Author Archives: Derek A. Olsen

Breviary Improvements

Ok—I’ve been letting this one linger for far too long… It’s time to do some serious changes around the breviary, in particular with the way that it handles preferences. Every since I shifted from a Windows server to a Linux server the preferences have been buggy or, perhaps more likely, the shift revealed some underlying flaws. Either way, the time has come to get this fixed once and for all.

One of the reasons this has lingered, of course, is that work that pays takes precedence over breviary tinkering which, though fun and instructive and useful, doesn’t pay the bills. If you use the breviary and feel moved to help, a <a href=”http://www.stbedeproductions.com/breviary/donate.php“>modest donation</a> will help defray the functional cost.

So—expect to see some changes! I wouldn’t be surprised if a few bugs don’t pop up as well in the process, and for those I ask your indulgence in advance…

The Daily Office: Sacrifice of Praise

Here’s a section where I’m going into the essence and the spiritual logic behind the Office…

——————–

The Sacrifice of Praise and Thanksgiving

When the Church Fathers spoke of the chief morning and evening services of the Daily Office—Lauds and Vespers in the Western Church—they often did so with reference to the Temple sacrifices. A classic example is Isidore of Seville (†636) whose encyclopedic writings formed the basis for most Western treatments of the liturgy for almost a thousand years. In describing Vespers, he writes:

Vespers is the end of the daily office and the setting of another daylight. Its solemn celebration is from the Old Testament. It was the custom of the ancients to offer sacrifices and to have aromatic substances and incense burnt on the altar at that time. [David], that hymn-singing witness, performed a royal and priestly office saying: “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice” (Ps 141:2). (De Eccl. Off., 1.20.1)

Isidore asserts a few things that we need to look at more carefully. First, he finds Vespers in the Old Testament. Second, he clarifies this remark by talking about sacrifices, particularly around the offering of incense. Third, he mentions David, citing a psalm in support of his statements. What’s he talking about, and in what sense do we take this?

Looking through the legislation in the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures, we find a double reference to what Isidore was describing. Numbers 28:1-8 gives a summary:

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: Command the Israelites, and say to them: My offering, the food for my offerings by fire, my pleasing odor, you shall take care to offer to me at its appointed time. And you shall say to them, This is the offering by fire that you shall offer to the LORD: two male lambs a year old without blemish, daily, as a regular offering. One lamb you shall offer in the morning, and the other lamb you shall offer at twilight also one-tenth of an ephah of choice flour for a grain offering, mixed with one-fourth of a hin of beaten oil. It is a regular burnt offering, ordained at Mount Sinai for a pleasing odor, an offering by fire to the LORD. Its drink offering shall be one-fourth of a hin for each lamb; in the sanctuary you shall pour out a drink offering of strong drink to the LORD. The other lamb you shall offer at twilight with a grain offering and a drink offering like the one in the morning; you shall offer it as an offering by fire, a pleasing odor to the LORD. (NRSV)

So—lambs, bread, and wine. This legislation is described again at the end of Exodus 29; Exodus 30 then gives directions for the incense altar right before the Holy of Holies in the inmost part of the temple and states: “Aaron shall offer fragrant incense on it; every morning when he dresses the lamps he shall offer it, and when Aaron sets up the lamps in the evening, he shall offer it, a regular incense offering before the Lord throughout your generations” (Exod 30:7-8). This is where the incense is coming from in Isidore.

Although these twice daily offerings are described separately, we find them joined together in some of the standard summary statements of priestly activity in the Temple. Thus, when King Abijah is trying to persuade the people of Israel to join Judah again he argues, “We have priests ministering to the LORD who are descendants of Aaron, and Levites for their service. They offer to the LORD every morning and every evening burnt offerings and fragrant incense, set out the rows of bread on the table of pure gold, and care for the golden lampstand so that its lamps may burn every evening” (2 Chr 13:10b-11a). When we think about services in the Temple, then, this was a big piece of the daily activity: the twice daily burnt offerings of food and incense. The best description that we have from the time of the Temple is in Ecclesiasticus 50:12-21 where the service is described while praising the Simon, son of Onias, high priest from around 219-196 BC. While interesting in its own right, the only point that we need to observe from this description is that it includes a description of the Levites singing a psalm at the time of the sacrifice. This agrees with the much later—and much more comprehensive—description of this ceremony in the Mishnah (the 3rd century AD written collection of Jewish oral teaching) where set psalms are given for each day.

To recap, then, there were daily temple sacrifices at morning and evening where prayers would be prayed, psalms sung, and sacrifices performed—both food and incense. This is the Old Testament precedent that Isidore is referring to. (Note: I’m not suggesting that there is any direct liturgical link between the sacrifices and the Offices only that the pattern is similar and that common elements are likely due to a Christian appropriation of what they read as Old Testament practice.)

These offerings of food, drink, and incense are the type that anthropologists refer to as “alimentary offerings.” That is, in these sacrifices, the community is feeding the deity; in traditions that include images or statues of the gods, they may be clothed at this time as well. Now—it’s easy to dismiss these as primitive and pointless, but to do so is to miss their deeper meaning. Only the very young or unsophisticated believed that the gods needed these feedings or would perish without them. Indeed, Psalm 50 explicitly mocks this shallow understanding: “If I [, the Lord,] were hungry, I would not tell you, for the whole world is mine and all that is in it. Do you think I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and make good your vows to the Most High” (Ps 50:12-4, BCP).  Rather, what’s operative behind these ceremonies is that the community is taking some of its common supplies—food, drink, things that people could use—and is choosing to give them up. The fact that useful (and sometimes even scarce) belongings are being exclusively devoted to the deity is a symbol of the community’s dedication to their god. That’s what’s really behind this: these sacrifices are an act of self-dedication showing through the community’s sacrifice what kind of material loss they are willing to incur for the sake of fidelity to their deity. This kind of sacrifice, then (and there are other kinds that we’ll talk about later…) demonstrates dedication because a limited good is being directed towards the god rather than the community’s (or individual’s) well-being.

Psalm 141 with its spiritualization of the sacrifice is pointing to something important when the psalmist asks that the prayer itself be considered a substitute for or (perhaps more precisely) an act of worship united—though at a distance—with the act of sacrifice: “Let my prayer be set forth in your sight as incense, the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice” (Ps 141:2, BCP). Even though the psalmist isn’t burning any lambs, the act of prayer itself reflects an act of sacrifice. A good that is inherently limited—time itself—is being voluntarily dedicated to God.

Thus, if the morning and evening sacrifices of the Temple are seen as acts of communal self-dedication to God, the morning and evening prayer of the Church mirroring these sacrificial acts are also acts of self-dedication. We are voluntarily giving up twenty to thirty minutes at each time to God—time that could be spent doing a hundred, a thousand, other things—and are choosing to spend this most precious resource in the praise of God.

There are two direct links that the Church has chosen to appropriate from the Old Testament legislation that puts us in connection with the spirit of these sacrifices: the use of psalms and the presence of incense. When we sing the psalms at morning and evening prayer, we are uniting our voices across time not just with the early Anglicans of Archbishop Cranmer’s day, not just with Isidore’s Spanish monks, but with the Levites serving God in the Jerusalem Temple. We are separated by centuries, yet united in song.

Likewise, when we choose to use incense—and this usually occurs either at the most formal expressions of public worship or, on the other end of the spectrum, as the act of an individual worshipper praying alone—we should use it in direct remembrance of the incense offered to God in the Temple ceremonies. We’re not trying to recreate the Temple sacrifices or to put ourselves under Old Testament ceremonial legislation, of course, but—like the psalms—we offer it in spiritual unison with the offerings of God’s people through time. Thus, when incense is used at the Offices, it should be used to cense the altar alone and not the people around it. We’re not at this time using incense as a holy purifier but we are offering it directly to God as a sacrifice in and of itself and as a visual representation of the prayers themselves ascending to God’s throne.

By putting substantial prayer offices at the hinges of the day—morning and evening—therefore, the Church joins its worship spiritually and symbolically with the twice daily sacrifices God commanded the Israelites to perform in Scripture. As with their worship, we are sacrificing something of value—our time—to God as an act of dedication. Praying the psalms, saying the prayers, lifting up our hands with or without incense, we are uniting ourselves with the full people of God across time as we offer our own sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.

Cassian: Discipline in Prayer

In doing some research for the next section, I ran again across this passage which was marked with double lines, underlines, and a star in the margin in my copy of the Conferences and which must be shared:

For whoever is in the habit of praying only at the hour when the knees are bent prays very little. But whoever is distracted by any sort of wandering of heart, even on bended knee, never prays. And therefore we have to be outside the hour of prayer what we want to be when we are praying. For the mind at the time of its prayer is necessarily formed by what went on previously, and when it is praying it is either raised to the heavens or brought low to the earth by the thoughts on which it was dwelling before it prayed. (John Cassian, Conferences 10.14.2)

I’ll have to stick this back into the Disciplines section somewhere…

Daily Office: Psalms

I’m now heading into the Office section of the Prayer Book Spirituality Project. I’m wrestling a bit with the organization… In particular, I’m trying to decide if the Psalms should receive their own chapter or if Psalms stuff should be folded into a more integrated discussion of the Office. I haven’t decided.

That hasn’t stopped me from writing, though…

So—here’s a section that will go *somewhere,* I just don’t know where yet.

——————————-

At the heart of the historic discipline of the Office is the Psalms. Recitation of the psalms has always been a central part of the practice and, not only that, many of the other elements in the Office are either borrowed from or directly inspired by the Psalms. As a result, it’s worth taking a closer look at them.

The Psalms (capitalized) refers to a book of the Old Testament containing 150 chapters. These chapters are, for the most part, discrete poems or songs known as psalms (not capitalized) that involve the relationship between God and his people, whether individually or corporately. What makes them unusual, given our typical perspective on the Bible, is their direction. That is, we ordinarily consider the Bible to be God’s self-revelation to humanity—God’s Word, revealing himself to us. The Psalms, though, are a set of prayers from humanity to God noteworthy for their emotional vulnerability and self-disclosure—feeling often more like humanity’s self-revelation to God!  Thus, the Psalms are a paradox of sorts: divine revelation laying bare the soul of humanity.

Having noted this unusual state of affairs, I now wish to turn to the question of authorship—who wrote the psalms, and how and why does that matter in our reading of them? One view, deriving from modern biblical scholarship, asserts that we don’t know who wrote the psalms—they are largely an anonymous collection. Another view, the traditional view handed down by the early and medieval Church, asserts that King David was the author of the psalms. Yet a third perspective is given by the psalms themselves that help us nuance and appreciate the importance of both perspectives.

By looking at language in relation to dialect shift over centuries, their possible original settings, relationship to other scriptural texts, and parallel material from the Ancient Near East, modern academic scholarship of the Bible sees the Psalms as a collection of material spanning several centuries from a diverse set of sources. Some psalms give a pretty clear indication that they were connected with worship in the Temple; others don’t have a temple anywhere near them. Some are connected to court life; others are written in the voice of the poor pleading for justice against rich oppressors. Some connect the king and Temple worship in ways that require a setting in Solomon’s Temple before its destruction by Babylonian armies in 587 B.C.; others reflect upon that act of destruction and one famously records the lament of those taken exile into Babylon and taunted to sing the songs of their homeland for their captors. Some are gems of theological complexity and subtlety; others reflect a more simplistic conception of God and the human-divine relationship. Some are placed in the voice of the king, yet others (like Psalm 131) are heard more easily in the voice of a young mother.

So what meaning do we take from this? For me, this breadth of the collection, the diversity of the voices, the anonymity of the writers gives me the sense of being in contact with a whole people of God at prayer. This anonymous collective is part of the great cloud of witnesses just as I am—just as I will be when twenty-five centuries have covered my own tomb with dust. From this perspective, the authors who wrote the psalms may be nameless and faceless but are by no means either voiceless or soul-less. Indeed, that is what gaps the chasms of time between then and now: an earnest cry—whether it be joy, or devotion or fear—that I recognize within my own breast as well. Thus, the diversity of the collection and the anonymity of its myriad authors and editors binds us to our heritage of the sons and daughters of God moving through time.

On the other hand, the tradition has insisted upon the person of King David as a centerpoint around whom the psalms are hung. While modern scholarship agrees that at least a few of the psalms contain linguistic and conceptual markers consistent with David’s time and place—and that therefore could conceivable be by him—it rejects the notion of Davidic authorship of the full Psalter as inconsistent with internal evidence from the psalms themselves. Whether it’s historical or not, there is some spiritual value for us in seeing the psalms in relation to David, so it’s worth looking more closely at why this attribution was so important to the Church through the ages.

The first reason is because the biblical narratives about David frequently connect him with music. According to 1 Samuel 16:14-23 even before the episode with Goliath, David was taken into Saul’s service precisely because his music soothed the king. Even after rising to high rank commanding the king’s armies, David still played daily for the him—indeed these music sessions twice became opportunities when the increasingly deranged Saul attempted to kill David lest he usurp the throne (1 Sam 18:5-12; 1 Sam 19:9-10)! Three songs ostensibly from the hand of David appear in 2 Samuel: the first his lament at the death of Jonathan and Saul (2 Sam 1:17-27), then an adaptation of Psalm 18 (2 Sam 22), and finally a song before his death (2 Sam 23:2-7) that names him “the sweet psalmist of Israel.”

Later biblical materials build on this aspect of David’s legacy. Chronicles portrays David as setting up all of the details of the Temple’s worship even though the structure wouldn’t be built until the reign of his son Solomon. Even later still, the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus honors his musical achievements as much as his military ones saying,

In all that [David] did he gave thanks to the Holy One, the Most High, proclaiming his glory; he sang praise with all his heart, and he loved his Maker. He placed singers before the altar, to make sweet melody with their voices. He gave beauty to the festivals, and arranged their times throughout the year, while they praised God’s holy name, and the sanctuary resounded from early morning. (Ecclus 47:8-10)

A more profound reason why the Psalms are connected with David is due to the fullness of the picture that we get of him in the Samuel-Kings material. While the pages of Scripture are filled with memorable people, few are drawn with great emotional depth. Two characters of the Old Testament stand out as fleshed-out emotional beings: Job and David. The view we get of Job is one-sided, though. Due to the purpose of the book, we see Job in various stages of lament and despair. In David, however, we see a man at full-stretch: the passionate lover, the exuberant warrior, the reverent monarch, the penitential father. We see him at his best and worst, in his highs and in his lows; he experiences the complete emotional range that the Psalter explores. In him we can make this anonymous collection personal and individual. We can see how events in his life might have prompted the cries of despair or the calls of joy, and find the parallels in our own.

A final reason why the early and medieval Church emphasized so strongly the Davidic authorship of the psalms is because they saw the psalms as deeply prophetic. They understood David to be uttering divinely inspired praises. But, even more particularly, they saw him engaging in an act of divinely-facilitated clairaudience reaching across the centuries: he was writing in the tenth century B.C. what his descendant Jesus—Son of David—would be feeling in the first century AD. In insisting upon the Davidic authorship of the Psalms, the Church could assert that they gave a unique perspective into the interior life of Jesus. The gospels tell of his deeds and allude to how he felt; having established the genetic connection, the psalms lay bare his own prayers and tribulations.

As modern people, it’s harder for us to embrace this perspective whole-heartedly than it was for our ancestors. Nevertheless, the Christological reading of the psalms has an important place in our spirituality. Granted—it does require some rather creative interpretive gymnastics to explain how some psalms show the psychology of Jesus! However, despite these problematic bits, the Church is saying something profound in attributing the emotional range and depth of the psalms to Jesus. It is another way to explore and ponder the full humanity of Jesus. Only a Jesus who feels deeply, passionately, fully, is a completely human (while completely divine) Redeemer. Indeed, this perspective brings us full circle to the paradox of revelation with which we began—how are human prayers to God part of God’s self-revelation to us? Seeing them in and through Jesus’ own self-communication to the Father clarifies how the revelation of the depths of our own humanity connects to divine self-revelation.

Having looked, now, at the modern idea of corporate anonymous authorship alongside the early and medieval understanding of Davidic authorship, I’d like to wrap up by adding in a body of scriptural material that can serve as a mediating, uniting, term between the two. The psalms in the prayer book are lacking one contextualizing piece that you’ll find when you look up the psalms in a Bible: the superscriptions. These are brief headers that appear at the start of most of the psalms—only 24 lack them in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. These headers aren’t original to the psalms but have been added in the process of compiling and editing them together. Therefore, they likely tell us less about history and more about interpretation. Often, these superscriptions give instructions to the choirmaster or give a tune name. (The tunes themselves have been long since forgotten.) Some superscriptions, however, attribute the psalm to either individuals or groups.

Predictably, 73 of the psalms are attributed directly to David, 14 of which are connected with specific incidents in his life. However, several other names also appear: one is attributed to Moses, two to Solomon, three to Jeduthun (this one’s unclear—this could be a person’s name…or an instrument), then groups identified in Kings and Chronicles with Temple Levites, eleven to Asaph, and twelve to the Sons of Korah of whom Heman and Ethan get explicit shout-outs.

Religious traditions hate a vacuum, though—so in the Septuagint, the translation of the Old Testament into Greek that occurred in Alexandria sometime around the second century B.C., superscriptions were added onto twenty-two of the psalms lacking them, leaving only Psalms 1 and 2 without them. Significantly, Psalms 146 to 148 are attributed to Haggai and Zechariah, writers and leaders of the post-exilic period!

In essence, therefore, the interpretative tradition reflected in the superscriptions enable us to have it both ways… On one hand, they explicitly refer to a wide range of people all of whom were involved in the creation, editing, and compiling of the Psalter. They give enough names to confirm our sense of the Psalms as a communal document in process over a long period of time. Also, they forestall simplistic attempts to pigeonhole the psalms as strictly Davidic. On the other hand, they solidly connect the psalms to a significant, emblematic figure of history—David—who stands forth not only as a heroic figure, an anointed leader, and a cultic pioneer, but also as a thoroughly flawed human being who, nevertheless, was a “man after God’s own heart.”

Basic Disciplines for Liturgical Worship, Part III

Ok, back from vacation, on with the project…
——————-

Attentiveness

If intentionality is about keeping ourselves focused on the big picture, then attentiveness is the related-but-different discipline of keeping our eye on the little picture. It’s the discipline of remaining in the present and being attentive to what we’re doing, the words we’re hearing, the words we’re saying, the rite which we’re experiencing. Remaining in the moment.

Most of us like to think we’re pretty good at this already. Alas, it only takes a brief experiment to show us how wrong we are… Go ahead—try to make the exercise of remaining in the present as simple as you can. Cut out all distractions and attempt to sit in silence for as little as five minutes; remain attentive and present by counting your breaths up to ten and starting over again. If you’re anything like me, it won’t take too long before your mind is flitting all over the place, you realize that you stopped counting a while back—or you discover that while you finished planning your grocery list you’ve counted up to 25! This phenomenon is aptly described by Zen teachers as “monkey mind.” You discover that however disciplined you thought your thoughts were, they dash around like a hyper little primate at the drop of a hat.

Here’s the thing—this isn’t a function of trying to sit in silence and count breaths: this is what it does all the time! The counting of breaths just helps us to notice it more clearly. Hence the need for attentiveness. And, as much as I’d like to be able to blame it on mobile devices, or the internet, or cable TV, Christian spiritual writers have been wrestling with it since at least the 4th century and likely earlier. So, how do we cage the little monkey for as long as we need to pray, to sing, to join in the worship of God?

This one requires a multi-pronged approach. The first and most basic is to recognize that the situation exists in the first place. When you’re in a service and the realization hits you that your mind has wandered, gently but firmly direct it back. Don’t beat yourself up about it—as your mind will only use that an excuse to go wandering off again about what a failure you are! As frequently as you find yourself wandering, just direct yourself back.

One of the few bodily gestures inserted into English canon law also provides an opportunity for attentiveness. In 1604, canon 18 enjoined that everyone present should make “due and lowly reverence” at the name of Jesus—that is, bow the head. At the parish where I learned this custom, it was explained as an honoring of the Incarnation. As a result, the head was bowed whenever the name “Jesus,” “Mary,” or the saint of the day were named as each reminded us of God’s incarnational presence in the world. I find that this sort of brief physical response helps me to pay better attention—to listen harder and can help me stay focused more clearly on the task at hand.

When praying alone from a book or saying the Daily Office by yourself, another tactic for retaining attentiveness is to engage as many senses as possible. Reading silently gives your mind ample opportunities for wandering. The act of reading aloud greatly improves the experience: you get the lips moving, and you hear the sound of your own words in additional to the passing of the mind over the letters. Adding in further physical gestures—like bowing or crossing yourself or kneeling—may help.

A 14th century devotional for English nuns recommends that attentiveness is much improved when you remember yourself to be in the presence of Jesus and picture him close by you. If you hold in mind the sense that you are speaking your words of praise directly to him, the feeling of being in conversation can help keep you more attentive.

The same devotional also makes a broad statement, noting that inattention in saying the Office is related to inattentive habits outside of the Office as well. I think I’d rather say it the other way: habits of discipline outside of worship help us be more disciplined with in it. As far as habits of discipline go, there’s none better than a daily bout of breath meditation as mentioned above. Simply sitting in silence for ten to twenty minutes, counting your breaths to ten, then starting over again, is a very useful tool for learning your mind more deeply, getting a handle on your inner life, and gradually soothing the hyper little primate that seems to live there.

I have heard some people express concerns over such a practice because it is “Buddhist” rather than being properly “Christian.” To my mind that’s as silly as a wrestler saying that he couldn’t do push-ups because they’re a “football” exercise. Just as push-ups are a universal fitness exercise found all over, breath meditation in various forms, under various names, and taught in various ways is a virtually universal tool for spiritual fitness. While it may be best known in modern America as a Zen practice, it’s been part of Christian spiritual practice at least since the time of the 4th century Desert Fathers and Mothers—if not before. (We’ll talk more about this when we discuss the Office and, in particular, our practices of praying the psalms.) Breath meditation is also an excellent foundational discipline if you choose to explore the tradition of contemplative prayer.

At the end of the day, attentiveness touches deep chords around the practices of an intentional, incarnational life. The principal of incarnation takes seriously the reality of God, the ongoing presence of Christ, the movement of the Holy Spirit bound up within our normal, daily, earthly life—the “full homely divinity” rightly celebrated in our Anglican tradition. If we’re not able to be fully present in the present of each moment, then these daily incarnations, these moments of God’s self-revelation, will slip past us, unnoticed as our minds flit from past to present to imaginary worlds of our own making.

Memorization

While I’m tempted to file this discipline as a subset of “attentiveness,” it’s important enough to earn its own section. We’re more attentive in corporate worship when we can follow along, and—while we are a people of the book—that doesn’t always mean we have to be stuck in the book! One of the glories of worship conducted in the tradition of the prayer book is that so much of it repeats, both daily and weekly. As a result, over time, it will become ingrained in your memory whether you want it to or not.

When my elder daughter was quite small—maybe 4 or so—I was concerned about her lack of attention during church; she would frequently be coloring when I wanted her to be paying attention (but, since she was at least being quiet I didn’t make a fuss…). Then, one day, I noticed a strange sight: of her own volition she went into our parlor, lined up her stuffed animals in front of a small organ bench topped with a cross she’d swiped from somewhere, and began “doing church” complete with most of Eucharistic Prayer A! I learned two very important things from this—first, that attentiveness may come in a variety of forms (especially from the young); second, that memorization occurs naturally with the prayer book rite.

It’s easier to be attentive to words that are already a part of us. It’s easier to stay focused on prayers we already know when praying alone. It’s easier to stay focused on the words the priest is praying if we’re praying them silently along with her. Memorization can happen by osmosis—indeed, it’s easiest if it happens that way—but the passive acquisition of the liturgy is only enhanced when we set out to actively acquire it as well.
As in acting, make sure you know your own lines first… Memorize the congregational parts of the Eucharist. Make sure you know the fundamentals: the basic responses, the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Creed, the Confession, the Post-Communion prayers. Then, the central canticles of the Office: the Song of Zechariah, the Song of Mary, the Song of Simeon. Other pieces will suggest themselves to you from there.

We’ll talk about this later, but the collects of the prayer book represent a great distillation of our tradition. And when I say tradition, I mean that our prayer book includes collects from the time of the Fathers down to the present with many of the Sunday collects have their origins in the 6th or 7th centuries. Taking the time each week to commit the collect to memory will place you in living conversation with these spiritual and theological gems.

I’ve found that the more I memorize (or the more that memorization happens to me) the more I understand the inter-relation of our liturgical language. For instance, I remember the first time I realized that the words “…walking in holiness and righteousness…”in the General Thanksgiving at Morning and Evening Prayer come from the Song of Zechariah (“…holy and righteous in his sight…”). Then, a while later, reading an alternate history book set in post-Civil War America by a favorite (Jewish) sci-fi author, I was astounded to see a speech put in the mouth of a character that concluded with a rhetorical flourish including the words “holiness and righteousness” and an image of “the dawn from on high breaking upon us…to lead our feet in the ways of peace.” The Author’s Note confirmed that the speech had been adapted from an actual address of the period, and—without having to look it up—I recognized from the rhythms and the rhetoric a 19th century prayer book Episcopalian connecting with his audience through words familiar to them all.

Indeed, this is how the real fruits of memorization occur. Little bits of the liturgies will float up unannounced. Maybe it’ll be sparked by a couple of words put in combination by a colleague or a snatch of song—they’ll strike a chord with something buried in your memory. Often, my most fruitful theological thoughts and connections will occur in this way as my subconscious mulls over something I’ve memorized without being quite aware of it. It’s moments like these that move us closer to the habitual recollection of God, that end to which liturgical spirituality directs.

Diligence

This one’s pretty obvious but it still needs to be said. We’re talking about habits, about formation, about the process of constructing an abiding Christian character through the discipline of regular worship leading towards the habitual recollection of God. It can’t happen without diligence. Acts don’t become habits if they’re not practiced on a regular, repeating basis. Will Durant’s summary of Aristotle’s ethics hits it right on the nose: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” The same is true of spirituality. It’s not an act (or, alternatively, if we don’t want it to be an act…), it must be a habit.

A devotion like the Daily Office does its work in a period measured by decades, not moments or occasions. We can’t pray it occasionally and expect it to bear the fruit that it’s able to. Likewise, treating the corporate worship of the church as a once a month, drop-in-if-the-mood-strikes affair fails to train us in the paths of holiness in the ways that weekly attendance does.

This is not to try and set up a New Legalism. There was a letter that started floating around Europe and the Middle East at some point in the sixth century, originally composed in Latin and eventually translated into virtually every medieval local language of which we have record. It was allegedly written by Christ himself in heaven and dropped through the clouds into Jerusalem, and it is filled with dire warnings against anyone who didn’t go to church on Sundays and who did any sort of “secular” work. In countries where people did work, it threatened plagues, and famines, and widespread disasters. I’m happy to say that several councils and church leaders did denounce this crude attempt at social control—including St. Boniface, the 8th century English-born Apostle to the Germans who had stern words for those who circulated it—yet the mentality that it evoked and effects it wrought in law codes across Europe persist to the modern day. We don’t go to church on Sunday lest God blast us; rather it is both our duty and delight to worship together the God who formed us, who loves us, and who was willing to become incarnate and suffer bodily for our redemption and reconciliation.

At its most basic, the discipline of diligence is about priorities. To what degree are we willing to spend our most precious coin, that which we can neither earn nor hoard: our time? The way we choose our activities reveals our priorities above all else. Any relationship worth having must be nurtured with this precious commodity, and our relationship with God is no different.

As the father of two active children, I know how difficult it can be to carve out time. In our time-strapped pluralistic age, schedulers of sporting events and dance rehearsals think nothing of seizing the Sunday morning time slot. While creative use of the available options (like Saturday or Sunday evening services—right, clergy friends?) can help negotiate this treacherous turf, sometimes decisions have to be made. And on those mornings with no good alternatives when ballet wins (I’m looking at you, mandatory Nutcracker dress-rehearsal), do we have the persistence to substitute a family act of worship in lieu of the full-on corporate experience?

To tell the truth, I’m also sometimes envious of my priestly wife and clergy friends for whom praying the Daily Office is (or could be or should be) part of their paid work. As a layman, I can only imagine my boss’s response to a request for paid prayer time! Instead the Offices have to be fit into carefully carved out niches of time that occur between child care and house work and relationship maintenance and regular employment. I’ll freely admit that sometimes those carefully carved niches collapse; sometimes the time I think I have disappears. There are days when the set prayer just doesn’t happen. On those days, I try to at least glance over the psalms for the day, and if that doesn’t happen at least hit the memorized high-points of the Office, and if that doesn’t happen at least a quick prayer of apology. In the grand scheme of things, at least feeling guilty about missing the Office is itself an act of diligence!

On a more serious note, though, while holding up the importance of diligence, we also have to approach the spiritual life as a marathon, not a sprint. This is a life-long path we tread. There will be seasons of our lives where time is easier to find or harder to find. There will be periods where the blocks of time come more freely to our hands, and those when it will not. This, too, is part of the ebb and flow of incarnate life. Our goal should be to be as diligent as possible given the conditions within which we find ourselves.

On Antiphons

A breviary user from a non-Episcopal background sent me a nice note the other day asking about  the antiphons from the Office. She was asking about these texts:

Well can this man say: I sat not in the assembly of the mockers, nor rejoiced; I sat alone because of thy hand, for thou hast filled me with indignation.

I have put off the clothing of peace, and put upon me the sackcloth of my prayer; I will cry unto the Everlasting in my days

These are antiphons from the feast of St Benedict; she was struck by them and was curious about what they meant and how they functioned within the liturgy. Let’s begin with the second question first.

Psalm Antiphons

Psalm antiphons have been a standard part of the Office from the early medieval period. Antiphons are small snippets of text, usually a verse or so in length, usually taken from Scripture that are repeated before and after the psalm. (The invitatory antiphon is repeated at several points within the invitatory psalm, but that’s a special case.)

The purpose of the antiphon is to contextualize our hearing/reading of the psalm. The way that we hear the psalm will shift subtly based on the content of the antiphon. It will help draw out certain aspects, and bring certain elements or ideas within the psalms to the fore as they relate to the antiphon.

Antiphons are interpretative devices; they assist in the meaning-making process. However, they are “”underdetermined”which means that they do not impose a meaning on the text but rather only suggest a potential meaning. The relationship between the psalm and the antiphon is not inherently clear. Thus, the interpreter has to do the work to figure out how the antiphon and the psalm relate to one another.

The effect is that the antiphon + psalm combination offers spiritual riches for anyone who has said the Office from one month to fifty years. By not imposing a meaning and by offering a suggestive juxtaposition, each hearer is able to find a spiritual meaning appropriate to their own level of understanding, one that will grow over the years.

For instance, consider Psalm 51, one of the penitential psalms and the single most commonly used psalm in the medieval repertoire. (That’s the one that starts “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness; * in your great compassion blot out my offenses.”) It will read one way if the antiphon is “For I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.” It will read another if it is “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Both of these are taken from within the psalm itself. However, choosing one or the other will shift how we hear the text.

Classically, there were common antiphons and propers. For feasts, special antiphons relating to the feast would be appointed; for ordinary days antiphons from the psalm itself would be selected. With Cranmer’s decision to simplify the Office, the psalm antiphons were dropped from Anglican liturgies. The current American prayer book restores the option to use them:

Antiphons drawn from the Psalms themselves, or from the opening sentences given in the Offices, or from other passages of Scripture, may be used with the Psalms and biblical Canticles. The antiphons may be sung or said at the beginning and end of each Psalm or Canticle, or may be used as refrains after each verse or group of verses. (BCP, 935)

Since this legitimates the use of the traditional proper antiphons which were virtually all drawn directly from Scripture, I’ve put them back into the Office in the St Bede’s Breviary. (Because of the way psalms and antiphons were grouped in the traditional Roman Offices, there is not an antiphon for every psalm for the commons. As a result, I’ve made selections from the verses used by St Bede in his abbreviated psalter as a source for antiphons.)

Propers of Abbots

So–the material referenced above comes from the Proper of Abbots since St Benedict was, indeed, a monastic abbot and legislator.

The first antiphon, “Well can this man say: I sat not in the assembly of the mockers, nor rejoiced; I sat alone because of thy hand, for thou hast filled me with indignation,” is an adaptation of Jeremiah 15:17. In its original context, it refers to the prophet’s unhappiness with his nation and his rejection of their theological and political decisions in the face of the Babylonian crisis that would ultimately end in the double sack of Jerusalem and its destruction in 587 BC. Isolated as an antiphon and related to abbots, it speaks to the monastic’s choice to isolate himself from society and to choose a life oriented to something other than the idols of his contemporary society.

The second antiphon, “I have put off the clothing of peace, and put upon me the sackcloth of my prayer; I will cry unto the Everlasting in my days,” is a direct citation of Baruch 4:20. In this passage from the apocrypha—in a book attributed to Baruch, the scribe of Jeremiah—it describes an act of penance in reparation for the nation turning away from Torah. As a monastic antiphon, it foregrounds dedication to a life of prayer.

Then, as these two antiphons are brought together in juxtaposition and one seems to lead into another, it does indeed create a potential meaning of a life that rejects the injustice of the wider society and the dedication to a life of prayer as a remedy against it. And, indeed, when you take a look at the original contexts of these two biblical passages, this meaning seems entirely consonant with them. Furthermore, as the monthly psalms have fallen, the first antiphon draws out the contrast drawn between the wicked habits of the “children of men” and the righteousness of God described in Psalm 57; the second leads directly into the question: “ARE your minds set upon righteousness, O ye congregation? * and do ye judge the thing that is right, O ye sons of men?” that kicks off Psalm 58.

So—quick recap—the antiphons are Scripture snippets that provide an interpretive context for the psalms that help us discover new or deeper meanings within them by highlighting certain themes.

On Liturgical History, Meaning, and Function

Again—just a quick thought, but one that I’ve been rolling around for a while in relation to my Prayer Book Spirituality project.

Liturgists, clergy, and those who teach the faith need to be careful when they make claims about the meaning and function of parts of our liturgy based on history.

The reason why things were put in long ago are not necessarily the reasons why they are useful and valuable now. The function that a certain liturgical element had may no longer be the same based on what else has shifted around it.

Liturgies are not just texts—they are always and should be approached fundamentally as enacted practices. However, we do encounter them (particularly historical liturgies) preeminently as texts and we apply principles of textual interpretation to them as we read them and make sense of them.

I’m going to caricature a little bit now… I see some people using historical criticism as a base reading paradigm. As in biblical  scholarship, this perspective believes that identifying when an element came in, where it came from, and why it was added is determinative for what that element means. I wouldn’t agree. I think the history is important to know, but that it operates on the role of being a supplementary fact that may or may not have any real impact on the use and function of an element now.

I prefer to take a reader-response approach as a primary tool among others in my interpretive toolkit. The question I ask, then, is “How have and how do people encounter what’s there largely apart from the original intentions of the authors, editors, and compilers?” This is one of the reasons that I love looking at the late medieval devotional guides for the Mass: they show the wide diversity of actual concrete readings of the liturgy operating from a radical ignorance of liturgical history and development. These texts discover, locate, and/or impose meaning on the liturgy in a variety of ways. Each of these teach us about how meaning can be found in the liturgy. Each of these gives us options to weigh when we start considering how meaning should be found in the liturgy. Some provide very interesting insights worth being recovered. Others—really deserve to be forgotten. But in the act of discovering and winnowing, I think we learn a lot about the process as a whole.

Quick Note on the Creed

This will be brief as I’m seriously crunched for time this week…

If you don’t at least look at the Liturgy blog of Fr. Bosco Peters, you’re missing out on a thoughtful voice grounded in an ecumenical appreciation of our ways coming from the New Zealand perspective. I find him to be a great representative of the best of the Vatican II spirit and tradition in ecumenical liturgy.

His latest post on the Creed, though, I find just plain wrong. He argues for dropping the Nicene Creed in the Eucharist because it serves functionally as a doublet for the beginning of the Eucharistic Prayer. That is, if I’m reading him right, he’s arguing that both the Creed and the beginning of any decent Eucharistic Prayer are both about the mighty acts of God and therefore the Creed can be considered extraneous. Furthermore, he suggests that the Creed began being used in the liturgy when the Eucharistic Prayer went silent, and that since we are back to a clearly-heard Canon, the utility of the Creed has outlived its purpose.

I disagree. There is some support for the notion of the Creed as a rehearsal of the acts of God if you look at the missionary preaching of the early medieval period. That is, Augustine’s On the Catechizing of the Uninitiated takes the creed as a basic framework for the Christian proclamation. Following Augustine, Martin of Braga (+580), Pirmin (+753), and my buddy Ælfric all use the creedal frame for their communication of the basics of the Faith. But that’s not to say that rehearsal of the acts of God is its only or even primary function. Rather, its primary function was—and remains—to lay down the fundamental boundaries of interpretation within which the Church reads the Scriptures.

As I see it, the Creed was added into the Mass during the Carolingian period because there were a lot of fundamentally unformed Christians. Adding the Creed was a way to put the framework of the Faith and the basic interpretive rubrics in front of as many people as possible.

As I look across the Church, we’re far more in an 8th or 10th century situation than a 3rd or 4th when it comes to formation. That is, there are an awful lot of Christians—and people period—who do not grasp the basics of the Faith. (Even worse are those both inside and outside the Church who think they know it but are woefully lacking…)

We need the Creed.

Furthermore, as we can plainly see, repetition of the Creed alone is not sufficient; it has to be explained and understood. But at least if it’s heard regularly, it provides catechists with a starting point!

On the SCLM Meeting

The Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music (SCLM) meeting is over now I’m home, and am beginning to be at the point to write about it. I find these meetings tiring, exciting, invigorating, and depressing—all at the same time… Everybody on the commission feels deeply about the importance of good liturgy and good music. We just frequently have differing opinions about what those are and how we go about nurturing them in the church.

The discussion of my proposal on HWHM occurred on Monday morning. There were some clear agreements around the table—most people didn’t like the word “almanac” finding it too old-fashioned. That didn’t bother me, I certainly wasn’t wedded to it. At a deeper level, though, most of the discussion was about theology even if the theology wasn’t overtly discussed or referenced. One person said that the proposal simply didn’t make sense; others saw it as an attempt to completely dismantle what had been accomplished in HWHM. I didn’t see it that way at all. What did become clear was that we had several different—some irreconcilable—understandings of sanctity and holiness. And, in arriving at that point, I think we accurately mirror one of the confusions in our church and one of the reasons why HWHM has been such a difficult body of work to complete satisfactorily.

I believe we did reach an agreement that will move the discussion forward in a new direction. In my previous post I said that I hoped to have certainty and specifics by this point; I don’t. We do have the basics of an agreement. However, there are a number of details to decide if it is to be workable and the last set was worked out in subcommittee work after the close of the meeting and has not yet been agreed to by the whole Standing Commission. Because this will represent a rather radical change, we have agreed not to discuss it until we have agreed on the principles and the main points lest an incomplete telling of an incomplete solution be misunderstood and blown out of proportion.

Trust me—it’s frustrating not being able to say more. However, it’s for the good of the work as a whole. I will, of course, say more when I can.

An Incomplete Update

I’m here in Milwaukee for the SCLM meeting, and we’ve just concluded the first day of our deliberations.

The main topic for the morning was my proposal on Holy Women, Holy Men. It was not accepted as drafted. However, we have come to a compromise that I think is workable; further meetings over the next couple of days will hash out some aspects of the compromise that are currently up in the air. I’d rather not comment on the nature of the compromise yet while so much remains provisional. Rather, I will have much more certainty and specifics on Wednesday and will post on it then.