Category Archives: Spirituality

Sacramental Ecclesiology

If you haven’t read this piece on Children and the Eucharist, you should.

The writer has accurately identified the next big theological crisis facing the Episcopal Church. All of the questions around communing children, the place of Confirmation, if/whether/how “First Communion” is “a thing,” and the communing of the unbaptized are simply different ways of entering a larger complicated inter-related question.

The 1979 American Book of Common Prayer placed recovery of a baptismal ecclesiology at its center. This was a good and correct move. The problem, however, is that a baptismal ecclesiology functions properly within a broader sacramental ecclesiology. What I mean by that is this:

Church is fundamentally about a sacramental path to discipleship.

Everything from how we comprehend the coherence between the local church and the mystical Church, how we enter the church, how the church frames and provides its rites and sacraments, how the church frames and understands its saints must proceed from an understanding of the church as a mystical vehicle for the grace of God given, received, and expressed normatively in her sacraments.

Baptismal ecclesiology is a very important piece of this complete vision—necessary but not sufficient!

What we need to do now is to flesh out the rest of our sacramental ecclesiology in a clear and coherent way that reflects deep continuity with the Scriptures and the Apostolic faith and is true to our current experience and context. Until this has occurred, we will find ourselves running around with incoherent band-aid fixes…

Daily Prayer for All Seasons, Again

I’ve been pretty heads-down on the GCW material and other, non-liturgical, projects since coming back from Toronto. In preparation for the SCLM’s meeting in New Hampshire next week, one of our instructions was to bring our copy of “Daily Prayer for All Seasons” (henceforth DPfAS). So, I picked it up again this morning and looked through it.

I’ve done that a few times now—I keep hoping that I have been looking at it while in a bad mood, and that if I get a fresh perspective on it, I’ll learn to like it better. No such luck.

I was not involved in DPfAS’s creation at all; it was completed before I was appointed to the SCLM. Part of me is sad about this. I wish I could have had a role in working with it and shaping it. But more of me is not sad. I’d rather have had no input into the process than to have had limited or disregarded input and yet still have my name attached to it. (That feels very harsh as I type it—and yet, that’s where I am right now.)

What makes me feel this way? Well, like I said, I’ve got a lot of balls in the air right now and this will not be a fully thought-out explication. (That may well come in its own time!) I cannot say I’ve given it a thorough evaluation, but I have looked through it on a number of occasions. Here are a few key points that have consistently come up as I have glanced through it.

1. It claims a continuity with the Tradition that it manifestly does not possess.

In the introductory material, the work makes reference to the tradition of “praying the hours” and “praying at set times” (p. VIII). It then makes reference to Benedictine monasticism: “For the inner structure, each set of seasonal prayers falls into eight ‘hours,’ which follows the pattern of Benedictine monks, who divided the day into a cycle of eight intervals, called ‘hours,’ that effected a rhythm between work (labora) and prayer (ora). . . . Each hour has a name, which also dates back to Christian monastic history and which we printed in italics after the hour’s “work” name [more on that in a moment…], for example, Praise (Lauds)” (p. IX).

Alright—what are we to make of this? I see this implying a connection between the eight monastic hours and the hours that will be found in the book. Indeed, the work moves beyond implication when it actually borrows the names of the hours in the text itself. But—the hours presented here have no connection with the traditional hours in their structure, their intent, or their content.

Structure: In a standard Benedictine configuration, Matins was the first office. This was the long Office that contained the main Scripture readings, sermons, homilies and the sung responsaries that broke these readings up. It was the monastic wake-up call and the start of the day. It ended the Great Silence that began at the end of Compline in it’s beginning citation of Ps 51: “O Lord, open our lips/And our mouth shall proclaim your praise…” Then you have Lauds that was a mid-sized office structurally balanced with Vespers so that the chief sunrise and sunset offices were consonant with one another. Prime immediately followed and balances with Compline (although not as directly as Lauds and Vespers); then Terce, Sext, and None were the mid-day little hours, identical in structure with one another.

DPfAS begins with Lauds. It’s a short office, one of the shortest in the book, and is structurally identical with Vigils, the last office of the day. (Classically, the names “Vigils” and “Matins” were used for the same office.) Then, the versions of Terce, Sext, None, and Compline are structurally identical with one another, but are mid-sized offices formed by adding more material to the pattern laid down in Lauds/Vigils. Lastly, Prime and Vespers are balanced together as the longest offices by adding still more.

In short, the way that the hours relate to one another has nothing whatsoever to do with the classical pattern of Benedictine monasticism to which the book’s introductory material refers.

Intent: The system of hours inherited and passed on by the Benedictines had a system of intentions built into it. As liturgical scholar Laszlo Dobszay writes:

The Lauds and Vespers was the regular morning and evening prayer of the church; it was also the continuation of the Old Testament prayer hours, furtheremore: of a basic religious institution of the mankind. The Vigils (Matins) was originally the time of occasional long prayers and meditation, connected to the feasts and the memorial days of the martyrs. The Terce, Sext and None was short stops during the daily activity, and also commemoration to three moments of the history of salvation. The function of the Prime and Complet was something to organize the daily c[o]urse of communities, to bless the start and close of the working day. (from here)

The notion of work and prayer (ora et labora) that grounds the Benedictine system is the idea that prayer (chiefly the psalms) and manual labor are complimentary with the additional notion that once one has internalized the prayer, than the work too can become an act of prayer as the psalms are continually recited and ruminated upon as one works. The mid-day hours in particular were brief moments of recollection—a monk could stop his work, go through these short (usually memorized) offices, then get on to it having been spiritually reoriented and having been explicitly reminded of some psalmic material to ponder as he labored. Confession in particular happens at Prime and Compline: the beginning of the work day (note that the liturgical day had already started hours before with Matins) and the end of the complete day, just before sleep.

In DPfAS, the hours that feel the most like the quick, “redirectional” hours vis. the classical Terce-Sext-None are assigned to Lauds and Vigils. The mid-day hours are now longer instructional things, and Confession happens at Prime and Vespers. But the chief thing about intent in the new system is that there are specific themes given to each office. Invoking the principle of ora et labora, DPfAS uses terminological sleight of hand to suggest that there is particular “work” that ought to be done at each hour. But this intent has little to do with the classical pattern, and when it does it is a cause for concern—the office with the work/intention of “Praise” (Lauds) is the most meager office offered!

Content: The heart of the Benedictine Offices is the psalms. Period. End of story. The ceaseless recitation of the psalter is the crucible of monasticism. The character of psalm-shaped prayer is absent from DPfAS.

How this work can claim to be in continuity with the hours of Benedictine prayer given the omission of any kind of discipline of psalmody is beyond me.

2. The character of the DPfAS feels disjunctive from the character of the Book of Common Prayer.

The BCP is a product of a Reformation-minded Church that was, nevertheless, strongly formed by the traditional cycles of prayer. The ’79 BCP remains in continuity with this formative heritage despite complicating matters by the inclusion of the “4th century agenda.” The ’79 Offices retain the fundamental grounding of the psalms.

DPfAS feels different. The use of prompts and leading questions, among other things, gives a very different feel to the liturgies. There is a certain amorphous quality that may be intended to offer room for meditative freedom lacking in the prayer book.

If one were to praying Morning and Evening Prayer from the prayer book, then use the DPfAS hours for the other hours, there would be a striking difference between the BCP offices and the DPfAS offices. Whatever it is, DPfAS lacks a certain complementary character. Its hours are not of a piece with those in the prayer book.

There’s more to be said here; it relates to what DPfAS is trying to do and be vs. what the prayer book is trying to do and be. I do get that they’re not trying to do/be the same thing. And, yet, I perceive a fundamental discontinuity between the two to be teased out at greater length some other time.

3. The tone of the prayers is didactic. 

To my ear, prayers have certain tones to them. I’ve never tried to categorize these or make a systematic study of them—perhaps I should one day! The prayers of DPfAS strike me on the whole as what I characterize as rather “didactic.” There’s an intrinsic self-awareness where the prayer knows that one of its functions is to make you aware that you need to think more about the big-ness of God.

Having said that, let me back up and say a few things to provide context for this label.

First, prayer is first, last, and always speech to God. Whenever it loses that character, something about it has profoundly failed.

Second, God doesn’t need our verbal prayer; thus, our verbal prayer has an inherently formative quality. We say certain things for a reason knowing that the words matter to and for us rather than God. Our praying shapes us.

Third, our recognition and awareness of the formational aspect of prayer must be considered carefully in the compositional act. That is, knowing that prayer forms people and communities, prayer must yet in spite of that be first and foremost speech to God lest it lose the fundamental character of prayer. To my mind, prayer that is too aware of its own role in this regard can crosses a fundamental line where it ceases to be speech to God and becomes an exercise in consciousness-raising or becomes merely didactic. I recall some Presbyterian pastoral prayers that I’ve heard that felt more like a second run at the sermon than the assembled community’s prayer!

Fourth, I don’t have an issue with expansive language for God in prayer. After all, I pray the psalms!  There is all kinds of expansive and non-gendered language for and about God tucked away in there. I do have an issue with it when it 1) it feels overly contrived or overly didactic (see above) or 2) when it is offered as replacement language. That is, expansive language offers us deeper ways of looking at God by expanding us beyond the traditional metaphors. We are offered new metaphors that help us round out our notion of God. The path of catholic orthodoxy recognizes the wisdom of both the cataphatic and apophatic traditions. We can say “God is Father” and recognize that we are borrowing a metaphor. At the same token we can equally affirm “God is not ‘Father'” because no metaphor of human language is capable of containing and conveying the true nature of God to humanity. Good expansive language helps us to not get trapped in certain metaphorical boxes. But when expansiveness starts becoming impressed with its own openness, it heads back into didactic territory…

I do know that I saw some regular prayer book prayers in it as I flipped through, so not all of the prayers are of this character—but many of the new compositions do feel this way to me.

Ok—I’ve spent way more time on this than I intended to. I’m still pondering.

One good thing that I do see in it, though, is that it makes more of Mary than most Episcopal resources, if only a tentative step. We could do with more Mary. Indeed, I think there’s a Roman Catholic Captivity of the Blessed Virgin that we in the Episcopal Church are well positioned to speak against. I don’t know that DPfAS does this, but even including the Blessed Virgin at a few points is a step in the right direction.

Collecting

M and I got home without incident from the Society of Catholic Priests conference in Toronto. As always, it was a great experience! We reconnected with old friends, met people we’d only known online, and made new friends. My talk was well received. Usually I post them here—I won’t this time because I don’t actually have the substance of it. Fr. David Cobb and I presented on the new revision of the St. Augustine’s Prayer Book. I talked a bit about the historical background of devotional books for the laity (also used by clergy) and went through the psalters, books of hours, primers, and later devotionals to provide some context for the SAPB. I decided to work from bullet points rather than a manuscript ; hence the lack of material to post here.

I’m desperately trying to get work on ‘Great Cloud of Witnesses’ (GCW) done before the SCLM meets in person to finalize our Blue Book submissions for General Convention. I’m pulling together the efforts of various members of the committee and giving it a final once-over. As I do so, I find more tweaking to do…

Look—it’s pretty clear. If you trouble to turn to page 357 of your ’79 BCP you’ll see a section of the Eucharist entitled “The Collect of the Day.” Under that is a rubric: “The Celebrant says the Collect.” (This is also exactly what appears on p. 325 in the Rite I Eucharist.) Ergo, whatever prayer is inserted there ought to be a Collect. A Collect is a particular kind of prayer. While the Prayer Book itself doesn’t give a definition, it certainly gives us enough examples so that we ought to be able to recognize one when we see it!

So many of the prayers in HWHM being reworked into material for GCW simply aren’t collects! I’ve written sufficiently on the topic of definition to not bore you with it here, but at least the notion bears frequent repeating. The blame, if blame there even needs to be, belongs at the feet of the 1980 revision of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. This edition signaled the move to the “biographical ‘collect'”—an approach tried and rejected in the first trials towards the Calendar in the ’50s and ’60s. What we see in HWHM is an extension of what was already done there.

Vatican II and the Liturgical Renewal Movement made much of the phrase “noble simplicity.” Typically, I’ve not been a fan of it because in its usual application, it means an attempted return to imagined 4th century liturgical norms and removal of “medieval accretions.”  However, it keeps forcing itself to the forefront of my consciousness as I work on these materials; I guess I’ve been more formed in this way than I thought. In particular, it means an instinctive desire to trim the vast thickets of relative clauses currently littering the new compositions appearing in HWHM.

Oh well—at the very least it’ll be interesting to see how these efforts get received at the SCLM meeting and beyond…

Feasting Bede: An Exercise in Collect Revision

The feast of Saint Bede fell over Memorial Day weekend this year. I didn’t post on it this year on its proper date but shall do so now.

In praying his collect this year, I was struck by its limitations. Here’s the text:

Heavenly Father, you called your servant Bede, while still
a child, to devote his life to your service in the disciplines
of religion and scholarship: Grant that as he labored in the
Spirit to bring the riches of your truth to his generation,
so we, in our various vocations, may strive to make you
known in all the world; through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one
God, for ever and ever. Amen.

It’s not so bad as far as current sanctoral collects go. It’s singable. It points towards his virtues and isn’t overburdened with detail. And yet, it could be better.

The regnant model currently is that of the “biographical collect.” This is a proper prayer that incorporates elements of a person’s life and biography. In the Episcopal Church, the biographical collect was attempted and rejected as a strategy in the original deliberations leading up to the first batch of sanctoral collects published in 1958’s Prayer Book Studies XII.  The main reason for the rejection was because “Too many of these Collects gave the effect of being overly contrived and erudite” compounded by the appearance of “subtle allusions” not edifying to the whole worshiping community (PBS XII, 9). However, in 1980, in contrast to these earlier findings, a great majority of the sanctoral collects were rewritten to be biographical. In recent years, particularly in Holy Women Holy Men, the biographical collect has achieved a position of dominance as the genre of choice for sanctoral collects.

I have a fundamental theological problem with the biographical collect. I’m a medievalist: everyone knows this. As a medievalist, my perspective on the saints—who they and and who they are for us—has been heavily influenced by medieval models and perspectives while still retaining a Reformation perspective. Saints are neither demi-gods nor cool people who were also Christian. Rather, the saints are remarkable individuals who have been singled out by their own communities and those after them because they represented the ideal of Christian maturity. If, as Irenaeus has said, “the glory of God is a human being fully alive; and to be alive consists of beholding God,” then these individuals are example of those who, in the act of beholding God, entered most fully into their own God-imaged humanity. Yes, many of them lived remarkable lives, did remarkable things, and have interesting biographies. But what we celebrate in them is our ability to see in their lives the universal virtues of Christ that they put on by virtue of their Baptism. It’s easy to get lost in biography. What we need to celebrate are the virtues and the charisms which they shared with Christ, which they grew into by virtue of Baptism, and which are available to us also by way of our own Baptisms. Thus, the biographical collect tends to err on the side of accenting their particularity rather than connecting to their universality and the Christ from whom it flows.

The second main issue I have with the biographical collect is its tendency to stop being a collect and to begin being a mini-sermon or secondary biography. A collect is a prayer; it is first and foremost speech to God. Only secondarily is it speech to the gathered assembly. The biographical collect tends to get this reversed, and attempts to edify more than it prays and praises. Consider again the genre of the collect. I’ve written about it here with a two-pronged simile: a collect is simultaneously like a sonnet and like a haiku. And I continue to come back to the words of Percy Dearmer:

Unity is the essential characteristic of the collect. To be good, it must have colour, rhythm, finality, a certain conciseness as well as vigour of thought; but it must be a unified petition, or it becomes something else than a collect. We might indeed say that it must be one complete sentence, an epigram softened by feeling; it must be compact, expressing one thought, and enriching that thought so delicately that a word misplaced may destroy its whole beauty.

Holding these things in mind, let’s review again the appointed collect for Bede…

Heavenly Father, you called your servant Bede, while still
a child, to devote his life to your service in the disciplines
of religion and scholarship: Grant that as he labored in the
Spirit to bring the riches of your truth to his generation,
so we, in our various vocations, may strive to make you
known in all the world; through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one
God, for ever and ever. Amen.

First off, this is a two-sentence prayer, not a collect. Standing in for an actual Invocation+Relative Clause describing God we have an Invocation+biographical note. This is one complete thought: “Heavenly Father, you called your servant Bede, while still a child, to devote his life to your service in the disciplines of religion and scholarship.” While it begins with God (verbally, at least), it says very little about who God is and says far more about who Bede was.  But it does so to talk about his job. (Again, the professionalization of sanctity, something I’ve railed about before and which I’ll spare you at the present…) Now—how does this first sentence relate thematically and conceptually to the second sentence? The second sentence (“Grant that as he labored in the Spirit to bring the riches of your truth to his generation, so we, in our various vocations, may strive to make you known in all the world”) identifies the effect of Bede’s service as bringing out the riches of God’s truth, and then requests—on the strength of that—that we be good evangelists.

I guess I can follow the logic—but is it good logic? Is it strong logic? Is this the best we can say about Bede and what we see in him and what we see of Christ through him? I certainly hope not…

Well, what are some other options, then? Here’s the version in the People’s Anglican Missal and the Anglican Breviary that substantially translates the Latin of the pre-1962 Roman Missal:

O God who hast enlightened thy Church with the wondrous learning of blessed Bede thy Confessor and Doctor: mercifully grant to us thy servants; that we, being in all things enlightened by his wisdom, may at all times feel the effectual succor of his righteousness. Through…

We do, in fact, have a collect here! We have a true Invocation+Relative Clause that says something about who God is—he is the enlightener of the Church and Bede is an example of vehicles he has used for this purpose. We at least see something of why we are revering Bede: his wisdom. And yet, this collect, too makes me feel a little edgy. I see Bede—I don’t see Christ…  This falls too close (and perhaps even over) the “saint as demi-god” line. Whose is the “effectual succor of righteousness”: Bede or Christ?

Now, here’s a collect for Bede that appears in PBS XII when he was first introduced into the Episcopal Calendar:

Almighty God, who hast enriched thy Church with the singular learning and holiness of thy servant Bede: Grant us to hold fast the true doctrine of thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, and to fashion our lives according to the same, to the glory of thy great Name and the benefit of thy holy Church; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

So—a true collect that starts out in a very similar fashion to the Roman version, thanking God for enlightening the Church by virtue of Bede his instrument. Too, we see Jesus and ask to pattern our lives off his and to both glorify his name and benefit the Church. The collect doesn’t explicitly say that this is what Bede did, but we should certainly imply it.

I like this collect. It does what it’s supposed to do and it falls quite neatly between our two boundary lines. It is a bit general, though. This is actually a common collect for teachers and theologians; in PBS XII, Bede shares this same collect with Thomas Aquinas, John of Damascus, Ephrem, Jeremy Taylor, and Samuel I. J. Schereschewsky! You can see how it will work admirably for all of them. Can we get more particular and still hold to our principles?

How about this:

Almighty God, who hast enriched thy Church with the learning and holiness of thy servant Bede: Grant us to find in Scripture and disciplined prayer the image of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ, and to fashion our lives according to the same, to the glory of thy great Name and the benefit of thy holy Church; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Learning and holiness capture well the virtues of Bede. I would characterize them as wisdom, knowledge, piety, and discipline myself. Holiness and piety are fairly synonymous, holiness lacking the whiff of sanctimoniousness that often accompanies the contemporary use of “piety.” I deleted “singular” as I don’t feel it adds. Rather, it detracts from our theology of sanctity! We don’t celebrate the saints because they are singular or unique; we celebrate them because they witness to our common gifts in Christ. Bede wrote his own epitaph in the closing chapters of the Ecclesiastical History thus: “I wholly applied myself to the study of Scripture, and amidst the observance of regular discipline, and the daily care of singing in the church, I always took delight in learning, teaching, and writing.” In making the common particular to him, then, I modified the petition relating to Christ. The original phrase “hold fast the true doctrine” is certainly correct as Bede was quite orthodox. However, bringing in the Scriptures and the singing of the Offices honors Bede’s own self-description better and enables us to capture his virtue of discipline.

Is this singable? I think so. It does have a number of clauses, but no more so than some of our other classic collects.

Now, I had made a suggestion earlier on in the process that we create collects that could sustain the optional phrase “[and in union with her prayers]” where grammatically appropriate in order to capture a true baptismal ecclesiology. This phrase would recognize the unity of our Baptismal community in Christ that physical death cannot sever, and acknowledge the presence of the saints within our present worshiping community. (And be entirely optional, noting that some have a more limited understanding of Baptism…) Looking at this new collect, though—there’s not a good way to fit the phrase in. I could see it going here: “and [in union with his prayers] to fashion our lives according to the same” except that we open a can of worms regarding antecedents. The natural antecedent of “his” would be Christ and if we substitute “Bede” for the pronoun it becomes clunky and interferes with “the same” at the end of the line. Thus, despite my desire for a recognition of our eschatological community with Bede and the rest of the saints, I think this collect is better off without the added phrase.

The Revised Saint Augustine’s Prayer Book

The Revised Saint Augustine’s Prayer Book has finally arrived. After several years of planning and working, I can at last hold it in my hands!

I know that there have been some questions about how the new revision relates to the previous version, the 1967 revised edition, so I’ll go ahead and address that.

Physically, the two books are roughly the same size in the hand. However, the bindings are different—while the ’67 is a hardback book, the ’14 is leather bound with sewn-in pages, two ribbons, and gilt-edged “Bible paper” pages. It feels like a prayer book that will stand up to repeated use. Because of the thinness of the Bible paper, there are roughly one hundred more pages in the new edition than in the previous edition.

SAPBs IMG_20140528_062831

Opening the book, the text is printed in both red and black.

A quick comparison of the two tables of contents underscores that this is a revision, not a new work. The same headings are present, but the new revision has a more detail, more subheadings, to help direct you to where you want to go.

The former revision was conducted as the Episcopal Church was in the midst of formulating its next prayer book. As a result, it remains a solid catholic supplement to the 1928 prayer book and is in dialogue with the Roman Catholic piety of its day in the very midst of the tumult of Vatican II. By contrast, this new revision was designed from the ground up as a solid catholic supplement to our current prayer book, reflecting the ecumenical and cultural situation of our day. Additionally, this revision intentionally draws from the wells of historic devotion incorporating more materials from Sarum primers and breviaries. In keeping with both aims—a closer connection with the current prayer book as well as recovering the riches of former ages—we have tried to give as many attributions as possible laying bare the historical span of the material. Just to be clear, though, old stuff isn’t in here because it’s old; it’s because in working and praying with these well-worn prayers, David and I were convinced that they had an important word to speak to the church of our present day.

There are prayers here in contemporary (Rite II) language; there are prayers here in traditional (Rite I) language. We have also incorporated some material—I’m thinking of Office canticles in particular—in direct address that provide gender-neutral praises to God. Above all, our goal was to use the whole register of liturgical language with the intention of not making language an issue. There was no quota of Rite I to Rite II to gender-neutral material. Instead, we went with what prayed well!

Some material was removed. David probably knows better than I which material exactly, but there’s a certain flavor of saccharine-sweet overly-pious immediately pre-concialiar sentimentality that is greatly toned down. To my Gen-X/Y ears, this material strays dangerously close to the line of self-parody. It’s one thing if your heart is genuinely overflowing with love and devotion; it’s another to insist that’s how you’re feeling and, if not, to whip yourself up to that level because the prayer says you should—that just doesn’t strike me as honest spirituality!

There’s also a good amount of explanatory material here. The previous edition had this too, but much of it has been updated. As David explains in his Foreword, he—like many clergy—discovered the Saint Augustine’s Prayer Book in seminary. That is, his first encounter with it and its spirituality was not necessarily in the context of a living church community. I know that my first encounter with it occurred that way—it was a text that I discovered apart from a living tradition. As a result, the explanations are offered as a way of introducing people to a fuller and deeper expression of the Anglican tradition that is completely consonant with prayer book spirituality whether they’re in a congregation familiar with such traditions or not.

It was a real honor to have the opportunity to work on this book. Both of us entered into it with a certain trepidation because of how deeply loved it is. None of our changes were made lightly; in each case we wanted to make sure that the material was consonant with our prayer book, with our Anglican tradition, and spoke Gospel words of life to modern Episcopalians.

As I have said—tongue in cheek—my chief role was to gild David’s lily: the lion’s share of the work was his. However, I had read through portions of it at David’s request and commented on them before I was officially invited onto the project by Scott Gunn and the good folks at Forward Movement. I see my true role in this work as representing the voice of the laity. It’s easy for devotional works of this sort to reflect what clergy want lay people to think, and do, and pray. I believe that’s a trap that we consciously avoided here. This work, flowing from the monastic well-spring of the Order of the Holy Cross, bolstering the work of the clergy, finds its true home in the hearts, minds, and actions of the whole church—not just the ordained portions. These are prayers that I use with my children, that I turn to between meetings, conference calls, and shuttling the girls to ballet lessons, that are made for our world, the sections both within and without the church’s walls. This is a spirituality for the whole church.

May it be received as it is offered: a treasury of Gospel nourishment for the road. Not a last word or a perfect work, but godly conversation as we push along the way!

Kindle versions are available at Amazon; for the present, physical copies can be ordered through Forward Movement. (They will also be available through Amazon at some point in the future.)

Little Hours and Lay Devotion

A few random thoughts coming together here…

Books of Hours and prymers were the pre-eminent expressions of lay devotion in the pre- and early Reformation period. As I’ve written before, these books had quite a variety of things in them but the key elements tended to be Little Offices—most invariably the Little Hours of the BVM and the Hours of the Dead, frequently one or more of the Little Hours of the Cross, Passion, Holy Spirit, All Saints or Trinity—psalms, litanies, and invocations of the saints.

I want to spend a little bit of time on the Little Hours.

Medieval devotion went in a variety of directions, but there was always at least one strain that looked to monastic models. The first liturgical books in the hands of the laity were psalters. Psalters deserve a number of posts dedicated to them, but for the moment, I’ll go with a quick and dirty overview. A liturgical psalter contained more than psalms. Containing the variable material outside the ordinary of the Daily Office, it contained the psalms, a number of canticles, sometimes hymns, and the additional devotions of the monks used before, after, or between the main offices. This is where we see the Little Offices appearing.

In the early medieval period—so, we’re talking AD 700-900—devotions to particular persons and doctrines began to appear in the continental monasteries. Their form varied, but generally, they were modeled on the regular choir Offices (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, etc.)  except that they tended to be shorter, use fewer psalms, and have fewer variable elements. These were recited in addition to the regular choir Offfices. As the Benedictine rule became normative throughout the lands under Carolingian sway as interpreted by Benedictine of Aniane and his comrades, and as the Cluniac ideal of the choir-based monk spread concurrently, these offices popped up all over the place. It was through their incorporation into the psalters, that they spread into lay hands and became features of lay devotion.

Completely skipping over lay use of psalters and the transition into books of hours, as we enter the hey-day of books of hours in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we notice some patterns. Out of the many versions of the Little Offices of various sorts, there has been a certain amount of consolidation and simplification. That is, the Little Office of the BVM and the Office for the Dead have moved to a central position, others have receded a bit.

Take the Hours of the Holy Spirit as an example… There are 11th and 12 century Hours of the Little Spirit that are full-fledged offices in their own right.  Thus, the offices outside Matins have an opening, a verse from the Veni Creator Spiritus, a variable psalm with antiphon (reversed at Lauds and Vespers—the psalm coming first), a chapter with a response, and a concluding collect. (Matins is more involved, has 3 readings and responsaries in proper Matins fashion…)

By the 15th century, the variable psalm has dropped and the chapter and response have shortened into something more like a basic verse and response. Thus, the later hours are chiefly, opening, hymn verse, verse/response, and collect. Instead of standing on their own, they were joined to the end of the Hours of the BVM. This becomes a standard pattern. The hymn verses and collects change each hour, but there is no variation from day to day and season to season. As a result, these become eminently memorizable. As books of hours spread and become status objects even among those classes with questionable literacy, the static form makes these offices easier to read (fewer changes).

By the time of the first English language prymers, the Hours of the BVM had quite a number of these “memorial” forms consisting on an anthem/antiphon, a verse/response, and a collect appended after Lauds and Vespers. With the coming of the Books of Common Prayer and the suppression of antiphons and v/r patterns, most of these disappeared, but some of their collects linger. In fact, you ought to be familiar with one of them—the collects “for Peace” in the section after the Collect of the Day at morning and Evening Prayer are remnants of the Memorial for Peace.  Too, the collect used at the Little Hours of the Passion is tucked at the end of the Good Friday liturgy on page 282:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death. Give mercy and grace to the living; pardon and rest to the dead; to your holy Church peace and concord; and to us sinners everlasting life and glory; for with the Father and the Holy Spirit you live and reign, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Ok—so that’s a real quick fly-by of the history of the Little Hours. In fact, I’ll make it even shorter:

  • They started out as focused versions of choir Offices
  • Over time, most were reduced to invariable forms through the day consisting of a verse-length hymn, a versicle/response, and a collect
  • By the time of englishing the liturgy, they entered as collects alone.

The trend for these ancillary devotions is a move to become shorter and less variable. Ergo, they were easier to memorize and to use throughout the day.

What are the implications for lay devotions in our own day?

Do we want to create things that are as variable as possible with as many moving parts as we can find—or does it make more sense to follow the fundamental channels that lay devotion seems to have followed in previous ages?

It seems to me that if I wanted to create intermediary offices as a supplement to the BCP’s Morning and Evening Prayers, I would go with the base pattern: hymn verse, versicle/response drawn from the psalms, collect. Some of the Little Hours, like those of the Holy Spirit and of the Passion, explicitly referred to the time of day and connected the devotion to biblical events that happened at that same time of day. Perhaps that strategy might still retain some utility today.

I wonder if the average hymn verse and/or collect has more or less than 140 characters…?

On Spiritual Honesty

I’ve been neglecting the blog somewhat severely of late… It’s not for lack of ideas. I have several posts bouncing around in my head; it’s purely a lack of time to translate them from brainwaves into electrons.

However, one of the items on my plate did get checked off today. Fr. Allen and the good folks at St. Mary’s, Abingdon invited me speak at their Lenten Luncheon. I had a great time, and had some delicious clam chowder in the bargain!

Here’s what I said…


 

Today, I’d like us to spend a little bit of time fussing around with one of the hardest of the Lenten disciplines. Honesty. I know—fasting, almsgiving, and prayer always get top billing and that’s fine, but what our Mother Church calls us to when we receive the exhortation to a holy Lent is so hard precisely because it’s so simple: The call to a Holy Lent is a call to spiritual honesty.

Ash Wednesday confronts us with two uncomfortable realities. First, that we are mortal. You and I are going to die. And we have all Lent to consider what that means as we watch Jesus’ own movement towards the cross and his death. First, we are mortal. Second, we are sinners. And this is where I want to focus today—I want to think about what this means, and how our prayer book helps us wrestle with this.

For me, there’s one Bible passage that is inextricably bound up with the act of Confession and that’s the fault of the Lutheran Book of Worship. I grew up Lutheran and the Lutheran book steals the Penitential order at the start of the service directly out of our Book of Common Prayer and the Scripture sentence that it always uses before confession is this one from First John: “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

They say that the first step in wrestling with an addiction is recognizing that you need help. And that’s one of the models that we can use to think about our complicated relationship with sin—that it’s an addiction that compels us into certain patterns and behaviors. St. John is gently calling us back to reality. If we say we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves. We are not being honest about ourselves and about our condition.

And there’s a lot fighting against this; one thing we can certainly say about humans is this: we are masters of the fine art of self-deception. We have crafted all kinds of ways to deceive ourselves about all kinds of things! Me, I’m a master Procrastinator. I like to convince myself that if I just forget about something or avoid it long enough and it’ll just go away. That’s one strategy… Then there’s Justification, “Well, that’s not really a sin, I mean it could be for some people, but this is what I just have to do and I have a very good reason for doing it…” Or, another good one is Comparison: “Well, maybe I shouldn’t do that—but it’s not like I’m an axe murderer! Those people are way worse than me!”

And yet—to all of these excuses St. John has one very simple response: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.” We don’t fool God. We don’t fool those people against whom we are sinning. And, let’s face it, some of the time we can’t even fool ourselves. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.”

The first step, then, to getting honest about ourselves and about our sin is to begin with the simple fact of acknowledgement. Simply the act of confessing sin names it. It gets it out there. It puts a stick in the spokes of our great engine of self-deception. It doesn’t solve the problem, of course, but it does make us sit up and take notice.

Now, when it comes to prayers of confession, our prayer book gives us several options. The classic is, of course, the one that we inherited from our earlier prayer books at the Eucharist where “we acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed.” It’s a great prayer and I love it—but I’m not going to talk about it today. Instead, since we’re talking about honesty, I want to focus on another prayer of confession—the one that we find before the Daily Offices. Here is the prayer of confession at the start of the Rite I, traditional language Morning and Evening Prayer:

Almighty and most merciful Father,
we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,
we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts,
we have offended against thy holy laws,
we have left undone those things which we ought to have done,
and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.
But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us,
spare thou those who confess their faults,
restore thou those who are penitent, according to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord;
and grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

Honesty. That’s where we start out. This prayer names for us five examples by which our sinfulness expresses itself.

  1. we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,
  2. we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts,
  3. we have offended against thy holy laws,
  4. we have left undone those things which we ought to have done,
  5. and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.

I really like this list. The reason why I like it, is because it focuses less on thou-shalt-nots and from talking about sin in the form of specific discrete bad actions and speaks more of sin as a fundamental misorientation of life. For me it’s that metaphor of the straying sheep that really hits home. We are wandering in the wilderness, following our own inclinations, heedless of the well-marked path of the Shepherd. The opening psalms of Morning Prayer, Psalms 95 and 100 riff on this image of the Shepherd and the sheep. I’d love to go into this more—there’s this really neat interplay between the language in the confession and the language of sheep and Shepherd in the psalms, but we don’t have time to get into it all now—just notice that it’s there for now and ponder it at your leisure.

Another piece of wisdom in this list is the ordering of the last two items. “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.” The point the prayer book is making here is that we sin far more by omission than by commission. We sin more in what we don’t do, what we leave off, what we pass by, than what we do do.

Classically, this whole list of five things was gathered together in a summary statement: “and there is no health in us.” This is a good and important summary provided that we understand it correctly. Remember—the translators and editors of the 1552 prayer book where this first appears still had the Latin ringing in their ears; salus can be rendered either as “health” or “salvation.” I read this less as a statement of Calvinistic depravity and more akin to a Lutheran sentiment that we are unable to save ourselves through our own efforts. It’s just like the opening of our collect for this week: “Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves…”

Ok—so, we begin by acknowledging our situation honestly. Yes, we sin. Yes, our lives—like sheep—have wandered off the path of virtue that God has laid down for us. And, as we said, owning this is our first step. Furthermore, we can’t fix this on our own. And so we acknowledge our need for God’s help. “Spare thou those…Restore thou those…and grant that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous and sober life to the glory of the holy Name. If the confession opened with the metaphor of the lost sheep and with the image of misorientation, the end of the confession is about reorientation.

Note how it happens, though. The sheep doesn’t get unlost through its own effort. Just so, we can’t work our way out of this no matter how good our intentions. Remember? There is no health in us; we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves. To my mind this is where it gets serious again. I at least want to have the illusion of control here! I at least want to think that there’s something I can do to fix this problem! But no—hear again where the prayer goes:

But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us,
spare thou those who confess their faults,
restore thou those who are penitent, according to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord;
and grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

It’s all God. It’s all grace. We can’t fix ourselves, but instead have to turn ourselves over to the God who promised to spare us, to restore us, and to guide us in right paths for his name’s sake. Yea, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we are not the ones in control of our direction and our destiny. We follow the Shepherd who leads us. And there’s the why of it as well. Why do we seek to live this way? Why do we seek this reorientation? For God’s glory—not ours. “That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, to the glory of thy holy Name.”

This is the honesty we drive towards in Lent: a realistic assessment of our situation, a realistic assessment from where our help comes, and a clear direction of how—and why—to reorder our steps.

If you pray the one or both of the Offices this Lent, I’d encourage you to be attentive to the words of this daily confession. Ponder it. As its words slip through your mouth, capture them in your heart and consider the discipline of honesty. Consider the reality of your situation, your state. And open your heart to the converting, reforming, refreshing grace of God. Even as we confess, even as we ask for this healing grace, may expect it, and look for signs of its flourishing in our lives.

Let us pray:

Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou
hast made and dost forgive the sins of all those who are
penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that
we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our
wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy,
perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our
Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Lenten Reflection

I haven’t put up many pieces on the Episcopal Cafe recently. That’s not a function of anything other than being overly busy, and not having anything compelling bubbling up to the top. However, I do have a new piece up as a kick-off to Lent.

Lent can be a mixed bag around the Church. Some see it as a time to curb minor food cravings without reference to its deeper intentions; others see it as a time for renewed advocacy of a particular cause. Too, I think some people in some years need more or less Lent than others. For me, I’m feeling a need for more and for a turn back to the personal side of Lent. I need to honestly take stock of where I am, and there’s no way I can do that without taking sin seriously.

In that light, my post invites us to a Lenten reflection about the dark places within ourselves, and the Gospel call to let in the light of Christ.

Decision on Calendar Issues

The Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music met yesterday afternoon. One of the top topics was the future of commemorations and the state of the Episcopal sanctoral calendar. I had pulled together the work of the subcommittee into a document which was further modified by committee and which was subsequently posted to the SCLM blog where we asked for feedback. Based on the feedback and discussion in the SCLM, we will be moving forward with a reconfiguration of HWHM tentatively retitled “A Great Cloud of Witness” (likely with a clear and descriptive functional title appended to the Scriptural phrase…).

Here are the key features of the recommendations:

  • We clarify that the sanctoral calendar of the Episcopal Church consists of those days celebrated by all—the Principal Feasts and Holy Days of the Book of Common Prayer—and that the calendar in the prayer book reflect this.
  • We clarify that all other days are—as they have always been—optional. They can be celebrated or not at the discretion of the presider or parish.
  • We move away from a canonization model. Instead, the resource follows a “family history” model and identifies people who have been significant and important for the church being the church in the 21st century.
  • The recognition of sanctity of any of the people either on or off the list is a local decision.
  • The central ecclesial act of recognizing a saint is eucharistic celebration. In order to clarify that the list of names and the resource is not a sanctoral calendar, entries will contain a collect for devotional purposes but not full eucharistic propers. However, suggestions for appropriate propers will be provided should a local community choose to honor a given person or group as a saint or saints.
  • Speaking of collects, the prayers currently contained in HWHM will be overhauled. We agreed that the goal is for each commemoration to have an actual collect that is appropriate for worship (not a supplementary mini-bio as one person said in the meeting…). However, given the scope of work, some entries may share appropriate Common collects if unique rewrites cannot be completed for all.
  • The bios will also be redone to remove errors and to highlight Christian discipleship.
  • Because this is not a sanctoral calendar there will be a clause in the criteria allowing for extremely occasional inclusion of non-Christian people with the clear understanding that the bio needs to be upfront about the fact that this is an exception and be equally clear on how the person’s life, witness, work, whatever directly connects to the church’s understanding of Christian discipleship. For example, all of the Dorchester Chaplains will be included—even Rabbi Goode—because the a significant part of the witness of this group is their ecumenical nature. To leave out Rabbi Goode would undercut an important aspect of the commemoration. Is anyone suggesting that Rabbi Goode is a Christian, “anonymous” or otherwise? No. Is his inclusion here indicating that the Episcopal Church now thinks of him as a saint? No. Instead, it recognizes that he was an integral part of a heroic gesture of compassion and ecumenical cooperation that local congregations are free to observe or not at their discretion.
  • The Weekday Temporal material and the Commons for Various Occasions will be collected together and will receive greater emphasis as equally valid alternatives on non-festal days.

There are other things that haven’t been fully decided that still remain to be hashed out. Too, none of this is official until General Convention renders a decision on it. GC may decide to scrap the whole thing and go back to HWHM. However, this represents what we’re working to pull together and put before convention.

As regular readers know, I don’t consider this a perfect solution. There are a number of things I would do differently if it were up to me, but it’s not—this is part of a church-wide process that must satisfy a wide range of theological and political positions. However, it is a workable solution, and addresses many of the flaws identified in HWHM. Whether we’ve just created new flaws, only time will tell…