Learning Matins

I'm regularly asked for information on how to say Matins.

So for those interested, I plan on posting a series of notes on it here.

The posts will be a mix of material on the structure of the hour and its rubrics, background on the prayers it includes, and aids to a deeper understanding of the text.  So feel free to pick and choose which ones you are interested in!

I'm using a separate blog to Saints Will Arise partly for convenience reasons  - the black and white layout I use there is not good with tables and diagrams.  I also don't want to clog that site up too much.

The Matins problem

One of the reasons I've been reluctant to provide notes on Matins is that there is no Latin-English equivalent of the Diurnal for this hour.  Given that the hour is very long indeed, pretty much equivalent to all the day hours combined, that is a serious barrier. Moreover, even if your Latin is good, while all of the texts for the hour can be found in the 1963 breviary, the chants, if you want to actually sing it, are much harder to find.

For this reason, as we go through this series I plan to provide a series of reviews and links to the various books that are available to help you say Matins, including what they do and don't include, and their assorted strengths and weaknesses.

However, if you are comfortable uing an online source, the Divinum Officium website now has most of the texts you will need if you select its monastic option.

Devotional vs liturgical

There are basically two options when it comes to Matins (as with all the hours) if you want to use the traditional Office: pray it liturgically, in which case you will need an officially approved book of some kind (I will come back to the options) to say it in Latin; or pray it devotionally, in which case you can adapt it to your own situation.

My strong recommendation is that unless you are obliged to say the hour (ie are a priest, religious or canonical hermit), and have some familiarity with it already, to start off with, aim to pray this hour devotionally.  That way you are free to say as much or as little of it as you like, and to use English if you prefer.  It also means that you have greater flexibility in terms of the books you use to say the hour with.

Accordingly, for the purpose of this series, I'm going to assume, for the moment at least, that you are praying it devotionally.  Over time you can build up to the full thing according to all of the official rubrics if you wish, and I'll point you to the resources that I know of to enable you to do this.

Books for Matins

In order to follow this series you won't actually need a book at least at first.  Instead I'm going to point you to the Divinum Officium website as a starting point.  

If you want an actual book, the most useful book to acquire initially for most people is the 'Matins according to the Benedictine ritual' put out by the Clear Creek monks and available through Lulu.  It doesn't provide everything you need for Matins (no Commons for feasts, readings, etc) but it does covers the normal weekday Office.

Some people may have acquired a copy of the Lancelot Andrewes' English only Monastic Breviary Matins.  But this is not, under any stretch of the imagination, an officially approved book, so won't do if you ever want to pray the hour liturgically.  More importantly, even for devotional use I think it has major drawbacks, above all in the form of the King James Version psalms - from a Catholic perspective, beautiful as the translations are, they are sometimes jarringly at odds with the Vulgate and thus Tradition.   Accordingly, I don't plan to centre my notes on it, though I will point to it as a resource for translations etc from time to time.

More soon!