About
about
View of an old Church in a Lebanese village in the mountains
The website is still under construction and I didn’t have the time yet to deal with the mobile version. The only way to browse it is on a Pc or a tablet for the time being.
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WHO AM I : I am not a theologian nor a learned consecrated person; I am not a computer whiz, but simply a lay person who after her retirement could finally devote all her time to be with GOD through the prayer. So, after having spent the majority of my life abroad from my home country, Lebanon, I returned to settle in it after my retirement and took residence in the high mountains, away from the pollution of the coastal towns and highways. But I had to pay a price for this choice: there were no Roman Catholic churches in the high mountains, only maronite churches. The Maronite Church is part of the Catholic Church but its has its own liturgical calendar and its liturgies are different than the Roman Catholic one as they stand between the western and the eastern traditions.
So, for more than nine years, I attended the maronite Mass, mainly in monasteries and I finally learned to appreciate it. The only thing that I was missing was my Roman calendar and its Saints as the maronite church does not celebrate the Saints as we do. So I started compensating for this lack with the prayer of the Divine Office which constituted a very satisfying complement to the maronite liturgy. I had thus the chance to take the riches from both sides. As I was left on my own, I started personalizing more and more my praying habits and the Offices that I was praying. This is also why I call the website “My” Breviary and describe it as “private” not because of hidden schismatic thoughts but because it is made of material found in different catholic breviaries and places,
So, after nine years of hard work, I came out with this Breviary, that I really yearned to share with a Community. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. Understanding that GOD’s Will was different than mine, I looked for other ways to share my work. Encouraged by some friends, I decided to go for a website. It was a good solution for sharing the Breviary since the landscape format of the Offices was meant to be read digitally. Moreover, the considerable number of pages it contains was making it impossible to think of a printed edition of it. The digital version of the Breviary offers also the advantage of being easy to correct and update, which is not the case of printed Breviaries which must wait many years and decades before a new version can come out.
So it wasn’t at all my purpose in the beginning to publicize this work as it was intended for a strict internal consumption, within a religious community. I need also to make it clear -in order to minimize the critics 😐- that English is for me an adopted language because my first language is French. The same for Latin used in the hymns and some other places. So I apologize for presenting a work which is far from being perfect but which I think is a good tool of prayer if you like to pray.
The musical content
I am aware that the musical content of these Offices might be out of reach for people who do not have a musical background. I myself am a former musician. But as I said it earlier, this work was intended to be used in a Community where assistance would have been naturally provided to all the members. MORE
NO COPYRIGHT
Since I did not have to limit myself to the resources of a single religious order, I have borrowed material from many sources. MORE
What I have done is free for use as I think it is outrageous to apply copyright to spiritual matters created for the sole purpose of praising the LORD.
HOW IT STARTED
HOW IT EVOLVED: Divine Office v/s Liturgy of the Hours
When I started praying the Hours in a small pocket sized book I was far of thinking that I would be here today. It is called in French “Prayer of the humble”. The small book had short morning and evening prayers for the seven days of the week. It was good for some time but after that I got bored with it.
Several years passed before I got again interested in the Hours. This happened through my visits to monasteries where I would participate to the prayer of the Divine Office. But this was in a country where I did not really know the language. So I searched on Internet and purchased the one volume ”Christian Prayer” published by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy. And I was so happy with this new acquisition. But soon I noticed that there was something missing: The antiphons of the high seasons were different in the monasteries than the ones I had in my book. So again I searched on Internet and found that there were four and not only one volume for the Liturgy of Hours..! I ordered them as a birthday present to myself and started praying with them until I discovered other Breviaries on Internet. I got very much attracted by the Antiphonarium Monasticum of the Order of Preachers . But it was all in Latin, language I don’t know very well. I think that what led me to undertake and complete this work was the discovery in one of those breviaries of the Canticle of Daniel 3 in Tone IV with its Antiphon. I was totally fascinated by the beauty and the power of the psalmody. And this is how I started my own Breviary: I started translating their antiphons and then adapting them to English, keeping some features in Latin and finally changing them to fit an English text
How I wish that MyBreviary will serve as a mustard seed for someone else.
The mustard seed !!!
Despite my preference to the traditional breviaries because I find them much richer and more inspiring than the Novus Ordo ones, but I find it extremely difficult to pray every day the traditional long Matins and all the small hours of Prime,Terce, Sext, and None with all the tasks that our modern life imposes on us. So I ended up using features from both the traditional breviaries and the Novus Ordo ones. MORE