Sing the Hours
is a Virtual Breviary, mostly the creation of one person, a young man, Paul Rose, with the help of his family, especially his dad John Rose.
Paul wanted to sing the Hours of Morning and Evening Prayer daily. Disappointed that he could find nothing on the internet, he decided to do it himself. He had the basic musical skills and the production skills which consist of computer programs that combine and edit audio-visual streams. Now more than a year later his YouTube site is a collection of more than a year of Morning and Evening Prayer using the official texts and his free style interpretation of them done in Gregorian Chant. He has almost 15,000 subscribers on YouTube with daily counts now running over 3000. The Hours are also available as a podcast on Apple and Spotify.
Paul and his family are converts from an Evangelical background. His dad loves Latin hymns and does some excellent translations of them. I wish they would just sing the English translations and not try to get us to appreciate the Latin poetry.
Paul thinks the production of the hours that he does is servile work which he does not do on Sundays or even Solemnities. Last Sunday, he first told subscribers there would be no Sunday Vespers production available, then decided it was OK to do Vespers live on YouTube. That resulted in the following hour-long YouTube post. He has now reposted it with the outline below. You probably will not want to listen to Vespers since it really is not his usual professional production. However, do listen to the first fifteen minutes which give what I would call his "spirituality of the hours." After Vespers he gives an impromptu lesson in Gregorian chant to convince everyone that Gregorian chant is easy. You can skip that unless you want to learn how to sing Gregorian chant.
Vespers and Chat
Going to sing Vespers live and stick around for a few minutes to answer any questions you might have!
"using the Word on Fire booklet at an off the grid bachelor's party in a remote area
nice to have the sacramental quality of a physical text
I really value sacramental physical worship and relationships and friendships
out in the woods (in this case) with one other Catholic and several irreligious (!!!) people
we sang Vespers together! awesome at the bachelor party(!!!)"
"with recovering from the trip and jet lag we had two awesome feasts
John the Baptist and Sacred Heart
on those days I did little recording since I try to party hard
when the Holy Spirit asks us to"
4:01 Canon law on feasting
"Isn't it great that part of the obligation of being a Christian and a Catholic
is to rejoice, think of all the scriptures which call us to rejoice
each Sunday we are required to celebrate the Resurrection, the eternal day of joy
Along with the requirement to celebrate Mass
is the requirement to rest, to REJOICE, and to abstain from regular work
Are you ready for a live reading of Canon Law!
I am not an expert in canon law; it is self-explanatory"
Canon 1247
Moreover they are to abstain from those works and affairs
which hinder the worship to be rendered to God,
the JOY proper to the Lord's Day,
or the suitable relaxation of mind and body.
"Have you ever imagined Christ, the God man singing?
Christ does sing eternally in thanksgiving to the Father
We have not only the privilege to imagine Christ singing
but to hear Christ singing.in our own voices
Contemplate Mary and Jesus teaching the child Jesus his psalter
If there is anything in which I can boast it is that Christ sings in me and in you
We have been listing to Sing the Hours during breakfast
About a week ago while we were listening my five-year old daughter said
"That is Jesus singing!"
I said "No. his name is Paul"
The child said "but he has the same voice as Jesus!"
Robin concluded "From the mouth of babes..."
15:00 Evening Prayer begins
15:15 Deus in Adjutorium – "O God come to my assistance"
15:55 "Aleluia sing to Jesus!"
19:00 Psalm 110
21:25 Psalm 114
23:23 Alleluia Canticle (Revelation 19)
25:55 Reading
27:20 Responsory
28:00 Magnificat
30:05 Intercessions
31:45 Pater Noster
32:35 Concluding Prayer (Collect)
33:15 Dominus nos benedicat – "May the Lord bless us"
because they are only in the American version of the LOH
37:25 "How do you sing the hours with others?"Paul says that praying in community (parish or monastery) is the ideal
however, he is not likely to stop providing the online version anytime soon
the hours should be sung, very possible in simple Gregorian tones
Chant tones were invented in the 6th century so peasants could sing in unison.
If you have had any exposure to music, you have more background than they had.
I am not an expert, I am just a peasant.
The important thing is just to do it, not to be an expert.
44:46 "the food of my people"
48:50 what does the cross / dagger thing mean in chant notation?
54:11 "i mean i'm in america"
55:11 more scribbling
58:15 patreon.com/singthehours 250 thousand offices a month prayed (across all media including YouTube)
this is a global movement of the spirit
I have bled for this in obscurity and the growing exposure this has been getting
but it is a happy thing, I love it, I am passionate about it
this is the prayer of Christ for all of us, and we deserve it
it is our birthright and our baptism right to participate in it
let's grow this 250 thousand a month thing
God is good.
The Virtual Future of the Hours: My Dream and Paul's Vision
your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. (Acts 2:17 and Joel 2:28).
In my opinion, the game-changing virtual future of the Hours lies in allowing Catholic laity to celebrate the Hours anywhere at any time: with non-Catholics at seemingly secular celebrations like at bachelor's party, at family breakfasts with a five-year old, on the front porch of family celebrations, and over the internet with friends.
As Paul says, it is our baptismal birthrate to celebrate the prayer of Christ and the Church. I would add that we don't need clergy, we don't need a choir, and we don't need a church building to do that.
If we all begin to do the Hours alone, with friends and family, and virtually with others, we will end up wanting to come together in Church to celebrate all together what we can do every day everywhere. The key is to begin at the peripheries through the use of virtual reality rather than attempt to bring everyone physically together.
The sung future of the virtual Hours lies in the ability of even modestly talented cantors to produce for the parish website sung versions of the psalms and canticles of the four-week cycle of Morning and Evening Prayer. One does not have to produce a full virtual breviary for the year like Paul is doing.
People of parish would then be able to celebrate the Hours led by the voices of their own cantors wherever and whenever they want. We will be building local communities virtually person by person, household by household, small group by small group, ministry by ministry.
The beauty of virtual reality is that we do not all have to assemble in the same place at the same time. Cantors can produce the sung text whenever and wherever they have time. They don't even have to get together as a choir. They can do it individually as Paul does. They can do it in pairs, alternating verses. They can do it as a small ensemble by alternating verses between a cantor and the ensemble. We as individuals and groups can join their prayer whenever and wherever we have time just by accessing the parish website on our electronic devices.
YouTube versions of the psalms and canticles have the ability of showing the modern equivalent of an illuminated medieval manuscript celebrating visually the life the of the parish in the light of psalms and canticles.
So, in addition to calling forth all the musical talents of the parish, we can also call forth all the visual talents of the parish: the artists, the photographers, the videographers. Individually and in groups they can illustrate and comment on the texts of the hymns and canticles interpreting them in light of our present realities both locally and globally.
Where can we get all the technical assistance that we need to put this together? In our local community colleges. There are courses on art, music, photography, and how to put all that together.
There are plenty of young people who would probably be glad to add a parish video to their portfolio of projects to impress the media world.
These courses are also accessible in my state to senior auditors on a space available basis for an administrative fee and the cost of textbooks (which are not cheap).
So, the young and the old, the unchurched and the churched could put together the modern equivalent of a medieval psalter on the parish website. This virtual cathedral will not happen instantly but will be built hour by hour in our personal lives and in our virtual and physical community.
Jack, thanks for this post. I will check out the video when I get a chance - I hope it will be later today.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you are finding fruitful ways to pray the Hours while you're living such a monastic (or maybe Carmelite!) lifestyle.
I chant Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer by myself every day, because I haven't found anyone yet who will do it with me :-)
Betty and I prefer to think of ourselves as “Benedictines” since as the Rule says, “nothing is more important than the Divine Office.” Of course, we do chant Vespers with the Benedictines each evening. Betty actually came close to joining a charismatic Benedictine community at one point in her life. I went to Saint John’s Collegeville as an undergraduate and regularly sang Vespers either with the choir monks upstairs in Latin or the lay brothers who used Gelineau psalms downstairs. Canterbury was once a Benedictine Monastery and prides itself on that fact offering itself as a place of pilgrimage, hospitality and liturgical life. Taft, among other liturgical scholars, has high praise for the Anglicans in creating an office centered around morning and evening prayer, attractive and accessible to people.
ReplyDeleteJim, if you want to chant the office with others consider during it virtually by using the Sing the Hours website, their YouTube site, or podcasts.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that I plan to do in introducing the virtual office to our parish is to challenge the three priests and two deacons to begin using the same website even though they do not say the office in common, and to invite other pastoral staff members to do the same.
In our contemporary society it is really difficult to gather people together at the same time and place, but we have learned to share life through virtual reality. A few months into the pandemic, Betty and I recognized that even if Meinrad and Canterbury were both located less than a mile away at our Parish campus, we would not be able to join them very often even without the pandemic. Our regular celebrations of the Hours are possible because of the convenience of doing it at the time we want at our home location. One of us will usually say “are you ready to go to Canterbury” or “time to summon the monks? That is all the planning that we have need to keep this going.
We have created here at NewGathering a virtual community precisely because we can do it anywhere and anytime that we want. We work it in by using small amounts of time here and there. But that adds up. Remember that the Friends study told us that we interact with our closest friend only about 17 minutes a day, but that add up to hours in a week, and about an eight-hour working day in a month.
My suggestion to parishes is to create a virtual Hours community by encouraging members to use the Sing the Hours app. Non clerical pastoral staff might do it regularly by dividing up the hours with each doing what they are able. For example, a choir of thirty members might do one day a month as their virtual community, knowing that if at any time they want to do an extra Hour one of their fellow choir members will be praying that day.
We can make virtual parish celebrations even stronger community builders if the cantors of the parish record the psalms and canticles of the Four Week Psalter for the parish website. We would then be led by our own cantors rather than relying of people elsewhere to lead us.
I like the idea of virtual hours. The Episcopal parish has morning prayer every day at 9 a.m. No singing, but if you get used to tuning in at the same time (one of the VERY few benefits of retirement is that your sked is wide open) you get into a groove.
DeleteThe local parish was ringing the Angels bells at noon. That used to be my cue to say the rosary, but Father turned off the bells (actually a recording) because it was followed by prerecorded "anti Catholic" (Protestant) hymns like "The Old Rugged Cross." I guess he hasn't found any suitable substitute.
I suppose I could tell him I miss them, but serving the lapsed heathen apostates is not really high on his lust.
Angels s/b Angelus. I think my auto correct is Protestant ...
DeleteCertainly, writing about what is "high on his lust" could be a Protestant jeremiad... :-)
DeleteLol!
DeleteYah, this guy's lust list runs to birettas, lacy vestments, obscure altar accoutrements, and his street rod Camaros. His mom is there every Sunday with his extended family to make him dinner. He's like a self-involved 16 year old.
DeleteThere is a big flap now because he is at the local rectory 24/7 instead of dividing his time between the two patidhes like he said he would. The local parish has a much bigger garage for his automotive hobby.
OK, I'll stop now. Christ knows I'm no saint.