Advice – Page 7 – The Saint Aelfric Customary

Posted on March 17, 2020January 13, 2020 by Fr. Brench

Learning the Daily Office – part 10 of 12

So you’ve heard about the Daily Office, specifically the Anglican tradition of daily prayer and scripture reading, and you want to enter into this beautiful and formative tradition? Great, grab a prayer book and go! Except, maybe someone already said that and you don’t know where to start… or worse, you did try it and it was just too much? The length of the Office was overwhelming and the contents too complicated to navigate when you’ve got no experience with liturgy. We understand, we’ve all been at that place before! Some just don’t remember it as well as others.

Diving into the full Prayer Book life of worship doesn’t work for everyone; sometimes you have to work your way up toward that discipline, adding one piece at a time as you grow comfortable with each feature and learn how to “do” them all. This post series is basically a twelve-step program to help you advance in the life of disciplined prayer from zero to super-Anglican. The pace is up to you – the goal of this sort of spiritual discipline is consistency, not “how much” you do.

Step One: Pray a Psalm followed by the Lord’s Prayer.
Step Two: Add a Scripture Reading
Step Three: Add more Psalms and Lessons
Step Four: Add the Apostles’ Creed
Step Five: Add Canticles
Step Six: Add the Confession
Step Seven: Add some Prayers
Step Eight: Add the Invitatory
Step Nine: Add the Collect of the Day

Step Ten: Add the Closing Prayers

The last thing to add to the Daily Office are the closing prayers at the end of the service. These are the same in both morning and evening: a General Thanksgiving, a Prayer of St. John Chrysostom, a quick dialogue, and a final “grace” or “blessing” (on pages 25-26 and 51-53).

Historically, most of these have been optional prayers to tack onto the end of the Daily Office, and most of them remain optional even in our new Prayer Book. And indeed it may make more sense to omit the Prayer of St. John Chrysostom when you’re praying the Office alone, since it makes reference to the gathering of people in prayer. Nevertheless, be sure to read it from time to time anyway, because even though you may be praying alone in the physical sense, you are indeed praying in spiritual unity with untold thousands of fellow Anglicans.

If you’re so inclined, the first of the three closing sentences (sometimes called “graces” or “blessings”) is an excellent opportunity to make the sign of the cross, at the three-fold name of God: Father (up), Son (down), and Holy Spirit (left, right).

Summary

You are now praying the entire Daily Office, by the book, without omission. If you’re doing this comfortably, you can (and probably should!) invite others to join you. Include your family, or invite some other church members to join in with you! Maybe even talk to your priest about doing this in the church itself. Historically, every parish church was supposed to provide the daily rounds of prayer in full, after all. Wouldn’t that be amazing if God’s people once again could be so moved to daily corporate prayer?

Posted on March 13, 2020March 13, 2020 by Fr. Brench · 1 Comment

Prayer Resources in the face of infectious disease

Earlier this week, Archbishop Beach released an excellent statement regarding the Church’s response to the COVID-19 scare that is encircling the globe. You can read that in full at this link, and I encourage you to do so if you haven’t already. I’d like to highlight one thing in particular that he said about prayer:

The Book of Common Prayer offers on page 269 a list of suggested Psalms on many helpful themes, including God’s sovereignty, providence and mercy, trust in God, and living faithfully in times of trouble. If reading from the Psalms is not a part of your daily prayers, try turning to one of these psalms each day to keep your heart focused on the Lord and his presence and care.

This is in reference to the 2019 Prayer Book. Page 269 is an index of Psalms pertinent to various topics. The ones he mentioned are:

God’s Sovereignty: 24, 93, 46, 47, 72, 89, 96, 97, 98, 99, 112, 146, 145
God’s Providence: 23, 121, 33, 34, 124, 89, 139, 145, 146, 147
God’s Mercy: 23, 100, 32, 130, 57, 61, 62, 63, 73, 77, 85, 86, 103, 118. 145
Trust in God: 27, 31, 57, 146, 62, 63, 71, 73, 77, 91, 118, 121, 124, 125, 123, 143
In Time of Trouble: 3, 11, 12, 13, 18, 20, 46, 30, 146, 40, 49, 57, 85, 62, 63, 80, 86, 90, 107, 118, 144

You’ll notice that these lists don’t put the Psalms in numerical order, but jump around a bit. And, by way of background, this “Selection of Psalms” resource is found, almost identical, in the 1928 Prayer Book (on page ix), so this indicates that the out-of-order listing is not a typo but a sign that they’re ordered by relevance rather than by number.

He also closed the statement with this prayer:

Almighty God, our strong tower of defense in time of trouble: We offer you praise and heartfelt thanks for our deliverance from the dangers which lately surrounded us and for your gracious gift of peace. We confess that your goodness alone has preserved us; and we ask you still to continue your mercies toward us, that we may always know and acknowledge you as our Savior and mighty Deliverer; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This prayer is #123 “For Deliverance from Peril” on page 683, and sets an example for us all: we ought to make use of the Occasional Prayers and Thanksgivings in this time of public anxiety and concern. Whether you are particularly fearful or particularly complacent, this is an excellent and important time for the Church to “be” the Church at prayer, and call upon God to halt the advance of this virus strain.

RESOURCES FOR PRIVATE DEVOTIONS

A few Psalms stand out from the several topics listed by our Archbishop.

On four lists: 146
On three lists: 57, 62, 63, 118, 145
On two lists: 23, 46, 73, 77, 85, 86, 89, 121, 124

During private prayers, make particular note and use of these prayers.

If and when any of these Psalms show up in the liturgy (I know at least Psalms 118 and 23 will appear during Eastertide, and 121 and 124 are in Midday Prayer) make particular note of them, to yourself and to others.

RESOURCES FOR THE DAILY OFFICE

Pray the Great Litany. Traditionally it was expected after Morning Prayer every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday. Include the “Supplication” at its ending, especially during Lent. Seriously, even the modern Prayer Book identifies it as particularly appropriate in “times of crisis”, and no serious praying Anglican should overlook this powerful resource.

Several Occasional Prayers and Thanksgivings, starting on page 646, are appropriate to times such as this. If you don’t already make regular use of them, look particularly at:

#5 For the Spirit of Prayer
#26 In Times of Natural Disaster
#30 For Civil Authorities
#44 In Times of Social Conflict or Unrest
#45 For those who serve others
#50 For the Medical Professions
#51 For those who inform public opinion
#53 For those who travel
#56 For the elderly
#57 For those with chronic disease
#58 For a person in trouble or bereavement
#59 For the Discouraged and Downcast
#61 For the Recovery of a Sick Person
#76 & 77 For Guidance
#79 For Mercy
#80 For Trustfulness in Times of Worry and Anxiety
#81 For Help to Bear Bereavement
#82 For Quiet Confidence
#95 In Times of Suffering or Weakness
#98 & 99 For the Acceptance of Prayer
#100 For the Answering of Prayer
#106 For Spiritual Communion (if you’re staying home on a Sunday)
#123 For Deliverance from Peril
#124 For the Restoration of Health

Pray any number of these after the three Collects in Morning or Evening Prayer, or as the Additional Prayers at Midday or Compline.

RESOURCES FOR THE PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE

I know I was partly goofing around a couple weeks ago when I wrote here about re-writing the Prayers of the People, but amidst the light-heartedness were some serious possibilities which we may want to take into account. If you’re a worship planner in your congregation, take especial look at the Occasional Prayers and Thanksgivings listed above, and talk to your Rector or Vicar about using them in the Prayers on Sunday mornings.

The simplest way to implement them, and least disruptive to the liturgy of the 2019 Prayer Book, would be to have the person reading the prayers (or the celebrant) read two or three of the above prayers after the regular petitions of the Prayers of the People. If you’re in a 1928 Prayer Book parish, there is a separate space in the liturgy, adjacent to the sermon, where the priest may bid special prayers, and thus offer these. You could even include a Psalm to be prayed or read at this point, but that might be over-stretching the liturgical context.

Ultimately you need to gauge the situation and disposition of the congregation. If they are fearful, emphasize prayers of trust and entreaty. If they’re especially fearful, make the extra step of putting a prayer or two into the liturgy such that they read it aloud with you. One of the beauties of the Prayer Book tradition is that we can literally put spiritual resources not only into the laps of the people, but into their very mouths!

BONUS ROUND: from the 1662 Prayer Book

The 1662 Prayer Book does not have nearly as many “Occasional Prayers and Thanksgivings” as modern books do, but among its number is this gem. It may feel over-the-top to our post-modern sensibilities, but its rich biblical imagery is hard to beat. And, when push comes to shove, we are all still pretty vulnerable to sudden death, despite the improvements of medicine and sanitation since the 17th century.

In the time of any common Plague or Sickness.

O Almighty God, who in thy wrath didst send a plague upon thine own people in the wilderness, for their obstinate rebellion against Moses and Aaron; and also, in the time of king David, didst slay with the plague of pestilence threescore and ten thousand, and yet remembering thy mercy didst save the rest: Have pity upon us miserable sinners, who now are visited with great sickness and mortality; that like as thou didst then accept of an atonement, and didst command the destroying Angel to cease from punishing, so it may now please thee to withdraw from us this plague and grievous sickness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Obviously, if you’re in a contemporary-language-liturgy congregation, you will probably need to modernize the idiom so that the people hearing this prayer will have a better opportunity to digest it. But give it consideration, too. After all, there has long been understood to be a link between sickness and sinfulness, even if the cause-and-effect relationship is not as straightforward as some would assume. Perhaps this prayer will prompt you or others to turn to the Rites of Healing – of the anointing the sick and the reconciliation of a penitent, and give renewed consideration to one’s standing before God? That’s why I included some penitential prayers in the earlier list (especially #79 For Mercy), after all.

Posted on March 11, 2020April 15, 2020 by Fr. Brench

Midday Prayer could take all afternoon!

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On page 39 of the BCP 2019 the following rubric is found:

Other suitable selections from the Psalter include Psalms 19, 67, one or more sections of Psalm 119, or a selection from Psalms 120 through 133.

This is to supplement what is said on page 33:

One or more of the following, or some other suitable Psalm, is sung or said.

So what if (and just go with me on this, okay?) we decide to put the emphasis on the “or more” part of these rubrics. What if we opt for ALL OF THEM? Psalms 19, 67, and 119 through 133. That’s completely permissible, given the rubrics we’ve got. How long would that take, maybe an hour? I guess it depends how quickly you read, pray, or chant them.

Welcome to Weird Rubric Wednesday! Not quite every Wednesday, but most Wednesdays for a while, we’re going to be looking at oddities, loopholes, or opportunities to do weird things to the liturgy without breaking the rules in the 2019 Prayer Book. This is not meant to bash the Prayer Book (in any edition), but simply an opportunity for some more light-hearted learning.

As it happens, I do have a suggestion for how one might make use of all of those “suitable Psalms” in Midday Prayer over the course of time. It can be approached in three ways.

Ordinary days of the year like during Epiphanytide and Trinitytide:
Favor the four Psalms provided in the primary text of the liturgy, and add three noteworthy Psalms mentioned in the Additional Directions (19, 67, and 130).

SUNDAY: 67
MONDAY: 119:105-112
TUESDAY: 121
WEDNESDAY: 124
THURSDAY: 126
FRIDAY: 130
SATURDAY: 19

Penitential seasons and occasions like during Lent and Advent:
Set up a two-week rotation (matching the liturgical calendar) that focuses primarily on going through Psalm 119, two sections at a time. Sunday can use the more penitential of the two of the primary-provided Psalms, and the last slot can go to Psalm 19 which is similar to 119.

124, 126 : SUNDAY : 124, 126
19 : MONDAY : 119:81-96
119:1-16 : TUESDAY : 119:97-112
119:17-32 :WEDNESDAY: 119:113-128
119:33-48 : THURSDAY : 119:129-144
119:49-64 : FRIDAY : 119:145-160
119:65-80 :SATURDAY: 119:161-176

Festal seasons and occasions like during Christmas and Easter:
Walk through the Psalms of ascent listed in the Additional Directions, using the same sort of two-week rotation mentioned above.

120 : SUNDAY : 127
121 : MONDAY : 128
122 : TUESDAY : 129
123 :WEDNESDAY: 130
124 : THURSDAY : 131
125 : FRIDAY : 132
126 :SATURDAY: 133

Posted on March 10, 2020January 13, 2020 by Fr. Brench

Learning the Daily Office – part 9 of 12

Step Nine: Add the Collect of the Day

You’ll be aware that, in the Prayers, we’ve been skipping the Collect of the Day. Now it’s time to add that in. Under where it says “The Collect of the Day” it notes that you can find them in “The Collects of the Christian Year” section of the Prayer Book. In the rubrics above (in italics) you’ll see it names pages 598-640 for that section.

Functionally, this is a very simple addition: look up the Collect of the Day that applies, and pray it at this point in the service. Most of the time, the Collect of the Day is the same all week, based upon the most recent Sunday. But there are also holy days that come with their own Collect of the Day. The Prayer Book’s calendar also directs that the Collects for Sundays and Holy Days are normally to be used starting at Evening Prayer before the day in question begins. The experiential challenge here is that you need to understand the basics of the Church Calendar in order to find the correct Collect of the Day. Presumably, you’ve been going to an Anglican church for a while, if you’ve put this much effort into learning to pray the Anglican Daily Office, so that experience should be enough to give you a sense of where you are in the year. You’ll hear the Collect of the Day for each Sunday at the communion service, right before the readings, so that’ll tell you if you grabbed the right one the evening before and earlier that morning, and it’ll set you straight for the rest of the week (again, except for other holy days that might come up).

It may be helpful to buy a special calendar, or use your prayer book to mark one up yourself ahead of time, so you can easily see what the Collect of the Day every day. This can be a fun activity to do with kids, too, inviting them to color each day’s box the traditional liturgical color… my four-year-old loves it!

The main point of this piece of the Daily Office is to provide a tie-in to the liturgical rounds of prayer that are more fully emphasized in the Service of Holy Communion. For the most part, the Daily Office is meant to be a stable liturgy, changing little from day to day and season to season, the Collect being one of its only links to the ebb and flow of our liturgical year. And so, learning to identify the Collect of the Day is a milestone in your education of the liturgy, connecting your regular daily prayers to the life of the greater Church beyond your home.

That being said, don’t worry overmuch about this. Most of the time, the Collect of the Day is just an extra bookmark in your Prayer Book where it simply moves from Sunday to Sunday. If you miss a holy day or grab the wrong week from time to time, you’ll survive. Liturgy is meant to be formative, not stressful. Checking in at church each Sunday will usually provide you with everything you “need to know” about this piece of it.

Summary

Your Morning & Evening Offices are now looking like this:

(Opening Sentence)
The Confession of Sin
The Invitatory
Invitatory Psalm or Phos Hilaron
The Psalm(s) Appointed
Old Testament Lesson (occasionally the first lesson is from the NT instead)
First Canticle
New Testament Lesson
Second Canticle
The Apostles’ Creed (consider standing up for this!)
The Prayers
1. Lord have mercy…
2. The Lord’s Prayer
3. Suffrage
4. The Collect of the Day
5. A Collect for (the day of the week)
6. A Prayer for Mission

This covers almost the entire Prayer Book liturgy for daily Morning and Evening Prayer. Two more steps remain to complete it, and then two extra steps to expand it further if you are so inclined.

Posted on March 3, 2020January 13, 2020 by Fr. Brench

Learning the Daily Office – part 8 of 12

Step Eight: Add the Invitatory

After the Confession of Sin you’ve probably noticed a little dialogue: “O Lord, open our lips / and our mouth shall proclaim your praise” and so on. This is called the Invitatory – a fancy description of something that invites us to worship. Included in it is the Gloria Patri – “Glory be to the Father…” – which you will find is also said at the end of most of the Canticles. If you haven’t already noticed and implemented it, now’s also the time to add this Gloria Patri to the end of the regular Psalms Appointed, too.

The lines “O Lord open our lips…” are from a Psalm, but their liturgical use in the Offices dates to monastic tradition; the idea was that this dialogue was the beginning of the first morning office, effectively being the first thing the monk says each day. Although this is not the case for us, nor is it even the beginning of the liturgy, it is like the beginning of the liturgy. If you conceive of the Confession as preparatory to praising God, then the Invitatory dialogue is where our praises actually do begin.

After this dialogue, Morning and Evening Prayer diverge from one another.

Morning Prayer sees an “invitatory psalm” take place, which is traditionally Psalm 95 (Venite), though when that psalm shows up as one of the daily psalms appointed our tradition is to replace it with Psalm 100 (Jubilate). On Easter the Pascha nostrum takes their place. You’ll also see a set of Antiphons, which are brief phrases (often based on bible verses) to be said before and after the invitatory psalm. Catholic tradition is full of antiphons, but our prayer book only provides them for this one place in the liturgy. Even here, it’s optional, so don’t worry about them if you find it too much. They’re there to beautify and enrich the liturgy, so if they’re a burden, don’t worry!

Evening Prayer is simpler: we find the Phos hilaron, an ancient Christian hymn, to be read between the dialogue and the Psalms. It explores the image of Christ as our Light, which has earned it a beloved place in the liturgical tradition. The classical prayer books didn’t have anything here for Evening Prayer, so the Phos hilaron remains optional. Or you can read or sing a different hymn instead, if you prefer.

Summary

Your Morning & Evening Offices are now looking like this:

(Opening Sentence)
The Confession of Sin
The Invitatory
Invitatory Psalm or Phos Hilaron
The Psalm(s) Appointed
Old Testament Lesson (occasionally the first lesson is from the NT instead)
First Canticle
New Testament Lesson
Second Canticle
The Apostles’ Creed (consider standing up for this!)
The Prayers
1. Lord have mercy…
2. The Lord’s Prayer
3. Suffrage
4. A Collect for (the day of the week)
5. A Prayer for Mission

This covers almost the entire Prayer Book liturgy for daily Morning and Evening Prayer. Two more steps remain to complete it, and then two extra steps to expand it further if you are so inclined.

Posted on March 2, 2020March 1, 2020 by Fr. Brench

Collects of the Day this week

Last week was a bit complicated for tracking the Collect of the Day in the Daily Offices. In a normal week, you start the Sunday’s Collect on the Saturday evening before, and use it through Saturday morning until the next Sunday Collect kicks in. Last week, however, had two holy days, one of which redefined the rest of the week:

Sunday morning: Collect for the Last Sunday of Epiphany
Sunday evening through Monday evening: Collect for St. Matthias Day
Tuesday morning and evening: Collect for the Last Sunday of Epiphany
Wednesday morning through Saturday morning: Collect for Ash Wednesday

This week we have the Lenten/Spring Ember Days, causing a similar mix-up of the Collect of the Day:

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday: Collect for the First Sunday in Lent
Wednesday: Collect for an Ember Day
Thursday: Collect for the First Sunday in Lent
Friday, Saturday: Collect for an Ember Day

One of the things that makes this tricky is the fact that we, in the 2019 Prayer Book, only have two Collects for the Ember Days. Sometimes, like in Advent a few months ago, this works out fine because a holy day (in that case, St. Thomas) sometimes cuts in and overwrites one of the Ember Days, allowing us to use both Collects on one day each. But now that we have three Ember Days unfettered, and only two Collects to use, how should we handle this? Perhaps the simplest approach is to use the first Collect each morning and the second Collect each evening.

Another tradition worth mentioning is the fact that the classical prayer books (that is, those before 1979) call for the repetition of the Ash Wednesday Collect after the current Collect of the Day throughout the season of Lent. The 2019 Prayer Book does not direct for this to be done, but with the rubrics the way they are, there is nothing “illegal” about applying this tradition in our recitation of the Daily Office. So give that possibility due consideration also!

Posted on February 26, 2020February 25, 2020 by Fr. Brench

What’s different in the liturgy now that it’s Lent?

Welcome to Ash Wednesday, the common name for The First Day of Lent. Occasionally you’ll see today called quadragesima because there are now 40 days left (excluding Sundays) until Easter Day. Let the 40-day fast begin!

One of the main questions I get from non-liturgical Christians, concerning Lent, is “what do you differently during this time?” This blog post is aimed at answering that question – partly for the benefit of those who are wondering the same thing, but also as a reminder to my fellow Anglican readers who might need a reminder of some of the changes, or possible changes, in the daily course of our liturgy.

Today’s differences

For those of us using the 2019 Daily Lectionary, or one of the historic daily lectionaries that uses the regular calendar, we may need the reminder that today’s lessons for Morning and Evening Prayer are interrupted from the regular course. At the bottom of page 740 in the BCP 2019 you’ll see the following readings appointed for today:

Isaiah 58:1-12 & Luke 18:9-14 for the Morning
Jonah 3 & 1 Corinthians 9:24-27 for the Evening

To that I would recommend another traditional-for-this-day reading, Hebrews 12:3-17, for Midday Prayer.

At the Holy Communion (or in place of it, if the Communion itself isn’t actually going to be celebrated) we have a special liturgy in the 2019 Book, starting on page 543, and prefaced by a handy introduction to this day (and Lent in general) on page 542. It’s worth reminding ourselves that the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday is a custom that was removed from Anglican practice during the Reformation, and not formally put into a Prayer Book until 1979, though the Anglo-Catholic movement had provided extra-liturgical material to sneak the practice back into the liturgy before it was embraced by the church as a whole. You can read last year’s note about Ash-less Wednesday here.

Also, remember that today’s Collect of the Day is now the Collect of the Day for the rest of this week!

Morning Prayer during Lent

There are some extra Opening Sentences of Scripture appropriate for this season on page 27.

The Venite (Psalm 95) should be said in full daily this season, if you don’t normally do so already. Keep in mind that you can bookend it with a Lenten antiphon from page 30!

The first Canticle, Te Deum laudamus, is recommended in our Prayer Book to be replaced with the Benedictus es, Domine on page 18. This Customary would recommend retaining the Te Deum on Sundays and other major holy days, however.

If you don’t normally do so, make a point of praying the Great Litany (page 91) after Morning Prayer on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Evening Prayer during Lent

There are some extra Opening Sentences of Scripture appropriate for this season on page 54.

The second canticle, Nunc dimittis, could be replaced by Canticle 3, Kyrie Pantokrator, most evenings. We’d recommend doing so on Monday through Friday.

The Minor Offices during Lent

The “Alleluia” after the invitatory dialogue is to be omitted now.

For Midday Prayer, it may be a good idea to make use of one the Additional Directions and make more extensive use of Psalm 119 throughout the season. Consider this two-week rotation of Midday Psalms:

<week 1> :day: <week 2>
124, 126 :Sundays: 124, 126
19 :Mondays: 119:81-96
119:1-16 :Tuesdays: 119:97-112
119:17-32 :Wednesdays: 119:113-128
119:33-48 :Thursdays: 119:129-144
119:49-64 :Fridays: 119:145-160
119:65-80 :Saturdays: 119:161-176

Consider making more frequent use of Matthew 11:28-30 as the Lesson at Compline.

The Holy Communion during Lent

There is an Acclamation appropriate for Lent on page 146, and another one for Holy Week.

This is a good season to make weekly use of the Decalogue (page 100) instead of the Summary of the Law if you don’t normally already.

The Gloria in excelsis is traditionally omitted during Lent. Consider replacing it with a hymn from the Lent section of your hymnal, just to emphasize the season difference in mood.

The First Sunday in Lent is one of the traditional days to read The Exhortation (page 147).

Consider using Offertory Sentences (page 149) that are more pointed about spiritual disciplines, such as Matthew 7:21, 1 John 3:17, and Tobit 4:8-9. This could be especially effective if you normally use the same one every week, memorized from the list in 1979 Book.

The “alleluia” in the Fraction dialogue (on page 118/135) is to be omitted now.

If you don’t normally prayer the Prayer of Humble Access and the Agnus Dei (page 119/135), this is the season to start. (Pro-tip: never stop using them!)

In fact, if your congregation normally uses the “Renewed Ancient Text”, I cannot heartily-enough encourage you to switch to the “Anglican Standard Text” at least for Lent. You’ll get more direct prayers of confession and of consecration (not to mention historically Anglican prayers).

Other Spiritual Practices

The classical Prayer Books appointed the Collect for Ash Wednesday to be used after the Collect of the Day throughout the season of Lent. I’m not so sure the 2019 Prayer Book intends to allow that, so consider making use of this Collect elsewhere – in the additional prayers at the end of an Office, or after the Prayers of the People at the Communion, or in your private prayers and devotions.

On page 689 our calendar directs The weekdays of Lent and every Friday of the year (outside the 12 Days of Christmas the 50 days of Eastertide) are encouraged as days of fasting. The classical Prayer Books were more direct about the expectation (not just encouragement) that we should fast. We’re not Romanists, so we don’t have elaborate standardized definitions of what “counts” as fasting; we have the freedom in Christ to fast according to conscience, as the Bible indicates. Nevertheless, some advice is helpful, and our calendar provides some: Fasting, in addition to reduced consumption, normally also includes prayer, self-examination, and acts of mercy. It is popular to “give something up for Lent”, or to “take something on for Lent”, and almost all of those particular expressions of Lenten devotion are summed up in that one sentence. Consider how you might mark this season in your own lifestyle, and give it a go.

Posted on February 25, 2020January 13, 2020 by Fr. Brench

Learning the Daily Office – part 7 of 12

Step Seven: Add some Prayers

Now it’s time to develop your utilization of the Prayer Book. You’re already reading the Confession, Psalms, Canticles, and Apostles’ Creed from it, now it’s time for some further prayers. In Morning Prayer pages 21-24 and in Evening Prayer pages 47-51 you will see that the Lord’s Prayer is preceded and followed by a larger sequence of Prayers. The Kyrie (“Lord have mercy…”) comes first, and after the Lord’s Prayer comes a “Suffrage” (a back-and-forth set of versicles and responses, mostly taken from the Psalms), and after that a pile of “collects” and prayers.

A Collect is a specific form of prayer, and the Prayer Book has tons of them. The usual structure of a collect is:

an address to God (identifying a name or attribute or work of God)
a specific petition or request
a reason for that petition or request, often linking back to the address
an appeal to the name of Jesus

In the 2019 Prayer Book you’ll the first Collect listed is “The Collect of the Day” – feel free to skip that for now; we’ll add it in later. For now, we’re focusing on developing your use of the Prayer Book liturgy without adding more page-flips.

Instead, finish your prayer times now with the Kyrie, Lord’s Prayer, a set of Suffrages, the Collect for the Day of the Week, and a Prayer for Mission. Morning and Evening Prayer provide different lists of prayers for this section, so your experiences of morning and evening are going to start diverging at this point.

You’ll notice that some of these prayers in Morning Prayer draw upon the image and reality of the beginning of the day, and Evening Prayer draws upon the images of darkness and light as pictures of death and life. Time and nature are explicitly now being drawn into your prayer life, and that’s a beautiful thing!

You’ll see that there are a couple more prayers and lines of other text after the prayers we’ve listed here, but don’t worry about them for now. Historically, those have been optional, almost thought of in an after-the-liturgy kind of status, so we’re going to save those for later. You’re welcome to plough ahead and include them now if you like, but don’t feel pressured.

Summary

Your Morning & Evening Offices are now looking like this:

The Confession of Sin
The Psalm(s) Appointed
Old Testament Lesson (occasionally the first lesson is from the NT instead)
First Canticle
New Testament Lesson
Second Canticle
The Apostles’ Creed (consider standing up for this!)
The Prayers
1. Lord have mercy…
2. The Lord’s Prayer
3. Suffrage
4. A Collect for (the day of the week)
5. A Prayer for Mission

At this point you’re almost saying the entire morning and evening offices in the prayer book tradition, congratulations!

Posted on February 19, 2020April 15, 2020 by Fr. Brench · 3 Comments

Create Your Own Prayers of the People

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On page 140 of the 2019 Prayer Book, the following Additional Direction is found:

In both the Anglican Standard and Renewed Ancient Texts, other forms of the Prayers of the People may be used, provided the following concerns are included:

The universal Church, the clergy and people
The mission of the Church
The nation and all in authority
The peoples of the world
The local community
Those who suffer and those in any need or trouble
Thankful remembrance of the faithful departed and of all the blessings of our lives.

For the most part this is a clone of the rubric in the 1979 Prayer Book, which also authorized a create-your-own-adventure approach to the Prayers of the People, providing a similar structure of required topics. I think the wording of ours is a bit more positively specific, but the freedom is basically the same.

Now, this is “Weird Rubric Wednesday”, a new series of posts that I’m running about weird, strange, or surprising things that the 2019 Prayer Book permits. As the intentionally horrific and obnoxious banner picture at the top of the page indicates, I’m running this partly for the humour, and cautioning against abuse of the system. But some of these will have serious and positive suggestions, too. How you deal with the Prayers of the People is going to be one of those mixed entries.

Ideally…

The two Communion rites in our Prayer Book provide their own default Prayers of the People. Ideally you should just use them as-is. Tampering with them is permitted, but almost never necessary. The special occasion once in a while may be well-highlighted by an edited set of Prayers here, but on the whole this is supposed to be a stable piece of the liturgy. If you always keep the congregation guessing from week to week, then you’re only teaching them to rely on you, or to rely upon their own spontaneity, rather than provide the spiritual formation available in the mature historic prayers.

Try your hand at Puritanism

One of the great practices of the Free Church tradition is the “pastoral prayer”, in which the pastor prays at length for, well, anything and everything. This can be a train wreck if he’s unprepared, but it can also be a beautiful moment of pastoral love and care for the flock. The Puritans, in particular, had a thing for insanely long prayers, and this rubric offers them a victory in our 2019 liturgy.

Personally I don’t recommend opting for this, but it may be a positive idea to pray, as a pastor (priest, deacon, or otherwise) for your congregation at the end of the traditional set Prayers.

Shaken, not stirred

Another thing you could try here is to pull out the Occasional Prayers near the back of the Prayer Book and grab a collect or two for each of the required topics to create your own Prayers of the People. This would result in a very piecemeal set of prayers, with little-to-no sense of flow to them, so I would not recommend that for ordinary Communion services. But that might be a cool idea to try out in an Antecommunion service on your own! It’s also worth noting that the list of topics in the rubric above also closely matches the organization of the Occasional Prayers, so this scheme would be easier to fulfill than you might think.

Outsourcing

This rubric also gives you the freedom to grab any other Prayer Book, official or proposed or supplementary, and use their Prayers of the People, assuming they meet the simple required topics. This could mean the 1979, or England’s Common Worship, or the Kenyan Prayer Book, or another province. Or, to channel that #broke/#woke/#bespoke meme, you could go all-out #bespoke and use the 1662 or 1928 Prayer Book’s Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church. How ’bout dat?

For ever and ever, Amen.

Pray the Great Litany as the Prayers of the People. Pray some or all the Psalms. Pray all the Occasional Prayers. This liturgy could last all day, baby! DON’T STAWP!

Posted on February 18, 2020January 13, 2020 by Fr. Brench · 2 Comments

Learning the Daily Office – part 6 of 12

Step One: Pray a Psalm followed by the Lord’s Prayer.
Step Two: Add a Scripture Reading
Step Three: Add more Psalms and Lessons
Step Four: Add the Apostles’ Creed
Step Five: Add Canticles

Step Six: Add the Confession

Alright, it’s time for something distinctly Anglican: the prayer of confession at the daily office. While confessing our sins before God is a universal practice (if grossly underutilized among many Evangelicals and Pentecostals today), it is a distinctly Anglican practice to include it in the Daily Office. You will find it starting on page 11 for Morning Prayer and page 41 for Evening Prayer. There is a paragraph that the Officiant (the person leading the Office) reads aloud, followed by the prayer of confession itself, followed by a choice of three responses. Two of those responses are statements of absolution to be read by a priest or bishop, but the third is a prayer for forgiveness that is to be read by anyone when no such minister is present, and that is what you’ll read when you’re doing this alone.

You’ll also see three “opening sentences of scripture” listed before this Confession set; feel free to read one of these first, too, as they serve as a sort of “call to worship”, beginning to direct your focus upon God and his Word before the act of self-examination and confession.

In the Daily Office we confess our sins at the beginning of the liturgy. This teaches us:

that it is only in repentance that we find salvation;
that we can only approach God in humility, not pride or presumption;
that true worship comes from a “broken and contrite heart”;
that there is no “health” (salvation) in us apart from God’s grace.

So it’s time to start your morning and evening prayer times with this confession. Sometimes you’ll read it quickly and move right along. Sometimes you’ll dwell on the words, or need to dwell on the words, along the way, letting their truth sink in and sober you up to reality. Sometimes a moment of silent self-examination will be necessary – think on your sins in the past day and release them to the Lord for forgiveness and healing. Sometimes this will feel merely a perfunctory feature of the Daily Office… remember this is a discipline, after all, so it’s there to shape and form you. Your heart will not always be as “into it” as other times, just like how certain psalms may appeal to you less or more than others. The point is that this is the pattern of worship you are growing in to, and that you have this opportunity to repent every time you approach the Lord in prayer.

Summary

Your Morning & Evening Offices are now looking like this:

The Confession of Sin
The Psalm(s) Appointed
Old Testament Lesson (occasionally the first lesson is from the NT instead)
First Canticle
New Testament Lesson
Second Canticle
The Apostles’ Creed (consider standing up for this!)
The Lord’s Prayer

This makes your recitation of the Daily Office about fifteen minutes in length each morning and evening. Apart from the Canticles, the format and order of Morning and Evening Prayer are identical for you. But that will soon change.