Part II - The Daily Offices As Daily
Offices.
Daily Morning and Evening Prayer
constitute one of the greatest treasures to be found in the Anglican
Book of Common Prayer (abbreviated hereafter as "BCP" in
this post). They provide a rich diet of God's Word for the daily
sustenance of God's people. We are told that in the early church, in
different parts of the known world, there were two daily services
provided for all the people which were regularly attended by them. As
time passed, these daily offices seem gradually to have become the
preserve of "professional" prayers, the clergy and
lay-brothers/sisters in the monasteries, in the large cathedral
churches and basilicas, or in the chapels of university colleges. The
two early offices developed, with regional variations, into a set
pattern of multiple prayer services or so-called Day Hours (Lauds,
Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline) and one Night Office
(Mattins). Obviously, such a full daily (and nightly) round of prayer
could not be observed by the ordinary folk of the parish who laboured
in the fields or in the markets or in other vocations throughout the
day.
The English Reformation of the 16th
century has been described as, in part, a "rediscovery of the
congregation". The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, in
the first (1549) and second (1552) editions of the English BCP,
sought to re-established two daily services of prayer for the
benefit, not just of the clergy and monastics, but of all the people
of England's parishes. Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, as they
appear in the prayer books of 1549 and 1552, use elements of the
medieval Day Hours and Night Office, but in a form greatly
simplified. They were designed to be vehicles for the real conversion
and spiritual growth of both clergy and people by means of the
consistent and systematic public reading and hearing of the Word of
God.
Cranmer himself in his Original Preface
(1549) to the BCP, points out that the services of the Church of
England had become so complicated that "many times there was
more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when
it was found out" (I cannot help but see a smile pass across his
face as he writes this). He also makes clear what his purpose was in
supplying the simplified Daily Offices. He wanted the Scriptures to
be read right through without their "continual course"
being broken by interpolated bits and scraps, such as hymns, anthems,
responds and invitatories. That is, whole books of the Bible were to
be read through chapter by chapter, day by day, month by month, year
by year. He provided a Calendar, or list of daily Bible readings,
which we call the Daily Office Lectionary, "which is plain and
easy to be understood". That is, he provided an
order of prayer, and for the reading
of Holy Scripture, much agreeable to the mind and purpose of the old
fathers, and a great deal more profitable and commodious, than that
which was of late used. (from the Original Preface of 1549)
His guiding purpose, in other words,
was spiritual edification, the building up of both clergy and people,
by means of the constant and faithful proclamation of the Word of
God. His desire was to profit the people entrusted to him by making
God's truth accessible to them.
I believe that one of our greatest
responsibilities as faithful Anglicans is to honour the Archbishop's
purposes and intentions. I am not ashamed of being called an Anglican
when that word is properly defined. The Bible, with the use of the
Prayer Book, and a faithful, honest, humble submission to the 39
Articles of Religion (which includes, by definition, a submission to
the three Creeds of the primitive Church, to the Homilies of the
Church of England and to the Textus Receptus), with the authority of
the Bible being first and foremost, these give us a way of being
Christian that is healthy, rich, and deeply rooted in Christian
history. For Christianity is not something that we are required to
re-invent for ourselves day by day. It is a great river into which we
step, by the grace of God alone, by the call of God, and by which we
are carried along in one good, strong current or another. The real
Anglican current of that great river carries me along just fine and I
am thankful to God for it.
For those of us who are clergy, we can
best respect Thomas Cranmer's vision by our own faithful, daily use
of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, for this is clearly what he
purposed for us:
And all priests and deacons are to
say daily the Morning and Evening Prayer either privately or openly,
not being let by sickness, or some other urgent cause. And the Curate
that ministereth in every Parish-Church or Chapel, being at home,
and not being otherwise reasonably hindered, shall say the same in
the Parish-Church or Chapel where he ministereth, and shall cause a
bell to be tolled thereunto a convenient time before he begin, that
the people may come to hear God's Word and to pray with him. (from
"Concerning the Service of the Church")
We may not have a
bell which we can cause to be tolled. We may not even have a Church
or a Chapel to which we can call the people to come. We may live very
busy, tent-making sorts of lives. But saying the Daily Offices
remains our daily responsibility and an example we ought to be
setting for the people under our care. Let us always remember,
although we tend not to use the word anymore, that we are still
"curates" and have as our responsibility the "cure of
souls", which "cure" has as its root meaning our care
and concern for those entrusted to us.
I have always been
somewhat surprised to find that many clergy, in various churches
which claim to be Anglican, feel no responsibility for saying the
Daily Offices but are wont instead to substitute other forms of daily
devotions and disciplines. Devotional reading, as well as biblical
and theological study, ought to be part of our daily lives, as time
permits, as should extempore prayer throughout the day, but the Daily
Offices ought to be bedrock for us, the place where we begin. They
are the ground floor of our devotional life as clergy.
The compilers of
the 1928 American BCP clearly had the intention of making the Daily
Office much more flexible and adaptable than it might arguably be
said to be in the 1662 English BCP. In 1662, there are few rubrics
that allow one to shorten the service or to make it more flexible,
although it is important to remember here the so-called "Shortened
Services Act" passed in the English Parliament in 1872 which
permitted the occasional shortening of Morning and Evening Prayer and
provided guidance for the same. But we see in the 1928 American book
a clear attempt to make the Daily Offices more readily adaptable to
local, 20th century situations. Although it is possible to have too
much flexibility and too many options, so that the basic shape of the
service is so distorted as to become unrecognizable, some flexibility
is surely welcome, when the heart of the service is protected. This
balance seems to be struck in the 1928 book.
In the 1928
American BCP version of Morning Prayer, after saying one or more of
the opening Sentences of Scripture, the minister is not required to
say the long Exhortation to Confession which begins "Dearly
beloved brethren...". He may replace this with an exhortation
which consists of a single sentence. But he may also omit altogether
the Exhortation, the Confession, and the Absolution, and go directly
to the first Lord's Prayer. He may also omit the Exhortation, the
Confession, and the Absolution, AND the first Lord's Prayer, going
directly to the Versicles and Responses, "O Lord, open thou our
lips ...". After the first lesson, he has the option of saying
or singing ONE OF THREE different canticles, one of which is the very
short "Benedictus Es, Domine", a canticle not found in
1662, being taken from the Apocryphal book "The Song of the
Three Holy Children" where it forms the first part of what we
call the "Benedicite" (one of the other canticle options in
both 1662 and 1928). After the second lesson, he likewise has the
option of ONE OF TWO different canticles, including the short Psalm
100, the "Jubilate". After the Creed, the Lord's Prayer,
further short Versicles and Responses (fewer than in 1662), the
Collect of the Day, the Collect for Peace, and the Collect for Grace,
the minister may simply end the service
with such
general intercessions taken out of this Book as he shall think fit,
or with the Grace.
In other words, he
may essentially end Morning Prayer after the third Collect, just as
in the original prayer books of 1549 and 1552. Clearly, he has a
great deal of freedom to make Morning Prayer adaptable to even the
most busy, modern, 21st century cyber-world schedule. It is difficult
to see how such a service could take longer than 15 minutes. And a
similar flexibility is provided for Evening Prayer.
If the clergy ought
to be committed to saying the Daily Offices, it seems also incumbent
upon the laity of our parishes to remember and respect Archbishop
Cranmer's intentions as well. We have enjoyed in North America and
England the venerable custom of having Morning Prayer celebrated
regularly as our main Sunday morning service, a custom which seems to
have developed in the 19th century. Previously, the pattern on Sunday
morning was Morning Prayer, the Great Litany, and the Holy Communion
or, more frequently, the Ante-Communion, a custom which continued up
into the 20th century in many places. But many of us North-American
Anglicans have grown up learning to love the beauty of Morning Prayer
(it alternated with Holy Communion in varying patterns, of course),
complete with its organ, choir, sung canticles, hymns, sermon, and
offertory. The 1959 Canadian BCP wisely provides rubrics which
recognize this custom, permitting a sermon after the Third Collect of
Morning Prayer, for example, or after the Grace, followed by an
offertory and a hymn.
Yet however much we
have grown to love Morning Prayer in that form (and hopefully we love
it in that form because it gives us so much of God's Word), we need
to remember that it is a Daily Office and is meant to be PART OF OUR
DAILY LIVES AS WELL. Immediately, we shall hear those voices which
will say that such discipline is not required of the laity as it is
of the clergy and this is so. But it was what the old Archbishop
wanted for the people of the church and it will surely be profitable
to them. It may be that many lay folk are unable to find the time to
say Morning and Evening Prayer each day, although it will be
instructive to compare the daily time spent in prayer with the daily
time spent, after work, before a screen of some kind. But with the
great flexibility provided, for example, in the 1928 BCP, there
really does not seem to be any reason why even the laity may not
learn to use the Daily Offices as such. At the least, it would be
possible for our people to begin to edify themselves by reading each
day the lessons provided in the Daily Office Lectionary. And once
again, that Lectionary in the 1928 book is notable for providing
plenty of options and variations.
What I am
suggesting is that, as Anglicans, we should all be SERIOUS STUDENTS
of the prayer book. We should be students of the Bible on a daily
basis, of course, that really being the whole point of the Daily
Offices, but being students of the prayer book can only help us to be
better students of the Bible as well. A serious student of the prayer
book will be familiar with what is in the book, will know the
different services that are there, and how they relate to one
another, for the various services are entirely interdependent. The
celebration of the Holy Communion assumes, for example, the proper
use of the Daily Offices, and a basic understanding of the Catechism.
Being a serious
student of the prayer book also means knowing that options and
variations and minor changes are going to part of our regular Sunday
fare and that we should learn to welcome them. Parishes which insist,
for example, on never using a particular canticle of Morning Prayer
because "the Reverend Mr. Brown never used it during his 200
glorious years of ministry with us", ought to be awakened to
their perversity. A minister of the Anglican Orthodox Church, without
doubt, has a duty to follow the rubrics of the BCP when he leads a
public liturgy in the parish, and he is wise to be sensitive to local
custom, but as long as he follows those rubrics he is doing his duty
faithfully, even if it means that there are some slight variations
from the Sunday before or from the well-remembered patterns
established by some beloved previous minister. No congregation or
clergyman, even a bishop, really has the right to overrule the
rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer or to tell a minister that what
the BCP tells him is an option is entirely ruled out by fiat of the
congregation or by some other unwritten, pseudo-romish tradition.
This is not faithfulness to the Anglican Way ... the Bible, the
Prayer Book, and the Articles ... but a perilous capitulation to
local idiosyncracy and pettiness. An Anglican congregation that
refuses to use portions of the prayer book has simply taken it upon
itself to revise the prayer book according to its own preferences,
something which it has absolutely no right to do. For example,
according to the Canons of the Anglican Orthodox Church, a revision
of the 1928 prayer book can only take place by decision of two
separate national conventions of the church, a very healthy proviso.
Again, daily
Morning and Evening Prayer are among the greatest treasures to be
found in our BCP. They are instruments of grace to us because they
proclaim to us, constantly, incessantly, gloriously, the great Word
of Grace, the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. They keep us focused
there. They are a daily still point in the midst of a rapidly turning
world. Let us thank God for them and day by day, Sunday by Sunday,
year by year, allow God, through them, that is, through His Word and
Spirit, to establish in us what by His grace we trust he has already
wrought in us. And to His Name be all the glory.
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ReplyDeleteBishop Neel, you make reference to the fact that ‘humble submission to the 39 Articles’ ‘includes, by definition, a submission to the three Creeds of the primitive Church, to the Homilies of the Church of England and to the Textus Receptus.’ The first two of these are clear from Articles VIII and XXXV, but where would you draw from in regard to the Textus Receptus? I write as someone who is convinced of the Textus Receptus and providential preservation, and who only uses the AV out of that conviction. It would be great to have the support of the Articles for this position, given that so many Anglican who profess to submit to them now use modern versions not based on the TR.
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