Making my own rule?

The Daily Office in the Book of Common Prayer is great. I find it a wonderful way to practice a daily devotion and I'm sad that I didn't find it sooner. The Office of the Anglican Breviary is great too... except that you have to be a doctor of divinity in order to understand how to use it. The complexity comes from the fact that almost every day is dedicated to the commemoration of some saint, sometimes several saints, and the Office changes constantly to reflect this. Then movable days like Sundays come along and conflict with the fixed (calendar) days of all these multiple saints, making it necessary to resolve many conflicts in order to say the Office properly. The feast of a saint may take precedence over a Sunday, or it may be celebrated with the Sunday itself, or it may be transferred to the nearest open weekday (or feria) as appropriate. Difficult.

It is difficult, but also really, really beautiful. The Breviary has a real richness that the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) doesn't. Each of the four BCP services (Morning, Noon, Evening, and Compline) has variable parts, but choosing between those variable parts is generally just a matter of picking one selection from three or four given choices. (I'm not talking about the lectionary, which of course cycles through two great arcs, a 7-week circle of psalms that rotates within a greater 104-week journey through the old and new testaments and gospels.)

I have already started adding celebration of the lesser feasts and fasts to my daily devotions, by using--you guessed it--Lesser Feasts and Fasts (2003). I read the "lesson" about the saint and then add the Collect at the appropriate time, but that's really all that Lesser Feasts and Fasts gives me. The Breviary, on the other hand, has different psalms, antiphons, and prayers for every saint's day, as well instructions for sorting out all the conflicts of who trumps whom.

I'm thinking that I'd like to add to the BCP Offices by using parts of the Breviary to build in a more formal celebration of the saints' days and fasts. However, using the Breviary itself for daily worship ( in place of the Book of Common Prayer) is just impossible. With eight daily offices, one every three hours throughout the day, reciting the Breviary is a major commitment. Maybe I'll do it sometime on a retreat, or after I retire; but right now it's simply a little much. I'll leave it to the monastics. Besides, my brain is too small to figure out all the rules anyway.

But I do think I'll look for some workable way to incorporate a little of the Breviary into the BCP Daily Office--without, of course, changing the essential character of its own centuries-old tradition. (I'm not thinking about changing any BCP Office itself; rather, I'm thinking about adding an Office from the Breviary to my daily worship. Maybe by adding Prime before Morning Prayer, or Vespers after Evening Prayer, or something like that.) Who knows. More later.