I was struck again this morning with the strong sense of the inter-relation between beauty, truth, and holiness. Beauty is a pathway into the soul. We need to be more attentive regarding the ways that we can work this truth into our daily practices of faith and life…
A correspondent sent me a note over the weekend, noting (correctly) that if one wishes to undertake the discipline of the Office, it’s good to pick one primary form and stick with it. His question, then, was which one:
Others could be added to these…
It’s a good question and one that I spent some time wrestling with a few years ago. I can’t tell him, or you, or anybody else what to do, of course, but here’s the answer that I’ve come to and that works well for me.
I’m a Prayer Book Catholic within the Episcopal Church. Now—as we’ve noted before, the term “Prayer Book Catholic” isn’t exactly the same in England as it is in America due to the differing situations of our respective prayer books. However, I take it to mean that I am obliged to the prayer book and its system of devotion as understood and supplemented by the riches of the Western liturgical heritage.
Thus, for me, I am obligated to the Morning and Evening Prayer Offices of our authorized Book of Common Prayer—that’s part and parcel of what it means to be an Episcopalian.
Now, the Offices contain a number of permissions—like the liberty of antiphons and hymns—that open the door to the riches of our heritage found in books like the Anglican Breviary, the Monastic Diurnal, the English Office, the Brevarium Romanum, A Monastic Breviary, and many others. As a result, I have and use these other books to supplement my prayer book services both in terms of material and in terms of additional offices.
Indeed, this was part of the genesis of the St. Bede’s Breviary. I wanted to create something that was faithful to the rubrics of the prayer book, but that also could easily include the other items when I had the time and desire for them. As a result, I have my “House Use” that I use regularly and can choose from the other leaner versions as circumstances require. However, at the root is always the framework and content of the BCP Offices.
In Advent and Lent I like to add in the Little Hours and will often do so—or attempt to do so—from the Anglican Breviary or Monastic Diurnal or the Sarum Primer. I say attempt because I don’t often succeed. My zeal for devotion frequently outstrips the time I have for it.
And that raises another important point. The BCP Offices are the least onerous of the list above. After all, it’s two Offices a day (only four if Noon and Compline are included). If I were to take the Anglican Breviary as a base office discipline, I would be obligated to pray all of it. Even doing so in aggregation would be difficult, and at this season of my life I just can’t imagine being able to juggle it all consistently, day in and day out. I hope this will change some day—but can’t see it happening until the girls can drive themselves!
For me and the discipline I’ve chosen, the Anglican Breviary represents the best source for supplementary material. I want to be able to pull in its antiphons and hymns. More particularly, I’d love to be able to draw on its patristic readings to augment the Offices.
So, if some are you are wondering why I’m proposing the Anglican Breviary project while also talking about the importance of the prayer book, this is how it fits together. I know several people who faithfully pray the breviary and who have asked me to work with it; I’d also like to make it available to interweave with the prayer book itself.
At the end of the day, selecting an Office discipline is a balance of ecclesial identity, devotional continuity, and an honest appraisal of your own ability to stick with the choices you’ve made. The heart of the Office is the repetition of the Psalter. If you can’t consistently make it through the whole psalter in your chosen Office discipline, then you’ll want to reassess it and consider if you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, and what will work for you. It’s always easier to start with the shorter and more basic and graduate to more complex forms as you go. But don’t be hasty about it either. Liturgical formation—like all other life-long habits—should be measured in months, seasons, and years rather than days and weeks.
Today I have officially launched a Kickstarter project to convert the Anglican Breviary to digital form and to make it available as a completely free web application.
For those not familiar with it, the Anglican Breviary is one of the great liturgical works that has come out of the Catholic movement in Anglicanism. 30 years in the making, it was produced in the year 1955 by the Frank Gavin Liturgical Foundation. Like all breviaries, it contains the traditional hours of prayers of the Western Church: the long early morning Matins office with its readings from the Church Fathers interspersed with psalms; the main offices for the hinges of the day, Lauds and Vespers; the daytime offices of Prime, Terce, Sext, None; the bedtime office of Compline; and the brief Capitular office that includes the martyrology recounting the saints to be remembered. Built on the structure of the Roman Catholic Divine Office according to the usage established by Pius X, it utilizes the Scriptures of the King James Bible and the Coverdale Psalms of the Book of Common Prayer to place these prayer hours within an Anglican idiom.
For more information on the Anglican Breviary itself, visit its home site at www.anglicanbreviary.net, owned and operated by Mr. Daniel Lula, the man responsible for keeping it in print. We have corresponded regarding this initiative, and I have his blessing to proceed.
Transcribing and coding this roughly 2,000 page volume will take a lot of time and energy, so I have split it into three manageable parts.
Completing this work will accomplish some goals very near and dear to my heart. Obviously, it will preserve the Anglican Breviary for future generations and will introduce it to a far wider audience than it has had in the past. Beyond this clear win, it will accomplish these additional goals:
My experience with the St. Bede’s Breviary (SBB) has shown me the downside of trying to accomplish such an effort on a voluntary basis; for the sake of my family, my efforts have to be focused on those projects that contribute to our income. As a result, the SBB has often received the last and least of my energy, stolen away in bits of time on weekend mornings before the girls get up. As a Kickstarter funded project, I would be able to engage the Anglican Breviary wholeheartedly, knowing that it was helping me provide for them in a much more direct fashion than the SBB!
I’m hoping to receive pledges to meet my goal by February 5th. That’s not a lot of time, but is—I think—sufficient time provided there is enough energy and will to get this carried out. Please check out the link and consider what you can do to support this project and ensure the future and flourishing of this gem of catholic Anglicanism!
Two things have caught my eye over the past couple of days that are well worth underlining.
The first was a bit from The Lead on the Church of England’s growth study. Of the 8 things ennumerated as things linked to growth, one was: “Being intentional in chosen style of worship”
I thought this was fascinating in light of the whole “worship wars” context. Had this been five or ten years ago, I would heartily have expected to see “use [XX instrument] in worship” where the XX was either guitar/drums or else organ.
This is so much better—it’s about being clear about who you are (actually making a choice), and choosing to stick with it.
The second bit is from Robert Hendrickson and his presentation on ministering to young adults. Here’s a fragment:
This is the trap of many churches – we have a great story – but we don’t live into it in such a way that our essential qualities are readily apparent and evident. Gen Y, hyper-marketed to and attuned to falsity, can sense intuitively when they are being sold a false bill of goods.
So how do we make sure that our congregations are places of powerful honesty? We have to live it out.
Honest to our self: Who is your parish? What is it facing now that it is challenging with radical honesty? Whatever your parish’s core identity is, there is nothing so precious, in terms of communication and evangelism, than living into it with integrity. If you are an evangelical parish then live into it. If you are an Anglo-Catholic parish, then live into it. If you are a parish focused on social justice, then live into it. Lean into your strengths and allow them not simply to be a story that you tell but a way of being that defines those who are part of your parish.
It’s not hard to connect the dots…
Honesty, integrity, and intentionality. These are key ways to live and proclaim the Gospel.
Here are a few thoughts that have been bouncing around my head around the topic of Christian Spirituality with an eye toward its Anglican expression.
1) Spirituality is the cultivation of the habits of living out the Gospel. “Cultivation” is a set of ideas, beliefs, doctrines, and practices oriented around forming habits. Thus, spirituality is not simply an “idea” thing or a head thing—it’s a “doing” thing with head components.
2) The core of the Gospel as far as spirituality is concerned is that God, in Jesus, is reconciling the whole world to himself. This is fundamentally what we’re aiming at. God is calling all things back to himself, to the original created goodness of everything, that is part and parcel of Christ’s victory over sin, hell, and the grave.
3) Our habits align with God’s purpose of reconciliation when we are participating in love of God and love of neighbor. God wills for us to live in union with him. However, living in union with God and his will is only possible when we are living in union with our neighbors–as well as the rest of the created order. (Cf. 1 John: how can we say we love the God whom we do not see, when we are not loving our brothers and sisters whom we do…)
4) A key part of an authentic spirituality is a ruthless quest for reality. In order to act with love towards God and neighbor, we have to understand the true nature of these relationships, where and how we compromise them, and be committed to engaging the ways that we compromise them. Real spirituality is not a form of spiritual escapism (although there are false forms that may be); real spirituality is not a flight from reality—it is a flight towards it.
5) As a result, an authentic spirituality has to take both sin and evil seriously as components of life that compromise our relationships with God and one another. Part of facing reality means acknowledging ways that personal sin, corporate sin, and societal sin hinder and sabotage our relationships with God and one another. A number of spiritualities floating around in the Church recently tend to downplay sin—particularly personal sin—preferring instead to rest on the strength of our original created goodness. In no way do I want to deny that we were created good and have the image of God within us. However, to suggest that our everyday ways of being and relating naturally reflect these doesn’t match reality.
6) Encountering reality is an unsettling experience. It’s easier to talk about reality than it is to face it, acknowledge it or experience it. Indeed, one of the many functions of human societies at all levels is to create insulators that conceal reality from us. And we collude with them in ignoring it. What exactly am I talking about when I say reality? Well—that’s a big topic that I’m not going to tackle now, but I’ll just give you two examples. First, American society works hard to insulate us from the reality of death. We buy meat from the supermarket in convenient packages. We have specific places—hospitals and hospices–where sick people go and where death is suppose to happen. Second, society works hard to keep us entertained. Between mass media, professional sports, games on our smarts phones, you name it—there is a tremendous industry around giving us diversions. But diversions from what? From silence? From being alone with ourselves and with each other? Why are these spaces and silences so threatening to us—and to the powers that be?
7) Insofar as spirituality involves moving past these insulators and encountering reality as it is, it must always contain counter-cultural elements. Because of the social character of these things that insulate us from reality, an authentic spirituality will have to have counter-cultural components precisely because it must lay bare that which society wants to hide.
8) Engaging reality requires disciplines of triangulation. Because of the variety of things that insulate us from reality—social constructs, our own personal habits of self-deception—we need habits and practices that will ground and re-orient us to what is really real and to what our purpose is. The reading of Scripture, praying the psalms, works of mercy and justice, sitting in silence, confessing our sins to God or to another—these things help us get the perspective necessary to apprehend that which is real and of value. Any one of these on their own can be subverted into just another form of pious insulators; they need to be used in combination.
I realized with the craziness of December, I never posted this on the blog. I know several people in the Facebook loop probably saw it, but—if you didn’t—here it is.
Richard Mammana, a friend of mine and one of the masterminds at Anglicans Online, is doing a set of interviews with some of the younger folks in the church. He asked me to do one with him which I was more than happy to do so.
Through a mix of chatting and email, we hammered this one out. It touches on a variety of things including where the name of the blog came from, how to pronounce it, and my hopes for the church
And, yes, I did finally get my hair cut shortly after that photo was taken…
Seems hard to believe the new year is already here!
Even though Epiphany hasn’t quite hit yet, I suppose my holiday hiatus is almost up.
Things are pretty busy on the SCLM front at the moment… We are proposing some changes to Holy Women, Holy Men, and the way we’re going to do it is to float it through a number of channels to see what kind of feedback we receive. If the response is positive, we’ll proceed in that direction. If it’s negative, we’ll regroup. I assume it’ll be mixed. That having been said, I think it’s probably the best solution that we can get most of the Church to agree with.
Apart from that, the Anglican Breviary project proposal should be going live in the next few days. More on that as it develops!