I will tell you this now.

After 23 or 24 years of praying this every single day, this is my favorite prayer. It is literally my favorite way to pray. I'm my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and this is the Center Presents. Maybe wondering why there's a Christmas tree behind me with lights on and everything. It's because right now we are filming for our Advent series called Waiting Well, and so we have to film now so you can have it then. One of the most daunting things, the night before I was ordained a deacon, I was so nervous. There's also the day you promised celibacy, but I was more preoccupied with the, made a promise that I would pray this thing called the Liturgy of the Hours every single day. Some days I don't pray the rosary. Some days I don't have a holy hour, promising to do this until I die. I was very, very intimidated by that. So let's back up, Liturgy the Hours. What is it? Why would the church ask all priests, deacons, bishops, religious sisters and brothers to pray this? And how can you get started? So the liturgy of the hours is like this.

It is the church has given, taken the prayer of scripture. Like we have the Psalms, right,

all 150 Psalms. We have canticles, right? Songs or prayers in the Old Testament and in the New

Testament. And the church has done this. It's taken all of those Psalms and canticles, or many of them,

and has put them in an ordered

way so that throughout the day, every person who prays them would stop and pray five times.

Pray those Psalms, pray those canticles on a regular basis, on basically a full week cycle

throughout the course of the church year.

Now, the first hour, the first hour, it's not, when I say hour, keep in mind, I'm not talking 60 minutes. I'm talking like, here's a moment that we stop. So it's an hour. So the first hour, the first prayer, is called the office of readings. And the office of readings is broken down into three Psalms typically, or three sections of psalms and then one longer

scripture passage and then a writing from some kind of saint or church document or church person

and it's by far it is my absolute favorite hour to pray liturgy the hours at the office of readings

so good you can pray that any time a day and then there's second one is morning prayer so morning prayer is similar kind of thing. You have three Psalms or two Psalms and a canticle, right? Canticle is just a word for a song, right? A song in Scripture or prayer in scripture. Two Psalms, canticle. And then some other prayers in the church. You pray a little reading from scripture. You have intercess, praying for other people. And there's also a

canticle, the one of Zechariah, right, John the Baptist's father, when his tongue is loosened,

he can speak, and we pray that prayer every morning. So that's morning prayer. Then we have daytime

prayer. Daytime prayer is the second shortest of all the prayers. It's relatively brief.

Opportunity to stop and pray. Evening prayer is the fourth prayer, and that is just like morning

prayer, but slightly different. I'll say it like that. Instead of the canticle of Zechariah, we have the

canticle of Mary from Luke's Gospel, where Mary visits Elizabeth, and she says, my soul proclaims

the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God and my Savior. We pray that. And so that morning

prayer and evening prayer kind of mirror each other in a certain way. And then the last prayer of the of the day is night

prayer. And that is some people's favorite prayer because it is the absolute shortest of all of the

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