Well, I have to start by apologizing for the state of the breviary recently… Since I moved it here to the WordPress platform, I’ve been relying on periodic updates to the date table to tell it what day it is rather than calculating it programmatically from the date of Easter as on the old site. What that means is, when I get bogged down and behind, sometimes that table doesn’t get updated and as a result there are no readings, collects, etc…

So—that’s why the start of Advent has been a little rough. Not bugs–it’s me. But at least I do have a reason.

As some of you know, one of my passion projects for quite a while has been a digital edition of the Prayer Book Studies series. These are the thick blue pamphlets where the Standing Liturgical Commission began presenting their research and ideas for what would eventually become the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer. If you truly want to understand this prayer book, what scholarship and sources went into creating it, the logic behind it, the paths not taken—all of these things can be found in these little blue books.

If you can find the little blue books…

And that’s the challenge. If you’re persistent and lucky in trawling the secondhand book sites, you can accumulate quite a number of them until you might be able to acquire a full set. And even then, you may well be the only person in your diocese who has a full set.

With all the discussion of prayer book revision, with all the discussion of writing new liturgies, I wanted to give these resources a wider circulation so that people interested in both appreciating and creating Episcopal liturgy would have a deeper understanding of it. It’s quite humbling to look at the pedigree of some of the collects of our prayer book—the direct sources, the additional sources consulted for tweaking, the deliberation over placement of clauses; it’s a whole different ballgame from jotting down a prayer on your way into the sanctuary following the acclamation/petition/result/doxology model. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but there’s a gravity, a weight of experience and years, behind so many of our prayers. It’s good for those who wish to create replacements or supplements to have a full understanding of that pedigree of prayer and access to the sources that nourished and nurtured the liturgists of former days.

In any case, I released the First Series of Prayer Book Studies as a digital resource through Church Publishing before COVID hit. It took me a little longer to get the Second Series together. But I finally did. On submitting the second part, I found a whole new editorial team at Church Publishing who decided to go a different way with it.

Yes, it’ll be a digital resources as I originally intended, but they’ve also decided to release it in both paperback and hardback! So–I’m on an extremely tight deadline to get the page proofs back in order for everything to get to the printer on time. It turns out that in printed form the whole collection together—First Series and Second Series—will span nine volumes. And I’m currently editing Volume 6…and they’re due back before the end of the week…

And that’s why the breviary has been glitching the last few days. (It ought to be good up until Christmas, but I do need to go back and remind it about the Ember Days.)

So—the glitches should stop now for the rest of Advent, and I need to get back to proofing.