The Customary for Evening Prayer has been completed; you can find it on this page: Customary: Evening Prayer
It will help you navigate between the two Suffrages, the choices of Collects, handling additional prayers and devotions, even the closing prayers and sentences.
The Great Litany is the oldest piece of liturgy in the English language; it was the first “worship service” that Cranmer assembled, a few years before the first Prayer Book was promulgated. It has been changed a little bit over the centuries, but on the whole is probably the “most original” piece of Reformation Anglican liturgy in our (or any) Prayer Book.
It’s also supposed to be very simple: start at the beginning and finish at the end, but in the 2019 Prayer Book (similar to what you see in the 1979 Book) it has three different endings! What gives? Welcome to Weird Rubric Wednesday.
Ending #1
The earliest rubrical ending is on page 96. When the Litany is sung or said immediately before the Eucharist, the Litany concludes here [between the Kyrie and the Lord’s Prayer] and the Eucharist begins with the Salutation and the Collect of the Day. This is a modern option inherited from the 1979 Prayer Book. The standard pattern set out in the English Prayer Books was that the Litany followed Morning Prayer, but the American Prayer Book tradition de-coupled the Litany from its usual standard times, and permitted it to be tacked on the end of both Morning and Evening Prayer and the beginning of the Communion service. What the 1979 and 2019 Prayer Books have done is simply chop off the end of the Litany and the beginning of the Communion service so they run into one another more smoothly and briefly.
Ending #2
The second natural place to stop is on page 97; this seems to be the default expected use of the Litany in the 2019 Book. One who is used to the 1662 Prayer Book Litany may be surprised here: why has the traditional ending been chopped off? This goes back at least to the 1928 Prayer Book (or maybe earlier; I haven’t checked), where a rubric on its 58th page notes that the majority of the last two pages of the Litany may be omitted. This last section has been given a section heading in modern prayer books: “The Supplication.”
Ending #3
The longest form of the Litany includes The Supplication, skipping the top half of page 97 and concluding on page 98.
That’s weird. How should I choose?
Well, it depends upon the situation. If you’re planning the Sunday morning worship service and you want to include the Great Litany, the easiest way to start your congregation out with it is to attach it to the service they’re most familiar with: so either as a special extended ending for Morning Prayer or a special prefix for the Communion service. The rubric on page 97 also states that the Supplication portion is especially appropriate in times of war, or of great anxiety, or of disaster. So, like, right now. We’re in the midst of a pandemic, race riots and protests are rocking the country, millions are unemployed or recovering from unemployment, and to top it all off it’s an election year. Pray the darn Supplication! We need it.
O Lord, arise and help us; And deliver us for your Name’s sake.
The single most time-consuming part of the Daily Office is the reading of the two lessons of Scripture. This indicates to the worshiper that this is a high point in the liturgy. Furthermore, where the majority of the liturgy is relatively static from day to day, the content of the lessons is appointed by a Daily Office Lectionary such that every morning and evening throughout the year has its own unique set of lessons. This suggests that the public reading of Scripture is even the highest point in the Office liturgy.
The tradition, with very few exceptions in modern Prayer Books, is that the first lesson is from the Old Testament and the second is from the New. This allows for multiple readings of the New Testament in a year (originally three, now two) and one read-through of the Old Testament in the year. Several chapters from several books have been omitted from the Daily Office Lectionary in every Prayer Book, most notably Leviticus, Numbers, and Ezekiel. Further examination on the lectionary itself will have to be provided later; here it should suffice to note that the basic pattern of Old & New Testament readings each day provides both a deep familiarity with the contents of the New Testament and a cursory-but-constant familiarity with the Old Testament.
Because the Daily Office Lectionary is designed to read through the Bible in continuous readings, there should be no attempt to harmonize the two lessons on any given day; they are independent of one another, and only overlap in theme or content on a very few holy days in the year.
Hello hello everyone, another Thursday means another update to the Customary is up! The first half of the Evening Prayer liturgy is covered, now. You can check that out here: Customary: Evening Prayer
So you know what to expect, what these Customary pages are doing, basically, is walking through each section, header by header, in the worship service, and giving direction for when and how its rubrics and options may be implemented. For example, there are three Opening Sentences provided at the start of the liturgy, and an appendix with many more. How do you choose between all these sentences? This Customary can guide your choices, with a little bit of insight into why these patterns are being made.
Yes, many of these points are quite fine points of detail. And taken individually they are quite subtle and probably not easily realized what they’re doing. However, taken as a whole system, the aim of a Customary like this one to order the use of the Prayer Book by arranging the “small things” to echo a bigger picture – a life of worship rooted in Prayer Book tradition, general Western liturgical tradition, and sensible and intentional discipleship and spiritual formation.
The Customary has been updated, now with suggestions for the Psalms, Lessons, and Collects at Midday Prayer. You can read the whole thing here:
https://saint-aelfric-customary.org/customary-midday-prayer/
The first and foremost distinction of the role of the Psalms, not only in the Daily Office, nor even in the Prayer Book generally, but in the entire history of Christian worship, is that the Psalms are to be sung or prayed. They are distinct from the rest of the Bible in this regard; they are not provided for in the lectionaries; the Psalms are prayers, not lessons. Indeed, just like the rest of the Scriptures the Psalms are useful for edification and instruction, but the manner in which they do so is not through proclamatory reading but through prayer. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously put it, the Psalms are the Prayer Book of the Bible. They are, therefore, naturally, the heart of the Prayer Book. Those who are new to the liturgical tradition often find this one of the most fundamental shifts in their understanding both of the Psalms and of worship.
The Prayer Book pattern of praying the Psalms set out by Archbishop Cranmer since 1549 is a methodical advance, cover to cover, through all 150 Psalms in thirty days. They are divided about as evenly as possible into Morning and Evening groupings for each of those thirty days, though every Psalm except the inordinately long 119th is kept intact. Thus the monthly sequential praying of the Psalms mirrors the annual sequential reading of the Bible, in the course of the Lessons that follow.
Just as different readings of Scripture teach the hearer different things at different times, so too do the various Psalms lead the worshiper through different tones and moods and subjects – and all this regardless of the individual’s condition or circumstance. This is one of the greatest roles of liturgy, calling individuals out of themselves and into a common worship and a common prayer. And if only one portion of the Daily Office could be considered absolutely essential, it would be the praying of the Psalms. From these 150, and the Lord’s Prayer, all Christian worship is extrapolated.
Our Prayer Book offers a sixty-day Psalter as an alternative to the Cranmerian pattern. This is not new; the 1979 Prayer Book’s daily lectionary provides a roughly-seven-week pattern of Psalmody (though omitting a few), and the 1928 Prayer Book’s daily lectionary throughout the year offers highlights of the Psalter ranging from four to seven weeks in length. These alternatives are best offered for the young and the beginner to praying the Psalms.
The Saint Aelfric Customary for the Daily Office of Morning Prayer has been completed. You can read it all here: https://saint-aelfric-customary.org/customary-morning-prayer/
The idea behind this is provide guidance regarding when and how to use the various options in the Prayer Book in order to make reasonable use of the scope of resources in the 2019 Prayer Book while yet retaining a stable tether to the great well of Anglican tradition before all these modern forms came to the fore.
I’m posting this a week later than I probably should have… maybe that was a mistake in my pre-planning. Anyway, back on June 21st we read Ezekiel 47 at Evening Prayer, and then didn’t come back for its final chapter, 48. Before that we’d skipped chapters 44-46, and 41-42, which I briefly explained and summarized in a video that Friday. But there’s more: chapters 19-32 were skipped; that’s about 30% of the book gone right there. Chapters 38 & 39 also were omitted. Altogether, approximately 45% of Ezekiel is not in our daily lectionary. The evangelical reader is probably annoyed right now. “What gives?”
If historical precedent is any consolation….
So with us reading 55% of the book, that’s a massive increase compared to every Prayer Book before ours.
But of course, someone who is not as optimistic about the wisdom of the Church and the value of the Prayer Book is still going to argue: what’s “wrong” with so much of Ezekiel?
I’m not going to analyze, explain, and defend the mentality of each prayer book in our history, other than to say that Ezekiel is one of the least-accessible Prophets to read fruitfully without a great deal of study, and so when it comes to the public daily reading in the churches it is more profitable to spend time on other portions of Scripture that are more readily understandable and clear to the people in the pews. That said, let’s take a quick look at what the 2019 Prayer Book’s daily lectionary omits.
Chapters 19-32 are a series of oracles, prophecies of condemnation and judgment, against Jerusalem, Israel & Judah, Ammon, Moab, Edom, Philistia, Tyre, Sidon, and Egypt. They vary in style and tone, and there are few “famous” images among these chapters, such as the Ohola & Oholiba parable for the unfaithfulness of Israel & Judah. These aren’t “unimportant” chapters, as such, but they are “redundant” with a fair bit of the Prophetic Corpus of the Old Testament.
Chapters 38-39 form the prophecy against the mysterious Gog and his land, Magog. This has been interpreted in many different ways, pointing to the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, and even to a yet-future world power in the End Times. When it comes down to it, this is not mere prophecy, but apocalyptic literature, which comes with its own special interpretive challenges. I suppose that the restoration of the book of Revelation into the daily lectionary has mitigated the need to to rely on its even-more-puzzling Old Testament forebear.
Chapters 41-42 and 44-46 are basically a series of pictures in prose form. Here we find the lengthy description of the New Temple, which I talked about in the video post linked at the beginning of this article. Chapter 40, in the lectionary, is sufficient for giving the reader the “establishing shot”, to use a TV/movie term, and chapter 43 describes an event or scene there. The rest, omitted, do provide additional prophetic insights of course (they are scripture), but the majority of that material is a slow slog through a lot of measurements and repetitive formulae.
Chapter 48, similarly, is an extension of the information in chapter 47; together they describe a map of new tribal allotments. You can read more about that here if you like. For the Christian, the important lesson is in the promise of God that he will bless his faithful people; the specific land boundaries are simply images that prefigure the perfection of the New Heaven & New Earth, so grinding through all the geographic descriptions is not strictly necessary for getting the point across.
That said, if you are a “completionist” when it comes to reading the Scriptures, you can always pick up this Customary’s Supplementary Midday Prayer lectionary to fill you in on the missed chapters of Ezekiel, scattered throughout the summer.
In the 2019 Prayer Book we’ve got a nice collection of ten Supplemental Canticles to spice up the Daily Office a bit. I’ve written about them before, in general, and I’ve made recommendations as to when one might most appropriate use each of them. You can find that article here.
Today let’s look at Canticle 8: Ecce, Deus, on page 85, which this Customary appoints for regular weekdays through Trinitytide. This short canticle is taken from Isaiah 12:2-6, but if you compare the text of this Canticle to, say, the ESV translation of the Bible, you’ll find that the phraseology is quite different indeed. Most of the differences are verb tenses (something that is honestly kind of squirrelly in Hebrew anyway) and prepositions (which also are pretty loose in Hebrew), which is already enough to give a different “feel” to a text without actually substantially changing the meaning.
As it turns out, the wording used in the Prayer Book is the same as that found in the 1979 Book, where Ecce Deus is Canticle 9 on page 86, named “The First Song of Isaiah.” So this translation was done by the Rev. Dr. Charles Guilbert, who was heavily involved in the crafting of the 1979 Book and in particular its Psalter.
The text of the Canticle itself is actually two psalms strung together. Isaiah 12:1-2 and 4-6 are brief songs of praise to God for his deliverance, connected by verse 3. The first part is more directed toward God, speaking of and to him; the second has more of a human audience in mind, calling upon others to give God praise and thanks also. Both in formal Bible translations and our liturgical translation, this pattern of praise followed by invitation can be discerned.
The rubric on page 85 indicate that it is appropriate for any time, noting that its themes and content have no specific connotation toward Easter or Advent or any other particular occasion – it is a Canticle for all seasons! So this is as good a time as any to enjoy Ecce Deus, if you ask me.
One of the “Documentary Foundations”, on page 769 in the 2019 Prayer Book, is The Athanasian Creed. It is offered there without comment, much like it is in the back of the 1979 Prayer Book, except this time in a normal font size so you don’t have to be especially young and spry in order to read it.
There is, however, a rubric in our Prayer Book that point to it. On page 139, among the Additional Directions Concerning Holy Communion, we are told that the Athanasian Creed may be used in place of the Nicene Creed on Trinity Sunday and other occasions as appropriate. This is probably the most widespread use of that Creed today.
In the classical Prayer Book tradition, however, it received a bit more use. In the 1662 Prayer Book, for example, we find this rubric:
Upon these Feasts, Christmas-day, the Epiphany, St. Matthias, Easter-day, Ascension-day, Whitsunday, St. John Baptist, St. James, St. Bartholomew, St. Matthew, St. Simon and St.
Jude, St. Andrew, and upon Trinity-sunday, shall be sung or said at Morning Prayer, instead of the Apostles Creed, this Confession of our Christian Faith, commonly called the Creed of St. Athanasius, by the Minister and people standing.
That’s 13 times a year this Creed was ordered to be said. If you’re curious about why those feasts were selected, and not others, the best I can offer is that the principle feasts of the year are covered (Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday), and beyond that one feast per month is chosen, such that this Creed would be heard about once a month, usually near the end:
Anyway, let’s look at the Creed itself. It’s called Of Athanasius because he is the traditionally-acclaimed author, though historical scholarship has indicated that it’s most likely a product of his school of thought, or his tradition so to speak, rather than of him himself. Thus some like to refer to it by its first line in Latin: Quicunque vult. But the appellation of Athanasius is appropriate nonetheless, as this does express his theology quite clearly.
In terms of contents, this Creed is by far the best and most robust resource in the Church’s arsenal when it comes to teaching the doctrine of the Trinity. In the way it is formatted in our Prayer Book, most of page 769 deals with the Trinity, all of page 770 does, and the first “verse” of it on page 771 concludes the section on the Trinity. The rest of the Creed (page 771) proceeds in a fashion very similar to the Nicene Creed, outlining the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But even this uses more developed language to expound the two natures of Christ (in close union with the 3rd and 4th Ecumenical Councils, again indicating a post-Athanasius origin).
Let’s be honest, this Creed can be a bit of a tongue-twister, and its repetitive phrases can make it difficult to understand without familiarity. But if you read it slowly and carefully, its logic will be clear, as two things are being established very methodically: there are three Persons in the Trinity and there is one God in Unity.
Apart from its length, this Creed has other features that have contributed to its decline in popularity over the past 200 years: its vehement insistence on orthodoxy for salvation. Note how it begins:
Whoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith.
Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
It ends with the same tone:
This is the Catholic Faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.
The good news here is that it never says “understand”, only “hold” or “keep” or “believe”. So if you or your child or your uneducated Christian friend don’t really understand what this Creed is saying, you or they are not damned. We keep the faith, we hold and believe the faith, however well we understand and grasp its particulars in our minds. The mystery of the Trinity is one of the greatest mysteries and paradoxes that can be found in the Scriptures, yet this Creed reminds us (and carefully explains) that no true Christian worships three Gods, or blends the Father, Son, and Spirit together into one person, neither do we blend the divinity and humanity of Jesus together into some sort of demigod half-breed. We hold to the intellectually-difficult yet simple truths that the one God exists in three persons, and that Jesus is both fully God and fully man.
So that, I hope, puts to rest any fears that the anathemas (condemnatory statements) may rile up in the heart of the reader.
If you and your church did not say the Athanasian Creed on Trinity Sunday this year (and let’s face it, very few of us even had the chance to!) consider taking up the tradition of the classical Prayer Books and saying it at Morning Prayer on John the Baptist’s birthday tomorrow! It’s not technically authorized in our Prayer Book, but to do so would be in accord with the spirit of the rubrics, if not the letter.
The Saint Aelfric Customary 