Monthly Archives: April 2011

Prayer Book Spirituality: Course Correction

I keep promising that substantive writing will return. I’ll stop promising and just give you this which is far more preliminary than substantive.

I’m becoming convinced that I’ve been approaching the Prayer Book from a slightly off angle; there’s a factor that had escaped me that I’m working on fitting back into place.

I was reading Christopher’s recent piece at the Cafe when this paragraph struck me strongly and clarified something I’ve been gnawing around in one branch of my recent research:

It has often been remarked that Thomas Cranmer intended to remake the Isles peoples into a vast monastery. I think this romantic notion gets Cranmer’s intent backwards. Rather our Prayer Book reforms the basic pieces of monastic piety and life precisely because in the first instance these matters should concern all Christians, not just monastics: Daily prayer and a life lived toward God and for neighbor in all the cares of daily and national life, including disputes over gentry seizures of commons and political intrigues at court. In other words, he intends to remake the Isles peoples into more well-formed and single-hearted, that is, praising Christians at work, in their home, and in their everyday community. It is within this generous framework that the particular dedications of our monastics should be placed, not vice versa.

Christopher hits the nail on the head, and a big part of it has to do with the origins of our prayer book.

Yes, the Offices that we have inherited as the larger part of Anglican spirituality are monastic in origin and are greatly shaped by Benedictine practice. I’d be the last to deny that. However, we over-simplify and misunderstand if we think that the relationship between breviary and prayer book is overly direct. We tend to  conceptualized it as: (Sarum Breviary->Payer Book Office). Sure, if we want to be more precise then we tend to sketch it this way: (Sarum Breviary->Quignonez/Hermann Revisions->Prayer Book Office). While this does get us closer, there’s one more mediating step that we’re leaving out. I think it really works more like this: (Sarum Breviary->Prymer->Quignonez/Hermann Revisions->Prayer Book Office).

The prymer’s the key. The Prayer Book isn’t a cut-down breviary with a missal added, it’s a jumped-up prymer.

Why does this matter? It’s all about audience and in whose hands what books were found. Breviaries and missals were books for religious professionals—professed religious and the clergy. The prymers were the books of the laity, that formed, shaped and directed lay spirituality along classic monastic patterns. Cranmer didn’t try and turn the Isles into one big monastery, rather, he sought to take the monastic-flavored piety already at work among the laity and broaden its Scriptural content.

Coming at it from this angle, we realize that the prayer book even at its start had strong roots in lay practice—and that changes quite a bit for me, at least.

At this point these are claims. I have hard evidence, but it’s not assembled yet to the point where it’s fully deployable. It’s on the to-do list…

Canadian Bishops on CWOB

I’ve been away from the computer for a while or, at least not in the blogging Anglican circles. I was alerted to an interesting news item by a friend of the blog. Looking back on the various sites that I frequent, I find it interesting that none of them has made mention of the recent meeting of the Canadian House of Bishops. At their just concluded meeting they “unanimously reaffirmed that the sacrament of the holy Eucharist is to be given only to those baptized in the Christian faith.”

Read more about it here.

Needless to say, I applaud the bishops for their decision. There is a logic to our sacramental rites that moves from Baptism to Eucharist. If anything, this was greatly enhanced by the 1979 Prayer Book. The new elevation of Baptism is an innovation, but I think a positive one. Any movement to degrade the position of Baptism is a clear step away from both the logic and theology of the Christian Church throughout the ages, and a big step away from the direction our prayer book leads.

I can only hope the American House of Bishops will issue a similar statement.

Holy Week Offices

After a year and a half, I still consider the breviary to be in beta because of issues like this morning—a missing collect and, in some cases, missing lessons. They’re fixed now and part of today’s events include a check through the rest of Holy Week to make sure everything’s functioning properly.

Exactly how the Holy Week and Triduum Offices are to be celebrated is a favorite topic among Anglican armchair liturgists; the various Books of Common Prayer give no indication of changes during this time but catholic practices give a variety of options with the Roman variations being predominate but I’m sure we can find some divergences even from that among regional uses (like the 24 candles of the Sarum tenebrae hearse as opposed to the more pedestrian 15 of Roman practice). I did write a bit about this last year which covers some of the various points to weigh.

Bottom line at the breviary is this: the breviary keeps the gloria patris for the beginning of Holy Week, but gives reduced offices for Triduum. The BSG version, however, does not use reduced offices but presents a full, regular, prayer book office. This probably is something that I should build into the preferences but haven’t had the time to do.

New Breviary URLs

The latest work at the breviary has not been primarily code changes, but has been the addition of some new dedicated pages. The breviary was designed to make pray the office both flexible and easy, and over it’s evolution, I’ve been making progress in both of these directions (more flexible and easier…).

I started with the date/time of day/option-sets entry screen.

Eventually, I made the move to cookies as a means of capturing specific options. (And I do need to do some work to make sure all of the options are functioning properly in cookie form…)

One of the issues I’ve faced from the beginning is the need for a static url which will get folks right down to the business of praying. An entry page was the only way in for two reasons—1) you had to make your choices somewhere, and 2) you needed to indicate what office you wanted to do. Cookies made the first one disappear, and—at the prodding of some friends—I’ve coded a page to by-pass the second as well. It functions by using javascript to find the timestamp on your computer (the client), then passes that value to my server-side PHP code. (So—if you have javascript disabled, this won’t work for you.) This allows me to present a single static url so that, if you already have a breviary cookie/set of preferences saved, all you have to do is jump to this url and the Office as you like it, appropriate to your time of day ought to appear.

Here’s the url: http://www.stbedeproductions.com/breviary/office.php

I’m still working out the exact times for changes between the offices so there may be continued tweaks with that part of it.

In related news, I have created a dedicated page for the Brotherhood of St Gregory—the ones who provided the impetus for this change, in fact—one of our Anglican religious communities bound by rule to pray the offices, according to their set preferences: a straight-forward Rite II with the monthly psalm cycle. This page requires no cookies at all and should work for anyone if this is the kind of office you desire: http://www.stbedeproductions.com/breviary/office_selectionBSG.php

For those interested, I’m also in conversations with Fr. John-Julian concerning a similar page for the Order of Julian of Norwich which should be up and running before too long.

So, my thanks to the Brotherhood for kindling a fire under me to get this work done, and I hope these new pages provide all of you with an even simpler way to experience the offices.