Author Archives: Derek A. Olsen

Random Things

  • I have some big, long, deep posts in construction. As you can see, none of them have actually made it to the stage of being published anytime recently.
  • Partly, that’s due to multiple projects going on. Some are proceeding well, others have just dropped in my lap. Others need serious attention. More on this in the next few days including a liturgy resource announcement!
  • I just finished reading a classic work that I’d only skimmed and dipped into before, Pierre Riche’s Education and Culture in the Barbarian West. It’s the standard work to cite if you do anything on early medieval education. I have noticed, a trend, though—it tends to be cited, not quoted. Now I understand why… It’s dense and learned and all, but is able to provide very little in terms of what I’d consider the basic practicalities of early medieval education.
  • I have a piece up at the Cafe right now on the importance of guidance in reading—particularly the Creeds. I know some people like to bash the Cafe because it does have a strong progressive slant, but—as a self-professed moderate who trends conservative on doctrinal issues—I’ve never had an issue putting stuff up there: http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/scripture/stories_and_truth_1.php
  • There’s a great manuscript picture floating around on Twitter (no surprise, I’m @haligweorc…) of two rabbits tying a guy up. It’s a classic role-reversal motif. See it here:Bunnies Being Bad

Note the bunny on the right. The stick-and-circle looking thing hanging from his belt is a sword and buckler. That is, the buckler (a little shield) is hung from the hilt of the sword for daily wear. This was a fairly standard way to carry both basic offensive and defensive gear in one neat package. Based on our sources, this combo was the standard for the English middle and lower classes. begin rant So why is this combo and others like it that we see over and over in manuscript art and that appears in medieval weapon manuals so greatly neglected in historical fiction and fantasy? M and I love watching “Vikings” but it’s hard for me to get through an episode without commenting on weapon and armor choices clearly selected for the sake of visual spectacle rather than accuracy or utility. Fantasy movies are usually even worse. It always baffles me why a genre that seems to revolve so much around armor, weapons, and the people who use them get so much so wrong so often. If I ever get around to writing a fantasy novel you can be certain that at least one guy with an ultra-spiky +25 flaming broadsword of malice will find himself quickly skewered by a guy with a basic spear and shield…

Children in Church: Easter Vigil Edition

bls rightly points us to Ben Myers’ wonderful post on his son’s experience of the Easter Vigil.

All I can add is: YES!

Well, actually, I know I can’t help myself from adding a bit more…

Two things.

First, I said a while ago that I needed to write up how M used to do her children’s mass because it truly was exemplary as far as I’m concerned. It was a well-done Anglo-Catholic prayer book low mass that incorporated children, but talked down neither to them nor to their parents. And both the kids and the parents loved it. I do actually need to write that up…

Second, Ben Myers’ observations parallel mine. The girls were in church quite a lot over the last few days, even going all three Nocturns at the Tenebrae. (I took them home and put them to bed so they didn’t get through Lauds. My decision—not theirs.) They loved it. Heading home, G’s principal comment after chanting through 12 odd psalms was “That’s what real Christian music is supposed to sound like, not the praise stuff they make us sing in chapel [at school].”

H is used to hearing Anglican Chant in church; she wasn’t used to us singing Gregorian tones there (we have sung it at home a few times), but after the Tenebrae she was at it like a pro—and insisted that we sing along with the choir at the Vigil. The psalms in our leaflets were unpointed, but she did a fine job of sight-pointing with me. (So, if my 8 year old can pick it up, why do some feel that adult congregations can’t…?)

Because the sign-up sheet was left unguarded in the parish hall, both girls signed up to serve as lectors, several times. They did great. Yes, we practiced and went over words, and worked on projecting and all. (H never did fully wrap her tongue around “ordinances” and also ended up with one syllable to many or to few…) But at 10 and 8, they read just as well as the adult lectors.

Kids want to sing, they want to serve, they want to have the full-body experience. Yes, they want to play with fire. And we should let them! Carefully, of course. They neither want nor need a second-class liturgy. They went it well-done and as rich and deep as the rest of us.

Liturgical Juxtaposition

One of the things that I talked about in my dissertation that I’m revisiting as I frame it into a book is the principle of liturgical juxtaposition. That is, one of the ways the liturgy functions is to draw Scripture together—literally placing passages one next to the other—sometimes purposefully, other times accidentally as different cycles draw different texts together, then leaving the participant to tease out connections and relationships between them. Sometimes these come only at a great stretch as we see in some tortured allegories of the liturgy. At other times, they flow effortlessly, naturally, and powerfully.

That was my experience at Morning Prayer today. The Passion from yesterday still ringing in my ears, reading Psalm 72 (on the monthly cycle), a psalm of royal triumph, juxtaposed with the Monday in Holy Week antiphon: “The Lord was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and He opened not His mouth” neatly captured the contrast that will animate the rest of the coming week.

Episco-pitch: The Short Version

A number of people have been posting their elevator pitch for the Episcopal Church. A while back I did my elevator pitch for the faith in general which I still quite like. But here’s my take. It assumes a very short elevator ride:

Faith seeking Understanding,
Rapt in the beauty of holiness.
Treading the sacramental path into love.

Perhaps it even qualifies as an Episcopal haiku rather than elevator pitch…

Maundy Thursday Musings

Not being a priest, I have no authority to shape liturgical celebrations at the local level. In a certain sense, this gives me the freedom to play “what if” and think through various scenarios without having to commit to one to embody in the midst of community that has its own histories that may either support or resist what I dream up in my head!

Of the various liturgical possibilities and quandries within the span of high-church Anglicanism, I think that perhaps the most interesting with which to wrestle is the tone of Maundy Thursday.

As I interpret the various services I’ve seen and attended, there seem to be two main types. The first is to emphasize the establishment of the Eucharist. In this version, Maundy Thursday is radically different from the Lenten and Holy Week liturgies around it. The vestments are white, the Gloria in Excelsis—unheard since the Sunday of the Transfiguration (or perhaps the Annunciation)—peals out its joy, and the Eucharist is celebrated in its highest possible state.

The second is to emphasize its setting within Triduum and Holy Week. Here the vestments are either the crimson or ox-blood or Lenten purple of the season, the Gloria remains tucked away, and the emphasis rest less on the gift of the sacrament to the Church than a man’s prophetic—and proleptic—last meal with his friends.

Like most of the mysteries of the Church, there ought to be a sense of both/and rather than a strict either/or. However, when it comes to the textures of the service, the vestments, the music, the tone of the event, you really do have to choose one or the other. Vestments are either crimson or white. In Rite II, you either use the Gloria or the Kyrie (or the Trisagion). The Opening Acclamation is either penitential or not.

The prayer book to which we look for guidance, gives us very little to go on. Indeed, it begins with the singularly unhelpful rubric, “The Eucharist begins in the usual manner, using the following Collect, Psalm, and Lessons.” Really? “Usual”? What’s that supposed to mean—usual Lent, usual Holy Week, or usual Feast of Our Lord/Institution of the Eucharist? The collect emphasizes the institution of the Eucharist as its central point, yet does not omit a reference to the night before Christ’s suffering.

As a liturgist who is also a biblical scholar whose work focuses on the gospels, I find this one of our toughest nuts to crack.

That is, if we celebrate Maundy Thursday as a Eucharistic festival, do we overshadow, obscure, or distract from our experience of Triduum and the gospels’ emphasize on the events around Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection? Recall the, I think accurate, summation of Mark’s Gospel as a Passion Narrative with an extended introduction. Recall that the evening of Maundy Thursday begins at John 13; almost a third of the John’s Gospel, from chapter 13 to the middle of chapter 20, occurs within the three-day span.

In one sense, this quandry can be constructed along classical lines of Christian argument as the age-old fight of sacrament vs. Scripture. But I think it’s deeper than that. Really wrestling with it engages some of the deep questions about the inter-relationship between the meal of Jesus in the upper room and the sacrament of the Church society, between our Lord’s command to repeat what he did in his memory and the forms in which we share this ceremony now. Rather complex questions of sign, intention, metaphor, and continuity vie with one another here.

My own preference is to let Maundy Thursday be the Triduum’s inauguration, where Jesus gathers with those whom he trusts and to whom he teaches his last lesson of love in two ways, both firmly rooted in ritual action. Then we watch a third way unfold as trust unravels, and he is betrayed into the hands of those who seek his life. I’m all for a blow-out celebration of the sacrament—and that’s why we have Corpus Christi, a day to revel in the gift of grace given to the Church. But to make Maundy Thursday that day, it seems to me, obscures a bit the uncomfortable yet necessary truth that the betrayer of trust is a disciple who loves Jesus. As we do…

The best of the celebration-style gatherings that I have seen use the contrast between the service’s glorious start and its stark ending in stripped sanctuary as a pivot. The contrast is an integral part of the liturgy’s experience. And I think that it can serve as an effective entry into the Three Great Days. But, on the whole, my preference is to experience it the other way.

For my part, of course, it’s not in my hands. I actually don’t know how my parish will celebrate it this year; I’ll find out next week. And I’ll be fine with whichever way we do it. However, I still see this day with its complex confluence of themes worth wrestling with…

 

Logos Anglican Base Package

The good folks at Logos Bible Software have sent me a review copy of their latest work, the Anglican Base Packages. I’m going to be writing a formal review for this software for The Living Church, but as a means to prepare for that, I’ll be putting it through its paces and posting informal reviews here as I work through various sections of it.

A little back story… I first used Logos Bible Software when the religion department at St. Olaf got a computer lab and installed it there 20 years ago (!). I liked it enough that I bought a copy for myself that I used through the latter half of college and my first few years in seminary. Looking through the old files on my hard drive, I found a review of it I wrote 10 years ago while assisting in the revision of the third edition of Biblical Exegesis. I liked it then too, but thought its search capabilities at that time came in second to the other big dog on the block, BibleWorks (then version 5). Since then, I haven’t done a lot with Bible software. I’m curious to see how far progress has come in the last ten years!

When I first got involved with Logos, it tended towards two main markets, Bible-studying evangelicals and academics. They were one of the first early systems to have good original language support, but a lot of their English-language library add-ons tended towards conservative evangelical devotional materials—mostly things that had gone out of print. In the days before Google Books, this was a good thing if you wanted such material. These days, post-Google Books, you have to step up your game significantly!

And they have…

In recent years, they have produced a product line specifically geared towards Roman Catholics called Verbum. In addition to biblical materials, they included good resources across the span of church history—from the Fathers through the medieval period up to the modern day.

Now—it’s our turn. Just looking at the number and span of resources in the Anglican Base Packages, I’m blown away. The people who put the list of resources together really knew what they were doing. It has many of the patristic and medieval resources that were in the Catholic set, and includes a wide array of Anglican authors through the centuries and across party divisions. Naturally, it has a strong prayer book section. The biblical material looks great too. I plan to look at all of these areas in detail in further posts, so I won’t dig into them here. Overall, my first impression of the package has been fantastic!

Here’s the official press release on it:

Bellingham, Wash., March 27, 2014 — Logos Bible Software has announced a new line of scholarly libraries tailored to Anglicans/Episcopalians. The new “base package” libraries offer all the features of Logos’ nondenominational base packages, with a resource lineup that meets the specific needs of Anglican scholars and pastors.

Conventionally, in-depth study requires access to a large physical library and large blocks of time for study and reflection. Logos’ Anglican base packages aim to overcome these barriers — they include hundreds of titles from the Anglican tradition, accessible on a computer or mobile device. All the resources are linked using Logos’ proprietary code, enabling users to jump between Scripture and Tradition with a click. This means Anglican scholars can spend less time on busywork and more time learning and reflecting.

“The Logos Anglican program is one of the best tools for personal spirituality and ministry that I have come across,” said Rev. C. K. Robertson, PhD, canon to the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. “Actually, it is more of a toolbox than just a tool, as there are so many wonderful aspects of it that I am only beginning to discover! Not only are the biblical materials incredibly helpful, but the pieces devoted to the Book of Common Prayer and the other Episcopal resources make this absolutely invaluable. I heartily commend this work to all members of the Episcopal Church.”

Logos has been creating world-class Bible software for more than 20 years. It has almost 2 million users in more than 210 countries, and partners with more than 200 publishers to provide the best content from the scholarly world. Logos’ in-house biblical-language and theological scholars do original research and consult on software development.

Last year, Logos hired an Anglican expert, Ben Amundgaard, to design a product line that would meet the needs of Anglican and Episcopalians. Amundgaard consulted other Anglican scholars and emphasized the classic Anglican integration of Scripture, Reason and Tradition; the result is a biblical and theological library customized to the needs of Anglican scholarship.

“I have happily used Logos software for Bible reference and study since 1995,” said Rt. Rev. George Wayne Smith, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri. “Every day I open the software to pray Morning and Evening Prayer from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer 1979, using the Logos resource for the Daily Lectionary. I also have at hand works by foundational writers in the Anglican tradition — theologians like Thomas Cranmer, Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes. I am thrilled to learn that Logos is releasing even more packages from this tradition that I love and call home.”

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.