Hi Friends! Welcome to Episode Five of the Reaching Hurting Women Podcast: A Contemplative Path of Recovery where we are learning new and healthy ways of coping with our daily struggles. My name is Tamara and I’ll be your host.
With the healing power of the Holy Spirit as our guide, we are integrating the traditional 12 Step Recovery principles with Benedictine Spirituality and other contemplative practices which we will be learning and discussing each week. It’s my hope to have a new podcast each Monday to discuss our theme of the week on ReachingHurtingWomen.com 
This week our theme topic is: The Liturgy of the Hours  
The Liturgy of the Hours otherwise known as the Divine Office, the Work of God, the canonical hours or the Breviary; is the official set of prayers that mark the hours of each day and sanctifying the day.
It consists primarily of psalms supplemented by hymns, readings and other prayers. It constitutes the official public prayer life of the Church and forms the basis of prayer within Christian monasticism.
The Liturgy of the Hours along with the Eucharist has formed the Church’s public worship from earliest times in both Eastern and Western tradition, Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran churches.
The early Christians continued the Jewish practice of reciting prayers at certain hours of the day or night in adherence to Psalm 119:164 “Seven times a day I praise you.”
In the cities of the Roman Empire, the forum bell rang the beginning of that day at six o’clock each morning, noted the day’s progress by striking again at nine o’clock, sounded the lunch break at noon, called citizens back to work at three o’clock and closed the markets by sounding again at six o’clock in the evening. Every part of the day within Roman culture was marked and ordered by the ringing of the forum bells, including Jewish prayer and by natural extension Christian prayer also. Christian prayer at that time consisted primarily of reciting or chanting psalms, reading portions of the Old Testament, and later adding a reading from the Gospels, Acts, the Epistles and canticles.
Around the end of the 5th Century The Liturgy of the Hours was made up of seven offices; Benedict of Nursia added an eighth office in the 6th Century. The eight offices attributed to St. Benedict are:

* Matins/also known as Vigils (The Midnight Office)
* Lauds/Dawn Prayer (Dawn or 3am)
* Prime or Early Morning Prayer (1st Hour 6am)
* Terce/Mid-morning Prayer (3rd Hour 9am)
* Sext/Midday Prayer (6th Hour Noon)
* None/Midafternoon Prayer (9th Hour 3pm)
* Vespers/Evening Prayer (at lighting the lamps 6pm)
* Compline/Night Prayer (before retiring 9pm)

In 1972 in alignment with the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI announced The Liturgy of the Hours, which modified the office to an order very similar to the one instituted by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer; by reducing the previously mandated eight office hours down to four; dividing them into Major and Minor hours. The Major hours, which I try to keep most, are:

* The Office of Readings (formerly Matins)
* Lauds/Morning Prayer
* Vespers/Evening Prayer
* Compline/Night Prayer

Volumes of books have been written explaining and describing the history of The Hours, so I would be hard pressed to condense it into a single podcast. Suffice it to say, as we are reciting or chanting the Daily Office we are keeping a religious tradition that even Jesus Christ kept when he walked here on Earth.
One of the most beautiful things about The Liturgy is that there are thousands of people praying it at the same time around the world, cascading from each time zone to the next surrounding the Earth with God’s Word, which is either being prayed silently, spoken or chanted aloud.