hours books and use one daily . One of the issues with a Kindle is navigating to specific locations in a book that is not necessarily read straight through. So, everyday you must forward through a number of pages to get to the desired location. It's not that big a deal but with a little more thought the people who designed this for Kindle could have done a better job. For the money we are paying it's not too much to expect.

A few years ago I might have been skeptical or leery about something like this... I was talking to one of my friends a while back and she was telling me how she had taken her son to the park to play and she observed a nun who was praying "while reading from a book." She told me that it "just looked so unnatural, why don't you just pray freely and openly and come before God as yourself - using your own words?"

And I would imagine a lot of people might feel that way.

But the liturgy of the hours is more than just praying traditional prayers or praying through scripture, it's about getting into a rhythm of prayer. When you pray the divine hours you are allowing the prayers to govern your time instead of just praying "whenever you feel like it."

Plus, praying through scripture has been happening since long before Christ. In fact, we know that even Christ prayed the scriptures. From the cross Jesus prays, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Which is a direct quote from Psalm 22. Praying or quoting the first line of a scriptural text was a way of "referencing" the entire passage. It was a way of saying, "I feel like this" or "remember this and what this teaches?"

And last, though praying the hours might feel like its weighted heavily in church tradition, well....that's because it is. And I think that's one of the bigger sellers for me.

I was reading somewhere about how the designers at Volkswagen decided to re-release the Beetle. And surprisingly enough it came about as a knee jerk reaction to the boom of the internet and the quick rise of technology. It seems that as each new year came and left, more and more people felt they were being thrust faster into the future. So designers and inventors started to see a rising trend in people gravitating towards things from the past. Suddenly "retro" was extremely in. So when Volkswagen was trying to come up with an idea for a new compact car in 1998, they decided to redesign the Beetle. One year later it was named "Import Car of the Year" by Motor Trend.

Not surprisingly we are seeing this same movement in the younger church. As modern church tried to make the Sunday service streamlined and more like going to the mall. Young hipsters started to move more towards all things traditional. As big mega churches began stripping away all forms of iconography, stained glass windows and pretty much anything that looked "church-like," young people began frequenting churches that not only "felt" like church, but "looked" like church as well.

Believe it or not... liturgy is cool.

So going back to me... this Christmas, to help me get back into a season of quiet time, I picked up Phyllis Tickle's Christmastide. This was a great tool to help me go through the weeks of advent and epiphany using scripture, hymns, poems and the traditional readings of the "retro church." For those of you who already own Phyllis' Winter Liturgy of the Hours, you don't need to pick this up as the readings are the same.

I have the paperback version of this book, which is wonderful. Unfortunately, the Kindle version has no day/date at the beginning of each day's reading. None at all. At the beginning of Advent it just starts on the first Sunday closest to November 30, and from there in there is absolutely no reference to what day of the week you are reading. Really disappointed and cannot use this book at all.

The Kindle version is quite difficult to use. It is possible to find a directory of days in the Table of Contents, but when you tap one of the very-close-together lines, you have no way of knowing for sure which day you ended up in. The daily prayers aren't labeled with the day, important information that is at the top of every page of the print version. You can't simply return to where you last read because each evening you go to Compline, which is at the back of the book. Also, the Kindle version has some really odd spacing (paging) of the Vespers hymns with unusual errors of mixed text from time to time.

A wonderful prayer book for the Christmas holidays. I gave it as a gift to a married couple as a special book to use together for their first and every one thereafter Christmas.

I was looking for some way to be more in touch with God during Advent. I'd had a terribly hard year, and had decided to start my new year along with the Church's new year. This book was exactly what I was looking for! I loved that it is the daily office, yet with the Advent readings. I ended up buyg some of her other pooks along the same lines. This is fantastic!