Customer Reviews

Lord, Open My Lips: The Liturgy of the Hours As Daily Prayer

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First, if you are interested in the latest version of this book, see the Amazon listing of Discovering Prayer. Discovering Prayer includes all of the content of Lord, Open My Lips, plus extensive information chanting AND an audio CD of sample chants to help you get started.

Lord, Open My Lips was written for a single purpose: To help you learn to pray the Liturgy of the Hours. It begins by introducing a little about what prayer is, in and of itself. It discusses, briefly, the history of the Liturgy of the Hours (also known as the Divine Office, Breviary, and other terms), and then takes you step-by-step through each of the primary prayers.

These primary prayers are Morning Prayer, Daytime Prayer, Evening Prayer, Night Prayer and the Office of Readings. There is a separate chapter for each of these "hours," helping you become familiar with the general outline for the prayers, the postures, and even refers to the exact page numbers in the available prayer books (most of which are also available via amazon.com).

Additional sections introduce basic chanting, and even cover some of the more "complicated" matters like special feast days. It offers practical advice on how much to pray, how to make time to do so, and even how to start a small prayer group in your neighborhood or work.

Lord, Open My Lips is a somewhat-abridged version of a more thorough text called Discovering Prayer. We've been self-publishing, revising and improving Discovering Prayer for about a decade, and made this version available at the suggestion of the publisher, North Bay Books, in 2004 (however, in the interest of full disclosure, I should add that North Bay Books is not authorized to continue to publish this text due to contract violations).

This book is an excellent introduction to and instructional manual for the Liturgy of the Hours. Before I received "Lord Open My Lips", I tried to work my way through the four volume set of the Breviary using the companion St. Joseph Guide, but I found it confusing, and I was not always sure I was praying "correctly" or as intended. It is a shame for those finding it too difficult, discouraging, etc. to bring the Liturgy of Hours into their lives because they had trouble tangling with the mechanics of performing same. This book is a perfect and, I would dare say, much needed resource, particularly for laiety interested in enriching their spiritual prayer life with this rich form of daily prayer.

This is a "get you started" book, for advanced beginners who wish to capture the mechanics of all of the Liturgy of the Hours. Its a good adjunct to "The Divine office for DoDos", which takes a more informal and instructive approach. These work well together.

This is an excellent book for those of you who are trying to understand Daily Prayer or Shorter Daily Prayer. If you have bought either of this books, you will appreciate this "how to" manual. If not, you won't know (or care) what I'm talking about.

The instructions are not well developed and could be more effective in leading one through the daily prayers. If this is the only instructions available to you, I recommend you only skim the book and then use the on-line website Universalis ([...]) to guide you through the prayers. I suspect the text by Nugent (The Divine Office for Dodos) is more useful. With the website, the abbreviated cards that come with the 4-volume set of the Liturgy, and the St. Joseph Guide, you will make about as much progress as spending this extra $[...].

This book is exactly what it claims to be and not one bit more. It is a brief introduction to the Liturgy of the Hours of the Catholic Church, written for lay people interested in rediscovering pietistic worship which has been neglected in recent years. It's slim and can be read quickly, and doesn't demand recourse to a lexicon. But it will NOT be enough to get you or your prayer team praying the liturgy right away.

What this book is, is a guide to using the recognized books of Divine Office, which the author admits are prolix if you don't have a teacher. And teachers are scarce on the ground these days. The author essentially figured out by sheer intrepid investigation how to use the books of Divine Office, and now he walks you through his steps so you don't have to fumble your way along, too.

I cringe when I spend my money on an instruction book and the first thing it demands is to purchase more books. The tutorials in the performance of the Hours only make sense if you have another prayer book in hand. When the back copy described this book as a "manual for praying the Liturgy of the Hours," I thought that meant I'd be able to start praying. Not so. This is frustrating.

Though the book is explicitly Catholic, there is nothing exclusively so about it. The author even includes an apt paragraph on the value of ecumenism. He also has a handy chapter on how to chant the psalms. This non-singer appreciates the author's avoidance of musical notation, and his insistence that the goal of chant is to pray perfectly, not to sing perfectly.

This book has its virtues, but is not what its promotional material led me to expect. I think this content would have been better served as an introduction to an inexpensive Layperson's Liturgy rather than a book in itself. If you already have your book of Divine Office in hand, this book might be a valuable path for decoding its content. But for us rank neophytes, this isn't what we need.