Some do the Liturgy of the Hours, others use monastic forms, and even some use the Breviary. Within the Anglican world, some do the Daily Office one way, others do it another way. Yet without a shared Divine Office form, what tangible unity in prayer do we ever actually have? None, in our current state, is the answer. People have different temperaments and spiritual dispositions, so it follows that allowing for liturgical variety is a good thing. This may sounds like a perfectly reasonable development, and in many ways it is. So to claim “devotionalization” is simply to observe that instead of being a point of Unity in the Church Militant-that is, laypersons, clergy and religious praying in basically the same way-the Divine Office today signals our differences and our personal choices. By “devotionalized” I mean in the sense of Thornton’s theology of the threefold Regula-Divine Office, Mass, and Devotion, each having particular characteristics. Whereas, according to his reasoning, the Divine Office emphasizes the Father and the Mass the Son, Devotion emphasizes the immanent Holy Spirit, who guides and teaches in radically personal ways according to gifts, temperaments, and local conditions. This, owing more to social and technological upheaval than to anything else, I suspect is true in many if not most places. It is my sense, based on wide observation, that the Divine Office, through well-intentioned use, has in fact become “devotionalized.” It has become optional, and it has become overly burdened by the dozens of variations through the Church.
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