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A Prayer for Seeking God

April 21st is a minor feast day, or Optional Commemoration, honoring Saint Anselm.  He was an Archbishop of Canterbury, a monk and abbot, and a theologian of great repute to this very day.  I’ve written about him before, which you should feel free to peruse if you’re interested.  Here’s the link: https://leorningcniht.wordpress.com/2018/04/20/st-anselm-of-canterbury/

For our purposes, however, staying close to the subject of Anglican spirituality with the new Prayer Book, I would like to observe that one of the Occasional Prayers (#88, for Daily Growth) is drawn from the prayers of St. Anselm.  He wrote a whole treasure trove of prayers and devotions which are highly theological, both affective and intellectual, you could say.  And from among that material, translated into comfortable modern English, we get this:

Teach me to seek you, and as I seek you, show yourself to me;
for I cannot seek you unless you show me how,
and I will never find you unless you show yourself to me.
Let me seek you by desiring you, and desire you by seeking you;
let me find you by loving you, and love you in finding you.  Amen.

This is very affective (emotional) as well as intellectual.  A lot of people are more strongly one over the other.  I was raised in a non-denominational evangelical setting where affective spirituality was the rising star: true devotion to Jesus was expressed in terms of love and joy and excitement.  More and more, people were expected to raise their hands and their voices in song as a sign of their spirituality.  But that same church, in my childhood, was more intellectual: know the Scriptures, memorize key verses, study the basic points of doctrine and consider why you believe what you believe.  This story is not unique, by any means; almost everywhere you can find both crowds, sometimes coexisting peacefully and sometimes at odds with one another.  Anselm is great because he stands squarely in their overlap.

Intellectually, he writes of seeking God and God revealing himself to us because we can’t seek or find him on our own.  Affectively, he writes of seeking and finding God by desiring and loving him.  And all the way through its a “both/and” scenario: let us seek God by desiring God and desire God by seeking God.

So if you’re an emotion-driven person who worries about the intellectual credibility of your faith sometimes, latch on to this prayer: “let me seek you by desiring you… let me find you by loving you” because that’s what you already understand.  Or if you’re an intellectual person who worries about how much you actually love Christ, latch on to the other side of the prayer: “let me desire you by seeking you… let me love you in finding you.”  The act of seeking God is itself a sign of love and desire; the act of desiring God is itself a sign of seeking and searching.

What an encouraging little prayer.  Thank you, Archbishop!

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Easter Week Readings all-in-one

I made one for Holy Week, and now for Easter as well: an all-in-one sheet laying out the Morning Prayer, Communion, Midday, Evening, and Compline lessons and psalms throughout Easter Week.

Easter Week, in particular, is often overlooked.  Folks tend to be exhausted by the end of the Easter Vigil and the many goings-on during Holy Week.  This is understandable, but also very unfortunate, as there are a number of significant angles on Easter that we have opportunity to celebrate.  There is a certain irony in the fact that those who are happy to see Pre-Lent done away with in order to “restore the balance” between Lent and Easter then fail to go on and actually celebrate Easter Week.

Historically, the Prayer Books have appointed more things for Holy Week than for Easter Week, so it’s understandable that we still tend to be more busy in the former than in the latter.  But now that most of us are at home most of the time, unable to exhaust ourselves with long and multiple church services, perhaps this is our great opportunity to discover Easter Week!  So here it is: easter week all-in-one 2020.

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Anglicanism’s ONE Manual Ritual

Liturgically speaking, Anglicanism is remarkably simple.  Sure, the Prayer Book requires something of a learning curve, especially modern Prayer Books with all their options and possibilities and multi-year lectionaries.  But when you compare the historic Prayer Book tradition to the other great liturgical traditions, particularly Rome and the East, ours is greatly simpler to follow, understand, and implement.  This is, I believe, part of the Reformation principle: paring down the extraneous developments that clogged up the system to unveil the Biblical and Patristic core of historic Christian worship.

This doesn’t mean Anglicanism cannot be complex and beautiful – many rituals and traditions, both ancient and medieval, have been re-appropriated in our context.  We can have incense and chasubles, altar candles and art, icons and organs… but when it comes down to it the “smells and bells” are optional.  These beautify worship but are not integral to it.

And yet, amidst our grand simplification of Western liturgical tradition, there is one rubric – only one – that has survived every Prayer Book revision, dealing with the gestures (or manual actions) of the Priest.  The 1549 Prayer Book had a couple other gestures directed which are often used today, but only one survived through the course of the Reformation and is fixed in every Prayer Book since the beginning.  Here it is, according to the wording of the 2019 Book:

At the following words concerning the bread, the Celebrant is to hold it, or lay a hand upon it, and here* may break the bread; and at the words concerning the cup, to hold or place a hand upon the cup and any other vessel containing the wine to be consecrated.

There are other rubrics, too, that deal with movement and location, standing and kneeling, but these are the only instructions left that deal with the manuals, the hands.  The celebrant MUST touch the bread or the vessel(s) containing it; the celebrant MUST touch the flagon or chalice or other vessel containing the wine.  These are the only requirements, amidst the many traditional gestures and symbols that prior tradition demanded.

Why is this so?  There may be different answers to this question.  Perhaps it’s as simple and practical as to indicate to all gathered what is to be consecrated.  Perhaps it’s part of a larger system of sacramental theology in which the celebrant has to indicate the intent to consecrate particular elements.  Perhaps there’s something incarnational in the celebrant’s imitation of Christ, or service in the place of Christ, in physically handling the elements in the same way our Lord did on the night that he was betrayed.  The explanation may be different according to whom you ask, but the rule or rubric is the same.

One of the important realizations that we must take from this, today, is the fact that we are NOT permitted to consecrated bread and wine via the internet.  There are a lot of simplifications and extraneous traditions that were removed during the Reformation, but physical contact between the minister and the elements is the one thing we’ve made a point of keeping.  Sadly, a number of priests, and even bishops, have advocated a sort of “remote consecration”, where the congregation has bread and wine in front of their TV or computer screen and the priest or bishop they’re watching live “consecrates” them for the recipients at home.  This is not permissible according to the Prayer Book tradition.  And, depending upon one’s theological explanation of this rubric, it’s probably also not possible or valid.

So I urge you, dear readers, not to hold or participate in such liturgies involving “remote consecration.”  These are, admittedly, extraordinary circumstances; but that does not mean we can abandon our beliefs and godly authorities.  Whether we like them or not, the Prayer Book already has resources for this sort of situation: pray the Daily Office, pray Antecommunion, ask the parish priest to deliver Communion house to house after celebrating with a small group.  Use the prayer of Spiritual Communion; it’s #106 in the 2019 Prayer Book.  True, none of these are quite replacements for the regular participation in the liturgy of Holy Communion, but these measures exist precisely to keep the people of God fed and nourished, even in times of infrequent reception of the Sacrament.

We can get through this.  We don’t need to violate our beliefs, practices, or rubrics.  We certainly don’t need to introduce strange, novel , and illicit inventions as “remote consecration.”  Honestly, to do so reveals a surrender to worldly conditions and a lack of appreciation (let alone understanding) of the beautiful and robust tradition we already have.

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Learn how to pray the Daily Office

The Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer (sometimes called Matins and Vespers) are staples of Anglican spirituality.  For most of the past five centuries, the typical Anglican was intimately familiar with these services – weekly Sunday Communion only having been achieved in the early-to-mid 20th century.  But now the tables have turned; comparatively few Anglicans are familiar with our Daily Offices, and know only the Communion Office.

There are many guides on the internet already explaining how to use the Prayer Book, how to find your way through the Daily Office, how to piece together the service, and give advice in getting use to it.  So I had no desire to replicate those resources.

Rather, I’ve put together a guide to learning the Daily Office from a different angle, for a different need: Sometimes the Prayer Book offices are too much for a newcomer to deal with.  Instead of diving all-in, some people need a gradual piece-by-piece introduction to this great tradition of prayer and devotion.  And, by approaching the Offices in this way, one learns the “heart” or “core” of the Office naturally, slowly growing and enfleshing it from the barest of ingredients to the fullness of prayer of beauty.

We’ve also gone through the twelve-step guide on this blog, but now I present it to you in a single document: Learn to pray the Office

Please share this with your friends, your parishioners, or anyone interested in learning to pray in a more robust, traditional, or biblically-grounded manner!

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A Psalm and a Plan

Welcome to Holy Week, everyone!

First of all I want to remind you that I made a handy-dandy all-in-one chart of the Scripture readings for the various liturgies throughout Holy Week, according to the 2019 Prayer Book.  You can read about it here: Holy Week Readings all-in-one explanation article, and download it here: Holy Week all-in-one 2020.

Also, I wanted to offer some reflections on one of the morning Psalms for today.

When I first being introduced to the liturgical tradition of prayer (while serving as pianist at Roman Catholic Masses during college), something that struck me as strange was how much time the prayers spent telling God what He had already done.  “Why are you telling God what he already did?  Why don’t you just get on with making the petitions you want to ask Him?”  What I eventually learned is that this is not only healthy for the people praying to rehearse God’s deeds in prayer, but it’s also a very biblical pattern of prayer to preface requests with remembrances.  We highlight some aspect of God’s being, character, or works, and on that basis we make our request(s).

Psalm 32:1-5, The Remembrance (or Memorial)

Psalm 32 is an excellent example of this pattern played out.  The first five verses are all about the past….

Psalm 32:6, The Sermon (or Homily)

Psalm 32:7-11, Responsive Reading (or Dialogue)

The End (or Goal or Telos) of Penitence

Read the whole thing here: https://leorningcniht.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/praying-psalm-32-in-lent/

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Holy Week Readings all-in-one

There’s a lot going on during Holy Week.  Morning and Evening Prayer continue.  This Customary’s supplemental midday prayer lectionary appoints special readings for these days, and there are Communion propers for each day of the week as well.  So there are a lot of opportunities for deeper devotions, both in the following of the liturgy itself as well as in simply taking their Bible readings for individual reading and reflection.

So I’ve put together an all-in-one chart: Holy Week all-in-one 2020

There you’ll see for the day of the week the Psalm(s) and Lessons for: Morning Prayer, Holy Communion, Midday Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Compline.  There are a couple of either/or choices in the 2019 Book’s lectionaries, and I picked them for you, according to what I’ve developed of the Saint Aelfric Customary thus far.  The goals, as usual are:

  • to be faithful to historic Anglican tradition whenever possible
  • to make the maximum use of the 2019 Prayer Book material
  • to avoid repetition of Lessons whenever possible

Since so many of us are home-bound during this time of plague, this is a golden opportunity to step up our disciplines of prayer, and observe more of our liturgical tradition than we might normally experience.  I hope this chart helps you so to do!

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Isolated Worship

So now that most of the country is under heavy restrictions of social distancing to slow the spread of this latest disease, churches everywhere are having to reinvent their approach to public worship.

As Anglicans, I cannot repeat this enough – we have a built-in feature of our tradition that SHOULD make this incredibly easy: the Daily Office.  The Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer don’t require a priest to lead them, they don’t require a sermon, they can be observed alone or in a group.  If we had bothered teaching our congregation the Office beforehand, they would be in excellent shape to keep up those disciplines on their own right now at home.  All we’d have to do is send them sermons, homilies, and reflections to aid their reading of the Scriptures in the meantime, and make the occasional plan for distributing communion, house to house.

Many of us have not taught them to pray the Office, however, partly because too many of us clergymen don’t pray the Office ourselves.  But thankfully, in this internet age, there are excellent resources to help people.

The best is “Daily Office 2019” which beautifully and accurately puts together the Morning and Evening Offices for you.  It even has the little Family Prayer devotions on a separate page.

The second-best options are the livestreams that many churches are offering now.  This approach is a two-edged sword.  On one hand, people get to see their (or another) church location, hear familiar music, and their favorite preacher(s).  But the downside is that it makes worship even more of a spectator sport than usual.  Our culture already has a problem with treating worship as a commodity, rather than an activity or discipline or offering in which each one participates, and livestreaming the liturgy (in part or in whole) will very easily play into that misconception and problem.

So, please, for the love of your congregation, or fellow laity, depending upon who you are reading this, teach others to pray the Daily Office so they can learn how to feed themselves.  Worship via livestream can be a great-tasting experience, but it’s mere spoonfeeding compared to what people can receive in praying the Offices alone or in small groups!

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An Evening Hymn for Healing

Before church worship service cancellations were confirmed, I had a hymn in mind to bring to my congregation to sing this weekend.  It’s #249 in The Book of Common Praise 2017.  Although it’s in the Evening section, I was going to appoint it for Sunday morning because of its excellent treatment of a subject often under-represented in classic hymnody: healing.  Let’s check it out.

At even, when the sun was set,
The sick, O Lord, around thee lay.
O in what diverse pains they met;
O with what joy they went away!

It begins, you can see, with an acknowledgement of the many biblical stories of miraculous healing performed by our Lord Jesus.  It isn’t spiritualized into the healing of the sin-sick soul, but actually about physical healings, which is (I think) a rarity.

Once more ’tis eventide, and we,
Oppressed with various ills, draw near.
What if thy form we cannot see?
We know and feel that thou art here.

O Savior Christ, our woes dispel,
For some are sick, and some are sad,
And some have never loved thee well,
And some have lost the love they had.

The fact that it is now evening is pretty irrelevant to the prayer of the song, really.  It’s just there to maintain a poetic continuity between the first two stanzas.  What we’re tackling here, primarily, is the acknowledgement and offering of our various forms of sickness (physical, emotional, spiritual) and the prayer for Christ to dispel such woes from us.  The statement that we “know and feel” God’s nearness perhaps betrays the 19th century romanticism (compared to the more-subdued-emotions lyrics of the previous two centuries), but it’s not over the top by any stretch.

The next verse narrows in on our spiritual condition as fallen human beings:

And none, O Lord, have perfect rest,
For none are wholly free from sin;
And they who fain would love thee best
Are conscious most of wrong within.

This is a difficult truth to admit – those who most truly and earnestly love God are the most aware of their sinfulness and unworthiness before him.  It is, therefore, revealing of an imperfect (or even false) love when someone is apparently on fire for Jesus but has little sense of the gravity of his or her own sin.

The final two verses turn the focus away from us and onto Christ our Lord.

O Savior Christ, thou too art man;
Thou hast been troubled, tempted, tried;
Thy kind but searching glance can scan
The very wounds that shame would hide.

Thy touch has still its healing pow’r;
No word from thee can fruitless fall;
Hear, in this solemn evening hour,
And in thy mercy heal us all.  Amen.

Never put Jesus’ humanity in the past tense; his incarnation is not one-and-done, but a union that lasts into eternity.  That’s how he is our Great High Priest, as the epistle to the Hebrews explains in detail.  And yet, as God, he sees and knows all our wounds and sins.  He can still heal; his word never returns to him empty (cf. Isaiah 55:11).

This is, for sure, a very good song to bring to our attention during this COVID-19 pandemic.

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A colorful week ahead

If you look at the Calendar of Commemorations in the 2019 Prayer Book, you’ll find a few Saints Days of particular note in rapid succession this week.

  • Tuesday the 17th commemorates Saint Patrick, bishop & apostle to the Irish.
  • Wednesday the 18th commemorates Saint Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem and teacher of the faith (or “Doctor of the Church” in Roman terminology).
  • Thursday the 19th is a red-letter day, the feast of Saint Joseph, the husband of the Virgin Mary and Guardian of our Lord Jesus.
  • Friday the 20th commemorates Saint Cuthbert, abbot and missionary bishop of Lindisfarne.
  • Saturday the 21st commemorates Thomas Cranmer, the first reformation Archbishop of Canterbury, author of the first Prayer Book, and martyr.

Of all these days, only St. Joseph’s Day is an official break from the Lenten fast; the rest are optional commemorations that you and your church may or may not choose to observe.  The Saint Aelfric Customary names all of these particular commemorations as “minor feasts”, the highest rank of such commemorations, and thus to be given pride of place in any midweek eucharistic celebration.

The way these observances are probably going to look in my household, for example, is that I’ll replace the purple candle on the family prayer table with a white one for Tuesday through Friday (each a saint’s day), and a red one for Saturday (a martyr’s day).  It’ll then go to a pink candle after that – for the 4th Sunday in Lent!  ‘Tis a colorful week indeed.

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Prayers in Time of Infectious Disease

On Friday we shared a sort of mish-mash of prayer ideas here, but things have continued to escalate.  As of Sunday evening, the commonwealth of Massachusetts has “banned” gatherings of 25 or over, effectively shutting down all church worship services (on top of schools, extracurricular programs, dine-in restaurants, and so forth) until early April.  Other state governors are moving in this direction, too.  So a tangible need for prayer resources for homebound families and individuals is definitely growing.

To that end, I’ve sorted through the material previously presented, and arranged it into a coherent and usable Order of Prayer.

You can download a simple Word Document of it here: Prayers in time of infectious disease

Or you can download a pdf version, formatted such that if you print it double-sided it can fold into a nice little booklet, here: Prayers in time of infectious disease -two-sided version

At present, this is only available in the contemporary language idiom, in accord with the 2019 Prayer Book.  I will, however, use its new traditional language edition to make another version of it for those who prefer the beauty of the Old Way!

How does this Office work?

Let’s talk about this thing a little bit.

First of all, this is an extra-liturgical devotion.  That means it is not a replacement for Morning Prayer, Evening, Prayer, the Great Litany, or any other Prayer Book service or office.  It is its own thing.  It is modeled after the order of the basic offices, however.

Opening Verses – Two opening verses are provided, and they both point us to the provision and providence of God.  He is the source of mercy and forgiveness (Daniel 9:9) and salvation and deliverance from death (Psalm 68:20).

Psalm 146 – This is the Psalm that showed up in four different lists, or categories, of psalms that were mentioned by Archbishop Beach in his statement nearly a week ago.  Psalm 146 calls upon God’s people to place their trust in Him, and not “in prince, nor in any child of man.”  God’s loving care for various vulnerable echelons of society and humanity are rehearsed, and the psalm both begins and ends with the great laudate – praise the Lord!

Lessons – Like Midday Prayer or Compline, just a little snippet of Scripture is to be read.  This is primarily an office of prayer, after all.  But the Scriptures must nevertheless guide our prayers, and so we hear from Philippians 4 or Jeremiah 17 or James 5; the first two of which remind us not to be anxious, and the third reminds of the penitential reality of hard times: there is a very important link between sickness and confession of sin.

The Prayers – Again like Midday Prayer and Compline, we start off with some basics – here the Kyrie (Lord have mercy…) and the Lord’s Prayer.  These are followed by the prayer from the 1662 Prayer Book that I mentioned on Friday.

The Five Collects – This is the unique feature of this office of prayer.  Five groups of prayers (most of which are collects, but let’s not get hung up on nit-picks) are appointed:

  1. Preparatory Prayers = more generic prayers to set the tone and capture the spirit of the times
  2. For those who are vulnerable, at risk, or sick = specific petitions for various demographics and groups, ultimately praying for the suffering and the needy
  3. For those who are responsible for others = specific petitions for those who care for the sick, for the infrastructure and leadership, and even the media, all of whom play they parts for good or for ill during a crisis
  4. For peace of mind = these prayers are especially for the benefit of you, us, all who are praying, so that God’s people might be a people of peace, and not of fear
  5. Concluding prayer = prayers that turn it all back over to God, or even adopt a posture of thankfulness for his action already

The idea is that you pray one prayer from each of these five categories, thus customizing this office to the need or passion or concern of the moment, and preventing it from becoming overly long and burdensome.  If you have the stamina and attention span and time to pray more of these prayers, by all means do!  It is the progression of these five sorts of prayers that is important: Setting the Scene, Praying for those in need, Praying for those who act, Praying for ourselves, and Placing it all in God’s hands, is a logical and spiritually sound movement of prayer that I believe will be a refreshing and grounding for the panicked soul.

The Blessing – Despite the near-universality of 2 Corinthians 13:14 as a closing blessing, I opted instead for the beginning of Psalm 67, which calls upon God’s “saving health”.  This is, I think the perfect double-meaning for such an office of prayer, health referring both to bodily wholeness as well as spiritual wholeness – salvation.

It is my hope that mini-offices of prayer such as this one will help many find peace in these times of turmoil, and steer the storm-tossed soul on a steadier path of faithful prayer.