Customer Reviews

Shorter Christian Prayer

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Like an earlier reviewer, I also own the four-volume set of the Liturgy of the Hours. I do enjoy the additional readings and the somewhat nerdy activity of finding my way around the complete liturgy. But for pure prayer value, "Shorter Christian Prayer" is the book. It has the entire four-week psalter for the key prayers of the day, Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, as well as the same Night Prayers as the larger volumes. What it is missing are the special readings and intercessions for feasts and memorials--but even those special days are built around the same psalms printed here. For me, on my commute, Shorter Christian Prayer is less distracting and much nicer in the hand than the standard Christian Prayer or Liturgy of the Hours. It has larger print than either. It has the gospel canticles printed on the inside covers, a brilliant idea. Plus it is a LOT cheaper.

This set of prayers is a daily offering of psalms, readings, and other prayers to help direct one towards God.
I have the four-volume set of the liturgy, but find those volumes are difficult to carry with me when I am traveling, or when I am visiting a place where I will have some time to pray and just want to carry a smaller book in my pocket. What you do lose is the complete set of prayers (such as the Office of Readings and various holy days), and you do have to use more place-markers, but it's a wonderful companion that I'd rather not be without.

Shorter Christian Prayer is a slim, pocket size version of the Divine Office or Liturgy of the Hours for Roman Catholics. It is perfect for travel, or if you want the simplest form of getting into one or more of the "hours" of prayer. It has the 4-week Morning and Evening Prayers & Psalms (150), and the standard one week cycle of Night Prayer. It does not have the Liturgy of the Hours for the middle of night and wee hours of day, or the variations for all the liturgical seasons and feast days.

The full Liturgy of the Hours is a thick four volume set which we have and it is rather complicated to jump back and forth as the Psalms and Canticles are scattered and cross-referenced. That one also has numerous wrtings by many great saints, Doctors of the Church, etc. along with the Hours.

The Shorter Christian Prayer has just the essentials of the Morning, Evening and Night Prayers. Let me briefly explain the Divine Office for those not yet familiar with it.

The Divine Office, or Liturgy of the Hours, is the official prayer of the Catholic Church. It is the "official" way to incorporate prayer throughout your day, every day. It was originally intended for clergy and religious, but has over time become popular with laity. The original Divine Office consisted of prayers and readings to be performed about every four hours around the 24-hour clock. Second Vatican Council simplified it somewhat and I believe eliminated the midnight prayer, or made it optional (I am not an expert, just getting started myself).

The idea is to "pray without ceasing" as Scripture instructs us. Do you feel a gap in your spiritual life between Sunday Masses? Do you feel that you lose awareness of God in the hustle and bustle of daily life? Are you struggling with bad habits or sufferings and seem to keep losing as much spiritual ground as you gain week by week? Then you need a strong habit of daily prayer to keep your dialog with God lively every day and to continuously seek His protection from evil and guidance in the righteous way. A firm foundation of structured daily prayer will also make it easier to remember to incorporate many small spontaneous prayers each day. Instead of your faith being a weekly devotion at Mass, it also becomes a daily on-going conversation with Jesus.

My wife and I started by doing the daily morning readings and prayers of the Magnificat [...] which is an even more condensed form of daily Morning and Evening Prayer with the daily Mass liturgy. Then we tried the Divine Office but it was too much. So now we use the Magnificat for morning prayer and reading and Sunday and occassional daily Mass. And we use the Shorter Christian Prayer for Night Prayer and occassional Evening Prayer.

Each "hour" of the Divine Office takes about 10-20 minutes. It consists of prayers, brief readings from the old and new testment, a canticle, and two or more Psalms. If you perform the complete Divine Office for the full 4-week cycle you will read all 150 Psalms and cover a lot of other Scripture readings. The canticle is a prayer about Jesus that was said by someone in the Bible, such as Mary's response to the Annunciation, Zechariah's proclamation and prohecy at the birth of his son, John the Baptist, the acclaimation of Simeon in the Temple, etc.

The Psalms especially give the prayers depth as they deal with real human sufferings, betrayal, persecution, repentence, prophecy of the Christ, thanksgiving, and glorification of God.

You won't get the commentaries and mediation from the great writers of the church in Shorter Christian Prayer as you would with the 4-volume set. You won't get the less common hours of prayer, or all the seaonal variations. But you will get a very accessible, easy to carry along volume of daily prayers and readings for the Morning, Evening and Night prayers. If you build a good habit of daily prayer with this small volume then you have a sound spiritual foundation for daily protection, and peace of heart with Jesus.

This book is wonderful for those of us whom don't have the time to pray the complete Liturgy of the Hours. Very compact and travel friendly, I am able to pray during my morning and evening commute to/from work...

Published for use in all the US Roman Catholic Dioceses (and many international ones too) and fully approved by the Bishop's Committee on the Liturgy, National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Excellent and user friendly. Highly recommended.

I highly recommend Shorter Christian Prayer. Praying the Morning, Evening, and Night prayers daily (and uniting these prayers of the Church with clergy and laity throughout the world) has been and continues to be a great blessing for me, to the greater glory of God. It has greatly enhanced my prayer life, deepened my spiritual life, and is bringing me ever closer to the Lord. The daily Psalms and Canticles are rich in beauty and their splendor grows with familiarity. I especially appreciate that beneath the title and theme of each Psalm and Canticle there is a brief reflection that relates the Psalm or Canticle to its New Testament (New Covenant) significance.

The book is of very good quality in the leather cover, pages, and layout. Could use more than one ribbon-marker, but a well-placed holy card does the trick just as well!

Very edifying and well worth the effort. Highly recommended.

I use the larger Christian Prayer. I ordered the Shorter Christian Prayer for a young friend of mine. When I read it, I found it contained (almost) everything as mine, but handier. I have asked my bookstore to obtain copies for my wife and our five children.

The Liturgy of the Hours is a great stepping stone for transforming our entire lives into prayer. The single volume Christian Prayer is a good starter. With the discipline of sticking with it daily, we tend to thirst for more. Then the four volume, more extensive set becomes a valuable purchase. The organization of its volumes into the various liturgical seasons better than the single book enhances our ability to focus on them.

Where can this lead? By dedicating each thing we think, say or do as a pray offering to God, we gradually grow into a state of constant prayer. It isn't necessary to be directly thinking about God as we pursue each task of our daily lives. Simply their dedication makes of them a prayer. The result is that we become consciously aware of God's presence on an ongoing basis. It's like when a person is standing behind us. They see everything we do, hear everything we say but we can't see them. Yet we KNOW they are there, and are aware of it at all times.

Once we are constantly mindful of God's presence, we allow Him to begin the purgative process, as St John of the Cross explains it. We think of hell as a 'firey furnace,' yet in the New Testament fire refers more often to God's love than anything else. In Hebrews and Wisdom 3, Scripture speaks of gold being purified in fire. Gold jewelry is an alloy with another metal, to enable crafters to shape it into a permanent, hardened state since gold is a soft, maleable metal. When we heat it up to 2500 degrees, though, it returns to its molten or liquid state, and the other metal (or 'impurity') easily separates from the gold, leaving only the pure, 24 carat gold.

Constant awareness of God's presence allows Him to begin to burn away our impurities by exposure to the fire of His perfect love. We feel the dissonance of everything that we think, say or do with His love when they fail to conform with that love. This spiritual discomfort becomes a gentle pressure, as we naturally begin to conform our lives to that fire of love. As we yield to His love and permit Him to transform our lives thus, we grow closer to entrance into perfect union with Him, which is essentially what heaven is. John of the Cross notes that this is what happens in Purgatory, but that we can make greater strides in that process during this life.

One by-product of this type of spiritual growth is that we acquire a keener sense of what God's will is. In the Last Supper discourse of John's Gospel, Jesus repeatedly says that whatever we ask for in His Father's name shall be done for us. St John qualifies that, though, in his first Letter by adding that what we ask of God must be in accordance with His will. As we conform our lives to His love, we increasingly feel more exactly what is in concert with it and what is not. Thus, we become more refined in terms of the prayers of petition that we ask of Him.

The Liturgy of the Hours is an excellent way to strive toward the prayer discipline that lets God draw us into that deeper spirituality, and ultimately into perfect union with Him for eternity.

This is an excellent book and less confusing than "The Liturgy of the Hours." We gather at our church every morning and say the Psalms and readings for that day. It helps you to get in the spirit of Our Lord and help Him to help you in your daily trials. The evening prayers are just as uplifing and helpful.

While not very sure about my ability to understand or find the time to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, this book has proven a great way to start.

It took me 45 minutes to pray the first time, following the ordinary and flipping like crazy. Some online LOTH sites helped. EWTN in particular has Morning and Evening prayer (audio) on the left hand sidebar of their homepage. I don't think they use SCP (they might be using Christian Prayer) but the texts were so similar it didn't much matter for learning purposes.

So now I've been praying it for a year and a half somewhat regularly, and it's become the backbone of my scripture/prayer life at home. There is no substitute for having scripture in your heart, and although limited, this little book proves its worth as the psalms and canticles are gradually memorized. Then you have them with you wherever you go. I've never been able to memorize scripture in any other format. Now I could rattle off the whole of Psalm 51 and several passages of the New Testament, as well as other frequently occurring texts.

The only problem now is that I chafe a bit when it comes to seasons like Lent and Advent where you only have seven days of readings and you have to repeat them every week (SCP includes Night Prayer, which gives only 7 days of readings, but I have since learned that that is all there are anyway). Plus I would love to read more extensive quotes from saints or the Fathers. And I hear the hymns in the full-size LOTH are more classical and beautiful, although without music.

No typos that I have found. Print/formatting is easy to read. No art, just little graphics. No sheet music. Could use an additional ribbon marker (there is only one).

If I had a genie in a bottle, and I could have one wish granted as regards this little gem, it would be a more traditional translation that elevates the language. I mean, it's hard to raise your spirit to God when you come across one of these dogs:

Psalm 72

O God, give your judgment to the king,
to a king's son your justice,
that he may judge your people in justice
and your poor in right judgment.

There are a few passages with these awful redundancies, or particularly uncreative or clunky phrasing. I've grown so used to it now that I don't mind it much, but I long for a more beautiful, flowing translation.

Still, an unbeatable deal, and a great way to get into the Divine Office.

I didn't buy my copy of the SCP; rather, I found it in the military chapel in Kuwait when I was on my way from there to Afghanistan. I'm guessing that it was provided by the Knights of Columbus or some other group, or maybe an individual or parish. Whatever the case, I pray God's blessings on them! The SCP kick-started my prayer life over there. It went to the mess hall with me for breakfast and supper, and was the last thing I read before I turned out the light to sleep. The advantages of this book are that you can carry it with you (it fits neatly into the cargo pockets of DCUs and ACUs), and that it is more psychologically accessible. I'll probably break down and get the four volume set, but I have the feeling that the smaller version will be the more used.