Category Archives: Daily Office

Breviaries and the BCP

Fr. Gregory has a quite thought-provoking post here on the different formation issues between the Anglican Breviary and the BCP. It’s one we’ve discussed at points here and a tension I also feel.

The issue is that the Daily Office Lectionary offers Scripture; the breviary offers concrete guidelines for interpreting the Scriptures—by patristic example. How, then, to do both?

I’m still of a mind that the best way to do it (in addition to a proper round of psalm and gospel antiphons which—classically—were themselves interpretive) is an expanded utilization of the Noon Office.

At Smokey Mary, the slot in the Noon Office is occupied by a reading from the Fathers; in the more expanded versions of the St Bede’s Breviary I’ve put in the daily portion from Benedict’s Rule. In practice this mirrors the post-Vatican II Office of Readings which is the retread of Matins, now removed from the middle of the night and stuck at a time where people who sleep can actually pray it.

I don’t know enough about the Office of Readings to know where to find the lectionary of patristic texts… Do any of you know?

Daily Office Text Note

While many of the modern lectionaries are fun to hate, it’s worth pointing out when they get something right.

Yesterday started Genesis in the Daily Office lectionary. We’ll continue in Genesis through much of Lent, and move into Exodus before jumping to Lamentations for Holy Week. This follows the old sequence of starting Genesis at Septuagesima and reading Genesis and Exodus through Lent.

For reflections on the monastic reading of Genesis and Exodus as read through the Responsaries, see here.

Of course, the detour through Proverbs during the later weeks past Epiphany is odd, but I suppose you have to fill it in from somewhere…

Programming Kalendars

Back when I first got serious about coding the Breviary—I guess it’s been a couple of years now—I talked to Fr. Chris about it and we discovered that we’d been doing some parallel development.

One of the first issues to tackle is how to figure out what “today” is liturgically. Both Fr. Chris and I approached it the same way. That is, we take “today’s” date as given to us either by the server or the local computer then a) run it through an algorithm to determine where you are in the temporal cycle, then b) compare it to a table to determine if there’s something sanctoral going on.

What I kept running up against was the problem of transference. There are certain circumstances when a feast must be moved from its original date. For instance, Major Feasts that fall in Holy Week and the Octave of Easter are transferred by order of occurrence into the Second Week of Easter (cf. BCP, p. 17). Too, Major Feasts that fall on Sundays outside of green seasons must be transferred; major feasts in green seasons may be transferred.

At one point, for the sake of moving forward, I threw up my hands and said enough… It seemed easier to simply create a table for the year and to work everything out ahead of time. This saved me the trouble of coding transference. What it created was:

  • more moving parts. Currently I have a kalendar code that must correspond to the same code in the collect table and the lectionary table. Some of the recent Scripture reading issues (like the one that occurred today…) was the result of a perfectly normal and legal kalendar code that didn’t synch up with the lectionary code (though it did with the collect code…).
  • setting aside a block of time at the right time to work out a year’s worth of dates. And ends of years tend to be busy times. I’m clear through the end of 2010, but if it goes further…?
  • A restriction to the dates that I have a coded table for. This is less an issue with the St Bede’s Breviary than some historical projects I have in mind. For instance—what if I wanted to know what liturgy was appointed for February 18th in 892? There’s no way I’m going to code tables for thousand year spans!!

As a result, I’m rethinking my decision. This won’t happen immediately—it may not happen for quite a while, actually—but I think the issue can be broken down more logically than I was considering before. So what would this look like?:

  • Get the date
  • Run the temporal algorithm and determine where we are in the year
  • Now–different pie (sets of kalendrical rules not pastries) have different rules for privileged octaves and when transferences happen. So, this is where each kalendar system will have to have its own algorithm. Within those, however, things may not be so bad. For instance for the ’79 BCP all I should have to do is add in a three step process:
    • Is today the Monday after Easter 2? If no, keep going, if yes, then see if we need St Joseph, the Annunciation,  St Mark, or SS Phillip & James.
    • Is today the Tuesday after Easter 2? If no, keep going, if yes, see if we need the Annunciation.
    • Is today a Monday not in a Green season? If no, keep going, if yes, see if yesterday was a major feast
  • Now check today in the Sanctoral cycle to see if anything needs to be celebrated.

I think there may be some real benefits to this approach—I’ll keep thinking about it…

An Antiphon for bls

So bls was asking for information on the antiphon “Hodie Christus Natus Est” used with the Magnificat on the Second Vespers of Christmas in the Roman liturgy as it appears in the Liber.

She was wondering about its antiquity. This piqued my interest, of course, so I thought I’d hop over to my favorite collection and check it out… Consulting the Winter volume of the Hartker Antiphonary (Cod. Sang. 390) I went to the folio for the Gospel Antiphon at Vespers and found the following:

As you’ll recall, scribes weren’t always picky about their line breaks… The “In Ev” in the upper right lets us know that the next line will be a piece used with the Gospel (Canticle); the red A in the left margin tells us that this line is an antiphon. Clearly this is not the antiphon we’re looking for, though.

Paging back, however, I ran across this:

Here we have the end of Lauds. The first line in this clip is the Gospel Canticle on the Benedictus which is the same as what’s in the Liber. That’s the end of Lauds proper—then we find our missing antiphon!

What we get are two antiphons here before we arrived at the antiphons used for the Little Hours during the day, the start of which is signaled by the “Ad Cursus” (For the Round of the Day) rubric at the bottom of the clip. These two antiphons are marked “Ad Crucem” which lead me to believe that it’s being used as part of the Common Commemoration to the Holy Cross. Typically these involve the use of an antiphon, a versicle and response and a concluding collect. This book tends to have them following Lauds and occasionally after Vespers. I’m not clear why there are two here, however…

Interestingly the Portiforium of St Wulstan from around the same time shares the Lauds antiphon but has a different Vespers antiphon (the “Lux orta” that the San Gall appoints for Prime, actually). The “Hodie Christus natus est” doesn’t appear in that book at all. Nor does it have antiphons for commemorations.

All of the English monastic breviaries studied at the Cursus Project use Hodie Christus natus est for the 2nd Vespers of Christmas with one fascinating exception. The Worcester Antiphoner uses the same 2nd Vespers Antiphon that we saw in the San Gall manuscript and the Hodie Christus natus est doesn’t appear until St Johns day where it is used as a Commemoration of the Nativity (Again, antiphon, versicle & response, then a collect—this time the one from Christmas).

The Sarum Breviary, following in the footsteps of the others uses the now standard Hodie Christus natus est.

So, that at least fills in a few points in regard to the history of this particular antiphon and its circulation in Northern Europe and England.

Scripture Trouble at the Breviary

Over Christmas we’ve been having some Scripture trouble at the breviary… The problems stem from one of the initial decisions I made about the project. Rather than selecting out all of the readings individually, I decided to install entire Bibles, then to install a parsing mechanism that would determine which passages to select. This gives the breviary a tremendous amount of flexibility, because it opens up the option of putting in new translations and new lectionaries without have to go and cut and paste a whole new edition.

Unfortunately, it also means working out how to deal with various complications in a lectionary with likes to leave out verses in the middle of a selection.

Too, the interactions between the kalendar codes, the lectionary codes, and the Bible tables is one of the reasons why I say the site is still in beta.

Today’s problem has been solved and I’m working on the lingering issues…

Random Daily Office Thoughts

Note: I’m not saying anything new here, I’m just putting some thoughts into conjunction with one another to stimulate my thinking on this topic…

The Daily Offices of the BCP are liturgical compositions in their own right. They contain their own internal logic and—500 years on—their own history.

These Offices are not the monastic Offices or the pre-conciliar ones.

And yet, the BCP Offices contain the elements and footprints of the earlier Offices. Those of us who have done the digging or have experience with the older Offices know what and where these are. Regular—even avid—users of the BCP who have not done these investigations usually do not know what and where they are because nothing in the book alerts them to it.

The Daily Offices of the BCP are liturgical compositions in their own right. They contain their own internal logic. Sometimes this logic is neutral towards the historical Office material and neither encourages or rejects its use. Other times, the logic of the current book is at odds with historical usage.

The most obvious example of what I’m talking about is the use and distribution of the canticles for Morning Prayer. The table on page 144 lays out the general principles according to the logic of the current Offices. I’d make these explicit as:

  1. Canticles follow Readings.
  2. Variety is to be preferred. Following the post-conciliar notion that a broader exposure to Scripture is better than a limited exposure, canticles have been added and selected to ensure a broader encounter with Scripture.
  3. The proper pattern is OT–>NT or NT–>Early Church. Thus the first Canticle is from one of the OT options (Canticles 8 through 14 in Rite II) and the second is from one of the NT options (Canticles 15 through 19). The main variation is when the Benedictus is used after the first reading and the Te Deum—a composition of the Early Church. The deviation from this rule is the Gloria in Excelsis (Canticle 20) which seems to be functioning like an NT canticle and has bona fide NT roots but is a composition of the Early Church…

Against these principles are the principles that come from the pre-conciliar Offices. The fundamental difficulty here is the very substantial amount of overlap: both forms (BCP and pre-concialr) have OT and NT canticles and there was use of quite a number of OT canticles. However, here are the principles that we know from the pre-Conciliar Offices:

  1. The Chapter (verse-length reading) at Lauds (and Vespers but we’re focusing on morning here…) is followed by a single NT Canticle.
  2. The daily OT canticles are found amongst the psalms in the Office of Lauds. So, these were used after the variable psalmody but before the eponymous “lauds” (Pss 148-150 treated as a single psalm). With the reforms of Pius X these doubled in number with the distinction between Lauds 1 and Lauds 2—more and less penitential forms.
  3. Monastic Uses substituted 3 OT Canticles as the psalmody in the 3rd Nocturns of Matins. Thus, the OT canticles continue to be associated structurally with psalms, not with readings. There’s a clear sense that OT and NT canticles function differently which is driven by theological principles.
  4. The NT canticle of Lauds, the Benedictus (Song of Zechariah), was invariable. No questions asked.
  5. The Te Deum was used at the end of Matins—sometimes. Generally on feasts and in festal seasons. On ferial days it was simply omitted—nothing took its place.

Upon looking at these differences it is abundantly clear that the two cannot be harmonized in a simple fashion. The pre-conciliar use of canticles does not fit with the current structure of the BCP Offices. Thus conscious adaptation is required. Furthermore, the complexities are such that there are several ways that adaptation could occur. If there are two readings, both of which require canticles and no psalms are being substituted with OT canticles than liturgical gyrations are in order—and we don’t all groove the same way.

At this juncture, there are two obvious paths:

  • Follow the apparent logic of the BCP Offices without reference to pre-conciliar models.
  • Make choices and adaptations to honor the legacy of the pre-concilar Offices within the structure of the BCP Offices.

I would suggest that these two options constitute the major differences between how current Episcopal communities practice the Daily Office (where and when it is still practiced in community…).

The first option here is entirely legitimate and honors the BCP as the duly authorized liturgy of the Episcopal Church. But I don’t like it. A willful amnesia toward our liturgical traditions and origins is hardly a move towards strengthening our proclamation of the Gospel in a changing world.

Choosing the second option gets very complicated. And not just liturgically.

The elephant in the room here is that there has never been a simple division between the BCP Offices and the pre-conciliar offices. Through the life of all of the Books of Common Prayer up to the present one there has always been a tension between current Episcopal/Anglican practice and current Roman Catholic practice. What I now have the luxury of calling “pre-conciliar Offices” were not simply historical and their use was not simply a preference for historical formulae; they impacted on and made statements about relationships between the two churches. How we prayed and how we chose to negotiate adaptations made statements about how we viewed our history and about how we related to the Church of Rome.

Within the life time of the American 1979 BCP, the pre-conciliar Offices have not had the same valence as before. They have far more of an historical signification because there are now post-conciliar Offices. That is, if one wants to negotiate the BCP to stay close to current Roman practice, following rules based on the pre-conciliar Offices no longer suffice. The post-conciliar Offices are structurally different and have different logics that are themselves adaptations of the pre-conciliar forms to a new model.

The bottom line is that how we place our canticles in Morning Prayer (or sort out any number of the other options) are theological decisions that may be driven be several different motivations including how we understand the theological principle of continuity and our understanding of ecumenism.

Furthermore, the theological valences of these choices are hidden to most Episcopalians. Most people neither know nor care nor know why they should care. And, at the root level, as long as they even know what the Daily Office is, I ought to be happy…

SBB: Handheld Devices

Ok—two thing on mobile devices:

  • The new design setup does not, I believe, function on mobile devices. However, I just made a modification to the style sheets that should (in theory) work. Someone who has one of these, please check it out and leave a comment. (M’s crackberry is with her in Philly…)
  • I have looked into what sort of development would need to be done for an iPhone app. Apparently, the development suite used for such things only runs on Macs—and I don’t have one. Too, the materials I read suggest that trying to develop for the iPhone without actually having one might…complicate…matters. Which makes sense. If, therefore, anyone with the skills, interest, and equipment would like to take a shot at this, be my guest.