Getting ready for Advent Part 2A - Reading an Ordo, Pt 1

Today, the second part in my series on getting ready for Advent.

This post and the next are also by way of general preparation for the incoming Ordos for the new liturgical year, since they look at how to use an Ordo effectively. 

Alerting you to go look...

Ordos work by providing an alert to you, a reminder that you need to look at a part of your book other than the psalter section.

For First Vespers of Advent for example, this year on Saturday 2 December, the Le Barroux Ordo says ' - Vesp. de Dom. seq.', meaning Vespers of the following Sunday.

This means you need to look in the 'temporale' or 'of time' section of your book to see what is there by way of instructions for 1 Vespers of the First Sunday of Advent. 

Names of feasts and Offices - and finding them in older books

The Ordo I provide on this blog generally goes a couple of steps further.

First, for Saturdays and 1 Vespers of major feasts, I generally try to include a more detailed reference to the relevant Office you are looking for, such as '1 Vespers of the First Sunday of Advent'.  

This meant to be a reminder that the texts will not all be of the relevant day of the week.

It is also intended to aid those using other/older books for whom the page numbers I provide won't line up.  

And it provides a cross-check in case there is an error in the page references I've provided!

Note though, that feasts and Offices can masquerade under different names in different books.  

While I generally describe Saturday Vespers as I Vespers of the Sunday, for example, consistent with the 1962 breviary, some older books describe it is as 'Sabbato ante Dominicam 1. Adventus' (Saturday before the First Sunday of Advent), and continue this convention throughout the year.

Accordingly, you need to become familiar with the terminology of the particular Office book you are using, and work out how it translates to whatever Ordo you are using.

Using the page numbering systems as a cue

I also provide page numbers for the relevant sections of the Monastic Diurnale and the Antiphonale Monasticum.

As I noted in my previous post, the page numbering systems employed by the Diurnal (and the page sections in the Antiphonale) give you a cue as to what section of the book you need to look in to find the relevant text.

Imagine you are using an older breviary, for example, and are looking for the feast of St John the Evangelist (December 27).

In principle this could appear in the sanctorale (it is after all the feast of a saint).  

In fact however it is normally placed in the temporale with the rest of the feasts of the Christmas octave.

If you didn't know this you could work it out by looking at the numbering system used for the Monastic Diurnal reference.  For Lauds, for example, the entry will be:

Lauds: Festal psalms with antiphons, chapter, responsory, hymn, versicle, Benedictus antiphon and collect of the feast, with a commemoration of the Octave, MD 90*/AM 255 ff.

The MD entry - number+ asterix  - tells you it is in the temporale section of the book.

Missing feasts

It is also worth noting that if you are using an older breviary, some feasts of the 1962 calendar may not be there at all (such as Christ the King, for books prior to 1925).  

If so, it is worth looking at whether I've given a page reference for the Antiphonale Monasticum (or another supplementary book), in order to fill in some of the gaps in your book (the Antiphonale, for example, can be downloaded from CC Watershed, and Clear Creek Monastery has published an inexpensive supplement to it, available from Lulu).