Saturday, June 27, 2009

Our Lady's Office

Apart from reading Lauds of the Day, all the other Hours I've read to-day, for convenience sake while out, and pro pia devotione, from my little pocket edition of Our Lady's Little Office - not from the Baronius Press edition, full as it is of misprints, but from my smaller, well-thumbed and annotated Carmel Books edition of 1997, being a facsimile of a 1914 publication.  This I did apart from anything else because to-day the Office of Our Lady on Saturday is read anyway in the Breviary, and because the Little Office, while being quite as liturgical as the full Office, is shorter, and this comforted me.  (I will soon enough return to the larger volume for 1st Vespers of the 4th Sunday after Pentecost, and therein will pray again the moving Psalms 143 and 144.)

While on the subject of the Breviary, I note an article on the New Liturgical Movement blog, and the very large numbers of comments made, all in earnest discussion of it as it pertains to the laity's use of it and suchlike forms of the Divine Office - all such praying, united in the differing forms of the Prayer of the Church, is excellent and laudable.  While I have declined from reading the Night Office, I still adhere to the Day Hours of the Breviary, and aim at least to read each day's Lessons if not the whole of Matins.   There is something very good about the weekly praying the Psalms - each day of the week, I am pleased to read again the same Psalms at each Hour, and certain verses become as old friends.  On Tuesdays, for example, I read at None Quoniam propter te mortificamur tota die, and am forcibly put in mind of my old friend Peter, now Br Paul Marie of the Cross, who prays the selfsame words and lives them in his godly penitential life devoted to the Lord as a Carmelite Monk in Wyoming.

As I read at Matins of Our Lady, Nos cum Prole pia benedicat Virgo Maria - or, as the Marquess of Bute once rendered it, "Bless us, Mary, Maiden mild; Bless us, Jesu, Mary's Child."

2 comments:

Kate Edwards said...

You are right about the Baronius - such a shame since it is a nice looking book and a useful size. And I really like having all the chants in one place, together with useful supplementary material.

But it isn't just typos - some of the antiphons in the music section don't match those in the text (I think I discovered the music was correct, but I may be wrong!).

And if you did want to sing it, it is really annoying not to have the accent marks etc included!

I still use it because it involves less page flicking than the other copies of the Office I have, but it is teeth gritting stuff at times.

Joshua said...

Yes, recall that I posted the absolutely huge list of misprints and misorderings in the Baronius Press edition - for instance, fairly obviously they mixed up some of the Hours for Advent with some of the Hours for Christmastide! Shameful.