Praying the hours
The Liturgy of the Hours — the Divine Office — is the Church's daily round of prayer, sanctifying the whole day with psalms, hymns and readings at fixed times. It is the fulfillment of the psalmist's 'Seven times a day I have given praise to thee' (Psalm 118 (119):164) and of the apostolic command to pray without ceasing: not by praying every minute, but by returning at every hour, until the hours themselves become prayer.
This is the native home of Gregorian chant. The overwhelming bulk of the repertoire was composed not for Mass but for the Office — thousands of antiphons and hymns to clothe the 150 psalms as they circle through the week. When you listen to chant, you are very often overhearing the Hours.
The eight hours
Matins (the Office of Readings) — the night watch, kept in darkness; the longest and deepest office. Lauds — praise at daybreak, the day's true morning prayer. Prime — the first hour of work (suppressed by the Second Vatican Council, still kept in the older Roman Breviary and in some monasteries). Terce, Sext, None — the 'little hours' of mid-morning, midday and mid-afternoon, brief pauses that keep the workday tethered. Vespers — the great evening office, with the Magnificat. Compline — night prayer: a psalm against fear, the Nunc dimittis, and a Marian antiphon sung into the dark — through much of the year, the Salve Regina.
This site keeps these hours with you: the panel on the home page names the canonical hour wherever you are, the light of the whole site warms and cools with the liturgical day, and each hour links to fitting music.
How to begin — simply
Do not attempt all eight. The Church's own advice is to hang the day on its two hinges (Sacrosanctum Concilium 89): Lauds in the morning and Vespers in the evening — or, more simply, Compline at night. Even five minutes at each — one psalm, slowly, with the chant playing — is genuinely praying the Hours.
A minimal rule: on waking, one psalm of praise (Psalm 62/63 is Lauds' own); at nightfall, Psalm 90/91 and the Salve Regina. Use any psalter or breviary app; let the chant on this site set the pace. Add the little hours only when the hinges hold by themselves.
The point is not quantity but rhythm. A day punctuated by even two fixed prayers changes shape: work is bracketed, night is closed, and time stops leaking.
How to actually begin
Most people who want to pray the Hours give up in the first week, and almost always for the same reason: they try to pray all of them. The Office was built for monasteries where bells ring and nothing else is scheduled. If you have a job, begin with one hour and keep it.
Choose Evening Prayer. Vespers is the best starting point for someone living an ordinary life. It falls at a natural hinge in the day, it is short, and it contains the Magnificat — Our Lady’s song, prayed by the Church every evening for more than a thousand years.
Keep it to ten minutes. A hymn, two psalms and a canticle, a short reading and responsory, the Magnificat, the intercessions, the Our Father and a closing prayer. That is the whole shape. You are not falling short of a longer version; that is Evening Prayer.
Say it at the same time. The Hours work by rhythm, not by intensity. Praying badly at six o’clock every evening builds something that praying beautifully whenever you feel like it does not.
What you need
Strictly, a breviary — but you do not need to buy one to start. The texts are widely available in print and online, in Latin, in English, or side by side. A single-volume edition such as Christian Prayer covers Morning and Evening Prayer, which is all most people ever pray.
If you would rather not manage ribbons and page numbers at the beginning, take the psalms alone. Pray Psalm 140 (141) in the evening — Dirigatur oratio mea sicut incensum in conspectu tuo, “Let my prayer be directed as incense in thy sight” — and you are already doing what the Church does at Vespers, in its oldest form.
Why it is prayed at all
The Hours exist to answer a problem every praying person meets: left to ourselves we pray when we feel like it, which is to say rarely and unevenly. The Office replaces feeling with a clock. It hands you words you did not choose — often words that do not match your mood at all — and asks you to say them anyway.
That is its particular genius. On a day when you have nothing to say, the psalter says it for you. On a day when you are happy and the psalm is a lament, you are praying it on behalf of someone who cannot. The Church calls this the prayer of the whole Body: not a private conversation, but a choir that has been going without interruption since the apostles, which you are stepping into for ten minutes and then leaving again.
It is also, quietly, the reason Gregorian chant exists. Most of it was written to carry these texts through these hours.
Last reviewed for accuracy on , against the Douay-Rheims Bible and the Church's own documents.