The Book of Common Prayer, 1979 Daily Office

The Book of Common Prayer, 1979 (BCP 1979) stands in a tradition in which ‘except for linguistic changes and the addition of prayers, the structure and texts of Morning and Evening Prayer have remained constant in every Book of Common Prayer since 1549’.Footnote ⁸ However, it did involve some minor innovations; for it included not only orders for morning and evening but also for prayer at noon-day and night-time, as well as some rather stiff ‘daily devotions for individuals and families’. The latter followed the same structure as the formal offices and also adopted the same – rather formal – register of language. And arguably, the BCP 1979 most notably provided an attractive version of the ancient rite of lamp-lighting, for the opening of vespers, which begins with the church (or home) darkened before (altar- and other) candles are lit to illumine the space for prayer.Footnote ⁹ Otherwise, the BCP’s morning and evening prayer do indeed look much like forms of the Daily Office kept since the seventeenth century. The 1979 book’s daily offices also look closely akin to their then counterparts in the Church of England’s contemporaneous prayer-book, the Alternative Service Book, 1980 (ASB). But much has happened in liturgical renewal since the Episcopal Church produced its BCP 1979, including with respect to daily prayer, and the Episcopal Church and the Church of England have not been the only Anglican churches to radically reshape their provisions.

Around the Anglican Communion

Given the proviso that ‘it is virtually impossible to generalize about the newer revisions, since there are so many variations among the provinces of the Anglican Communion’,Footnote ¹⁰ it is nevertheless possible to note at least some broad trends – for example, an increasing tendency ‘to permit greater flexibility to suit the needs of particular communities and to reflect seasonal movement through the liturgical year’Footnote ¹¹ – as well as to note particular interesting features of recent rites.

The shift to greater seasonal emphasis became more emphatic in the 1980s. For whereas the BCP 1979 had included only the most minimal seasonal provision – mainly just a short sentence of Scripture varying here and there, or minimal provision of seasonal collectsFootnote ¹² – in 1985, the Anglican Church of Canada’s Book of Alternative Services (BAS) greatly enriched seasonal provisions by employing several evocative berakah prayers at the opening of evening prayer (the opening itself now being described as ‘The Service of Light’). For Lent, for example, this one:

Vivid prayers such as this shape The Service of Light. They were drawn from a Roman Catholic source, as were short psalm-prayers throughout the Canadian book’s psalter – albeit from a different Roman source, and in the case of the psalm-prayers having been refracted through their earlier use in a Lutheran publication. The ecumenical character of Anglican forms of prayer is readily evident in the Book of Alternative Services, even as it is also deeply indebted to the Episcopal Church’s BCP 1979.Footnote ¹⁴ In the case of what the BAS calls ‘the Divine Office’, there are creative additions to the rubrics of the rite, with provision of a unison prayer (a line drawn from Psalm 141), and the foregrounding of the use of incense – something which is mentioned only in the ancillary directions of the BCP 1979Footnote ¹⁵ rather than the order itself.

Also throughout the Canadian book are, for each cluster of services, pastoral and pedagogical introductions. The one for everyday services outlines contemporary scholarship which distinguishes between ‘urban’ and ‘desert’ forms of daily prayer in the early traditions of the church,Footnote ¹⁶ their particular synthesis in early Anglican books, and ongoing legacy, as well as practical notes on the contemporary enactment of the office, in which pray-ers using the BAS are encouraged to approach its resources with creativity and adapt them as needed to the circumstances of the persons praying, and to the place and occasion of prayer.Footnote ¹⁷ One service among the cluster that constitutes the divine office was, over time, perhaps found to be less adaptable, and so in 2001, ‘Night Prayer: An Order for Compline’ was published in a bookletFootnote ¹⁸ that also included two new Services of the Word, some new expansive language eucharistic prayers, and two ‘Meditations on the Lord’s Prayer’ – one of which had previously featured in A New Zealand Prayer Book’s Night Prayer (see below), while the other made a different expansive language revision of the Prayer That Jesus Taught,Footnote ¹⁹ beginning with an address not to ‘Our Father’, but to ‘Abba, Amma, Beloved’.Footnote ²⁰

The 1989 book of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia, A New Zealand Prayer Book Footnote ²¹ (NZPB), was another landmark. This provided a form of morning and evening prayer suitable for ‘public worship’ – a ‘Service of the Word’Footnote ²² – but also offered a range of ‘Daily Services’ as the basis for a ‘regular spiritual discipline commended to all’.Footnote ²³ These daily services were simplified versions of the public service, and further adaptation of them was also very much encouraged. Each day of the week was given its own simple pattern of opening sentence, New Testament reading, informal prayer and song of praise. Usually the song of praise was a scriptural canticle, but on occasion use was made of a local creation such as the ‘Benedicite Aotearoa’ which ‘riffs’ on the ancient song: ‘You Maori and Pakeha, women and men, all who inhabit the long white cloud…’.Footnote ²⁴ As well as the different forms of this simple pattern for each day of the week, the NZPB also included even more informal ‘Daily Devotions’. These daily devotions were shaped around the structure of the Prayer That Jesus Taught and core passages of the Gospels. As just one illustration of their register and tone, on Monday mornings the opening fragment of the Prayer That Jesus Taught is followed by a devotion:

This example also shows another most notable feature of the book, not only in its daily provisions, but across the whole: it took seriously the multi-cultural context and constituency of its users by employing not only English but Maori and various Pacific Islander languages. English and languages other than English stand side by side on the pages of the book.

A New Zealand Prayer Book had some other striking features: notably, it took seriously the presence of children in daily prayer by providing ‘family prayer’ resources in simple English, quite in contrast to the formal register of the Episcopal Church BCP 1979’s daily devotions for individuals and families. A confession in the NZPB’s resources for family prayer reads:

As so much else in the book, the resources for everyday prayer also embraced emerging concern for inclusive and expansive language by avoiding male-gendered imagery. One prayer, for instance, a ‘song to the Holy Spirit’, is by well-known New Zealander poet James K. Baxter, and uses images of God as sunshine, mother eagle, bright cloud, kind fire and singer of songs in the hearts of the poor.Footnote ²⁷ NZPB’s form of night prayer is entirely shaped by expansive language and incorporates a version of the Prayer That Jesus Taught composed by Jim Cotter and further shaped in feminist communities of women-church:

A New Zealand Prayer Book quickly became popular in many parts of the Anglican Communion, and greatly shaped developments in at least some elsewheres. Its influence was of no less than three kinds: first, its fresh, simple, sometimes quite terse style of English language came to influence some other resources. Secondly, its embrace of expansive language and languages other than English modelled an approach to issues of ‘inclusivity’ in the liturgy which has been little followed, but which points to ongoing struggles with feminist perspectives and theologies of advocacy in some churches of the Anglican Communion.Footnote ²⁹ Thirdly, its extensive provisions of services for every day of the week – and of both ‘daily services’ and ‘daily devotions’ – set a standard for providing stable, fixed, forms to shape daily services. Within these stable forms it drew in material – prayers, canticles, responses – that changed day by day. So it fostered a sense of sloping through the week in a way which represented a very significant development on inherited, more static, provisions in which prayer forms were always the same, day after day.

In England, the influence of the NZPB was accompanied by the widespread use of another resource that also provided services with different levels of in/formality, had lots of flexibility and held a stable pattern with varying texts across the week: the Anglican Franciscan community’s Celebrating Common Prayer (CCP) of 1992,Footnote ³⁰ which was able to be brought into wide use under English Canons through recent provisions for A Service of the Word in the Church of England.Footnote ³¹ Like NZPB, it provided daily services, but made its own advance by, in a very intentional and accentuated way, linking the variants for each day of the week to the seasons of the year. Thus, each day was weighted with a strong seasonal emphasis. In seasonal time, the same order would be used every day – the Wednesday order every day in Christmastide, for example.

CCP also provided very user-friendly ‘simple celebrations’ which presented only the shape of the service and the few unison texts needed for participation. These simple celebrations could be organized so that only the presider and readers would need to hop their way around the book, from psalms to collects, and so on. Others could simply hold the book open at one particular place, never need to turn a page, and follow the service set out with only headings, minimal rubrics and a line or two of unison prayer or responses. These pages also featured pictures, line-drawings.Footnote ³² In these simple services especially, the intent was to allow for ‘a form that can be used at home and in the family, or in groups, while it is celebrated at the same time in church. It depends on care being taken to make it true community worship, even when it is used alone.’Footnote ³³

The simple celebrations proved good not only for children, but also helped to inscribe the expectation that newcomers may be present in the praying community, and hence the importance of accessible, welcoming style. For many reasons, this among them, CCP ‘enjoyed wide use across the Anglican Communion’,Footnote ³⁴ and its influence perhaps especially on the Church of England proved to be quite remarkable, as charted below.

The 1995 A Prayer Book for Australia (APBA) also showed some influence by Celebrating Common Prayer, with its orders for each day of the week focusing on a seasonal theme.Footnote ³⁵ It directly incorporated CCP materials, such as the warm opening prayer used each morning:

It is notable, however, that although APBA did make correlations between days of the week and seasonal themes, this was not as accentuated as it would come to be in resources emerging later elsewhere. The more muted emphasis on seasons in prayer books from the Southern Hemisphere perhaps reflects a sense of ill-fit and unease with the alliances between the themes of the liturgical seasons and Northern Hemisphere climatic patterns.Footnote ³⁷ For example, throughout the year, imagery of light and darkness is out of kilter with the seasonal changes of the Australian climate – Lent is not a season of lengthening days, and Advent is by no means a season of darkness. APBA did, however, include A Service of Light for evening-time, using the Roman prayers that featured in the Canadian BAS (although unlike BAS, APBA makes no mention of use of incense, despite using a text from Psalm 141).

It might also be noted that in 2006, the Australian church published an attractive separate booklet of the Daily Services from A Prayer Book for Australia. This comprised the daily services themselves, with prayers for various occasions, some blessings and thanksgivings, and the collects for throughout the year. The booklet provided default psalms whereas the prayer book version had not, and it also included ‘Prayer At the End of Day (also called ComplineFootnote ³⁸ )’, but omitted A Service of the Light. This notwithstanding, what was provided, in 110 pages, created (for the purposes of daily prayer at least) a much more usable resource than the 850-page APBA itself, perhaps especially helpful for the contexts of ministry from which requests for a more usable book initially came. According to the introductory note to the booklet, defence force chaplains asked that the daily services be issued for use in the field.Footnote ³⁹ (Some other churches have also made booklet sized versions of their resources for everyday prayer, while others such as the Church of EnglandFootnote ⁴⁰ and the Church of IrelandFootnote ⁴¹ have made all of their materials freely available through the Internet, which has greatly enabled the local production of accessible paperwork for everyday prayer.Footnote ⁴² )

The Anglican Church of the Province of Kenya’s Our Modern Services (OMS) of 2002 is harder to place within the trajectory being sketched, standing somewhat outside the BAS/NZPB/CCP trends, but it is most interesting nevertheless. It makes no provision beyond ‘Morning Worship’, ‘Evening Worship’, and ‘Late Evening Prayer (Compline)’.Footnote ⁴³ Only the brief rubric before Compline notes that ‘it may be used in church, in conferences, at home or (for) any other appropriate place or purpose’,Footnote ⁴⁴ while rubrics for morning and evening referring to processions, assembly song, and so on, suggest a larger gathering is in mind for those services. The language used is sometimes vivid, for example at the opening of prayer in the morning:

Or, in the confession, God is approached thus:

Interestingly, images of light are, at least sometimes, not paired with darkness,Footnote ⁴⁷ but with heaviness: ‘Grant us the joy of forgiveness and lighten our hearts with the glory of Christ, who died and rose again for us’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Interesting Trinitarian idioms are also used:

Music is central to the Kenyan services. For example, a wording of the Magnificat is given which can be sung to tunes used for ‘How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds’,Footnote ⁵⁰ a verse of ‘Rock of Ages’ is used in Compline, and choruses are put to use – a song which echoes Psalm 134Footnote ⁵¹ in the evening and a verse of ‘Seek Ye First’ (‘Ask and it shall be given unto you…’) is used both morning and evening to lead into the Prayer That Jesus Taught, which may itself be sung to a popular tune.Footnote ⁵² ‘Prayerful choruses’ are also commended during the prayers of the people.Footnote ⁵³ Also in OMS, a note draws special attention to the offertory: ‘it is encouraged that the leader first exhorts the Christians to give generously for the Lord’s work’.Footnote ⁵⁴ And some prayers make local references; so for example, blessings for crops and livestock are included:

with the blessing then turning to family members and the sick and mourning, orphans and widows.Footnote ⁵⁶ Reflecting local produce, a canticle based on Habakkuk 3 switches images from olives to mangoes: ‘Though the mango tree does not blossom … yet I will rejoice…’.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, other new prayers are less dependent on the local context:

The relative informality of some of what is found in the Kenyan resources also became a mark of much of the Church of England’s Common Worship: Daily Prayer (CWDP),Footnote ⁵⁹ of 2006, even if the English book draws little from the Kenyan resources themselves. CWDP is itself a book – one of several in the Common Worship range (with others providing for initiation, pastoral and episcopal services, and so on) – that at 902 pages is larger than the entire A Prayer Book for Australia. Largely based on Celebrating Common Prayer, CWDP provides full services of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, as well as an analogue to what CCP called ‘simple celebrations’, which in CWDP become ‘Prayer During the Day’. Both prayer in the morning and evening and Prayer During the Day have forms which are indebted to CCP, but not quite the same.Footnote ⁶⁰ Notably, rather than focus seasonal themes on a day of the week, as CCP had done, in CWDP seasons and days are separated out, so that one set of orders is provided for use in particular seasons, and another for the days of the week in ordinary time. The book as a whole contains Compline, manifold canticles, forms of intercession, collects and full psalter, with the psalter using both psalm-prayers (following BAS and CCP) and also adding a new feature, refrains, which can be repeated throughout. For Psalm 34, for example, the repeated refrain is ‘O taste and see that the Lord is gracious’ (repeating verse 8a several times throughout) and Psalm 57 has the closing psalm-prayer:

CWDP also provides striking additional material that allows for the enrichment of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, such as an ‘Acclamation of Christ at the Dawning of the Day’ for morning, The Blessing of Light for evening, and pieces adopted from CCP in the wealth of short rites in thanksgiving for the word,Footnote ⁶² for baptism,Footnote ⁶³ for healing,Footnote ⁶⁴ for mission,Footnote ⁶⁵ and for unity,Footnote ⁶⁶ as well as prayers at the foot of the cross for Fridays (at least outside Christmas, Epiphany and Easter),Footnote ⁶⁷ a commemoration of the resurrection,Footnote ⁶⁸ and vigil office.Footnote ⁶⁹ Quite apart from the merit of the texts themselves – in which berakahs, as BAS, are often central – these additional materials are significant for enabling actions. The berakah for the Word, for example, reads

As for actions, not only is the burning of incense encouraged in the Service of Light,Footnote ⁷¹ but, for example, the thanksgiving for baptism is to be celebrated at the font and may involve the people being sprinkled or using the water to sign themselves with the cross, the thanksgiving for healing may involve anointing of persons, and prayers at the foot of the cross may involve ‘any of those present [coming] forward to touch the cross. They may, for example, place their forehead on it as a sign of entrusting to God, in union with Christ and his suffering, their own burdens as well as those of others.’Footnote ⁷²

This attention to the embodied dimensions of worship is continuous with the feature of various Church of England resources since 1989’s Patterns for Worship,Footnote ⁷³ to give guidance and advice about the setting of the texts in space and ceremonial scenes. Indeed, an introductory section of CWDP, called ‘Setting the Scene’, is characteristic of the entire range of the Common Worship volumes in attending to questions of liturgical action and environment. In this, CWDP and its companion volumes in the Common Worship range can be seen to have taken to heart the value of the pastoral and pedagogical introductions that were first developed in the Canadian BAS. For its part, CWDP highlights ‘attention to the place of prayer’ and suggests the like of sitting ‘in a semi-circle in an appropriately sized space, around a lectern on which the Bible is placed, rather than behind each other in pews’,Footnote ⁷⁴ sitting before an open Bible, or a cross, a candle, an icon, or some symbol of the season, and in fact using ‘anything that helps to give a sense of sharing in the prayer of the whole Church’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Prayer During the Day (PDD) is the most innovative part of CWDP. It is intended as ‘a simple starting point for common daily prayer’,Footnote ⁷⁶ trying to provide ‘a pattern which would be shared with others’ by those who keep ‘a daily Quiet Time, for reading Scripture and for praying’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The introductory notes suggest that some may use PDD as their sole act of prayer and praise each day, while others will use it with Night Prayer to frame the day, as it were, and that others again may well use it at midday in between fuller offices in morning and evening, just as yet others will use the PDD provisions as an analogue to the Roman Office of Readings, adopting a more ‘desert’ style at this service while using the provisions for morning and evening in more of a ‘city’ mode.Footnote ⁷⁸

The structure of Prayer During the Day is itself very simple, beginning with a versicle and verse of Scripture – for example, on Sunday:

A ‘Praise’ section then allows for ‘a hymn, song, canticle, extempore praise’ or a brief text provided, for example on Tuesday, a portion of the Carmina Gadelica:

The main section is then on the word, in which a suggested psalm and reading is given in a four-week patternFootnote ⁸¹ – though the notes make clear that any number of ways of Bible reading are encouraged. The word section is followed with ‘Response’: ‘Silence, study, song, or words from Scripture’,Footnote ⁸² before ‘Prayers’ with biddings based on a cycleFootnote ⁸³ and a collect – either of the day or as an alternative, a default collect usually drawn from a classic treasury including Alcuin, Anselm, Augustine, Benedict, and so on – and then the Prayer That Jesus Taught, before a brief word of conclusion, with, in seasonal time, a strong seasonal theme.

However they are used, all of the CWDP materials are constructed as, in one way or another, ‘variations on a common theme – praying the Bible together’,Footnote ⁸⁴ and thus promoting a sense of unity among people through shared lectionary resources in, and common shapeFootnote ⁸⁵ to, the form of prayer. The common shape, spanning more traditional pathways through morning and evening prayer and also the more creative approach to everyday prayer fostered by Prayer During the Day, patterns everything around ‘three key elements’: ‘praise, intercession and engagement with Scripture’.Footnote ⁸⁶ As such, CWDP, with its very different forms, is quite deliberately conceived as a resource to shape habits of daily prayer not only among the clergy but among the whole laos, the entire people of God, in their different kinds of lifestyles. Its flexibility is intended to enable persons with very different daily demands and responsibilities, commitments and communities, to nevertheless find their way to somehow ‘being part of a wider community of prayer’.Footnote ⁸⁷

Through all these developments, the Episcopal Church had itself also been crafting new resources for daily prayer. In 1998, Enriching Our Worship 1 (EOW) emerged, and included new materials with a strong care for language, very intentionally moving away from what it called ‘Paterfamilias’ depictions of the divine.Footnote ⁸⁸ But Enriching Our Worship itself stressed that its materials were incomplete, and needed further work.Footnote ⁸⁹ While doing much more than most other offerings from around the Anglican Communion to avoid gendered language and to foster expansive language,Footnote ⁹⁰ it did not, however, make much progress with respect to other concerns it highlighted as important: ‘multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual and multigenerational’ Footnote ⁹¹ challenges. Unlike the NZPB, it used no languages other than English between its covers, and although drawing attention to the reality that ‘[n]on-verbal language – the language of gesture, movement, sign – will always override the text of the prayer’,Footnote ⁹² unlike CWDP it did not offer any guidance in crafting and caring for the wider ritual context of whatever words are used, providing only texts. The texts themselves included some opening sentences on seasonal themes, a confession and an alternative to the Gloria Patri (which reads, ‘Praise to the holy and undivided Trinity, one God: as it was in the beginning…’Footnote ⁹³ ) and responses to the readings which all steer clear of gendered language.Footnote ⁹⁴ It included many of the canticles which were introduced by CCP, including ones which used expansive language, such as the non-biblical ones from texts by Anselm of Canterbury and Julian of Norwich depicting Christ as mother.Footnote ⁹⁵

Daily Prayer for All Seasons

The latest Episcopal Church resource, Daily Prayer for All Seasons (DPFAS) was published in 2014. Its notes betray some reliance on Enriching Our Worship, but much more obvious is that the 2014 book strikes out on its own in numerous ways. Although it carries the copyright of the ‘Office of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church’, unlike other Episcopal Church liturgical resources, this one names the persons who shaped it. The group of persons was chaired by a priest, Julia Wakelee-Lynch, in Berkeley, California, and the group also included the three professors of liturgy then at Berkeley’s Church Divinity School of the Pacific: Louis Weil, Lizette Larson-Miller, and Ruth A. Meyers – the last also being the chairwoman of the Episcopal Church’s Standing Committee on Liturgy and Music. The group describes itself as diverse, from all over the United States, recognizing ‘the need for prayer and the short time they had for prayer’, with jobs and families, grocery-shopping, gardening and ironing to do, subway trains to catch, doctors to see, and reports to write.Footnote ⁹⁶ The demands on their lives, the pressures on their time and energies, were intentionally placed ‘on the table’ as they worked on DPFAS. What they have produced together is intended as a ‘prayer book for all of us, clergy and laity, who think we’re too busy to pray’.Footnote ⁹⁷ They suggest that ‘praying the hours’ ‘has always reminded us that God walks with us throughout each day’,Footnote ⁹⁸ and that common prayer is a way of the community of faith coming together whether its members are ‘all in one place or scattered like raindrops’.Footnote ⁹⁹ DPFAS is said to ‘work for individuals, small groups, and/or congregations’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Several introductory pages – helpful, but scant – give further account of the group’s work and of the book’s contents.

In those introductory pages, the BCP 1979 is said to have offered ‘beautiful services’ for morning, noon, evening and night-time, ‘all under the heading “The Daily Office,”’ whereas DPFAS is ‘a variation on that theme’, not least in providing services that are all shorter than the BCP 1979’s everyday services. Attention is drawn to the fact that some complete services in DPFAS cover one or two pages at most, and that there is no need to shuffle prayer books and hymnals.Footnote ¹⁰¹ What isn’t highlighted in that statement is that the Bible does not need to be shuffled in making use of DPFAS – a point to which more attention will be given below. Significantly, DPFAS presses far beyond the BCP 1979’s provision that ‘on occasion, at the discretion of the Minister, a reading from non-biblical Christian literature may follow the biblical Readings’Footnote ¹⁰² to incorporate, every day, not only non-biblical material, but sometimes material drawn from other religious or ‘non-religious’ sources: ‘poetry, meditation and prayers from the broader community of faith’.Footnote ¹⁰³ These portions of the services are one of the key ways in which, in a certain continuity with EOW, DPAS provides a variety of images of God using expansive language.

Daily Prayer for All Seasons includes eight forms, organized around the seasons of the liturgical calendar, and which intend to ‘track the events’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ of Jesus’ birth through to the coming of the Spirit to the church. This means that the relatively short periods of Holy Week and Christmas receive their own forms, while in the case of the longest season, ordinary time, two orders are provided (one on the theme of creation, the other on the theme of rest), allowing for some variety.

These eight forms shape what DPFAS calls its ‘outer structure’. An ‘inner structure’ sits within the outer one, and consists of eight ‘hours’, modelled on ‘the pattern of Benedictine monks’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It is the ‘rhythm between work (labora) and prayer (ora)’ in the Benedictine pattern which is felt by the group to be so significant in DPFAS, and their product assigns a specific labour to each hour: so

1. – dawn (Lauds) is paired with praise

2. – start of day (Prime) is paired with discernment

3. – later morning (Terce), with wisdom

4. – mid-day (Sext), with perseverance and renewal

5. – afternoon (None), with love

6. – evening (Vespers), with forgiveness

7. – bed-time (Compline), with trust

8. – and mid-night (Vigils), with watching

The Latin names of the Benedictine hours are preserved, but as ancillary to DPFAS’s own contemporary pairing of a service and a work or labour.

Some of the orders are weightier than others, filling out a common shape shared by them all. The simplest services (midnight and dawn) are those that are just one or two pages long and are a ‘basic form’ that is intended for private use. In these midnight and dawn services, material is organized under five key headings:

1. – Entering (a short call-and-response emphasizing the theme of the hour)

2. – Scripture (a brief passage)

3. – Meditation (‘a question or a prompt for spiritual reflection’)

4. – Prayer (a closing collect)

5. – Going Out/Closing (as Entering)

Longer services (for late morning, midday, afternoon and bedtime) add other things to this pattern:

1. – Prayer/Opening Collect (geared to time or season)

2. – Praise (a hymn, psalm, or canticle)

3. – Meditation (an ‘inspirational’ quotation preceding a question or prompt)

4. – Responsive prayers of the people, with space for personal intercession and thanksgiving

5. – the Prayer That Jesus Taught (which can be prayed in ‘the language of the heart’)

In this second cluster of services, pronouns move from singular to plural, ‘I’ to ‘we’, to reflect that they are primarily intended for group use – although they may be adapted for individual use.

Two services (start of day and evening) are the longest and fullest, and again are intended for group use and may be adapted for individual use. In morning-time there is the further addition of an affirmation of faith, and in evening-time there is the addition of an invitation to repentance (shaped in such a way that it does not involve a formal absolution, and so may be led by a lay leader).

Even to those familiar with the spirituality of settled Benedictine communities, this pattern may of course seem complicated, but it is followed consistently so that it may perhaps quite quickly be picked up in practice. And there are other continuities which lend the pattern stability. One example is the use of a Taizé chant at the opening of each celebration of Lauds.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Another is the rubric, in the mood of a pastoral introduction, at the head of each service, which remains the same throughout the year: so for Vigils: ‘Like nuns and monks at prayer, we can listen in the stillness of the night to hear God’s call’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Across the whole, some liturgical forms commonly associated with daily prayer find repeated use, so the Magnificat is used at various places.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ (The Hail Mary – or at least the first, ‘biblical’, part of it – also appearsFootnote ¹⁰⁹ ).

The consistency of the (albeit complex) pattern of prayer is the context for an extraordinary diversity of content within the shape. Some of that is in continuity with EOW (and other resources around the Anglican Communion) by making use of expansive language canticles (so Julian of Norwich’s ‘Song of True Motherhood’ is used as an act of praise at Terce in Advent, for example).Footnote ¹¹⁰ A wide range of music also features in the praise sections: African-American Christian spirituality is represented in the inclusion of assembly song from the hymnal Lift Every Voice and Sing Footnote ¹¹¹ among a mix of pieces from the 1982 Hymnal and more recent Episcopal Church musical resources such as Wonder, Love and Praise.Footnote ¹¹² Like much material in the latter hymn book as well as EOW, DPFAS is concerned to minimize gendered language, though perhaps somewhat oddly, while language of Fatherhood is marginal in DPFAS,Footnote ¹¹³ that of Lordship is ever-present. That notwithstanding, ‘Beloved’, ‘Wisdom’, and ‘Holy One’ are much-repeated invocations of God.

Interestingly, only one of the prayer books from around the Anglican Communion, noted above, is mentioned in the notes to DPFAS.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Considerable use is made of the BCP 1979 itself,Footnote ¹¹⁵ albeit in a way that remixes the BCP 1979 material within a framework that creates a very different ambience.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Otherwise, one of the most-used sources is the ecumenical collection of Revised Common Lectionary Prayers,Footnote ¹¹⁷ which is employed especially for the opening collects. These sometimes have a quite different register of language from their BCP 1979 counterparts. Sext in Advent’s collect, for example, reads: ‘may Jesus, who is Emmanuel and son of Mary, be more than just a dream in our hearts’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Other prayers maintain this register, which is sometimes informal or somewhat colloquial: for example, God is addressed as one who ‘understand[s] us like a friend’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Other prayers are notable in that they break from traditional patterns in having no referent, as one beginning ‘Wisdom is brilliant; she never fades…’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Some of these characteristics carry over into other pieces of the services, so the Advent affirmation at Prime is quite unlike the creeds contained in the services of the BCP, making reference instead to

Other affirmations are drawn from an ecumenical array, and some do have a more creedal ‘feel’, such as the United Church of Canada’s well-known affirmation, ‘We are not alone; we live in God’s world…’.Footnote ¹²² Sometimes the introductionsFootnote ¹²³ to the seasons carry ‘traditional’ descriptions of theological concepts which are then given a lower profile in the liturgical forms that follow, marked as they are by a strong pictorial bent or informal style: the introduction to the Christmas season, for example, confesses the doctrine of the Incarnation in a more extensive way than the ‘Women’s Creed’Footnote ¹²⁴ which is used as the affirmation in that season.

The questions for meditation sometimes resemble the kinds of material used in the emergent church practice of ‘open space’.Footnote ¹²⁵ The question for Lauds in Advent reads, ‘How will I look for God’s glory today? How will I help others to see it?’,Footnote ¹²⁶ the question at Compline in that season, ‘How shall we travel through the darkness of Advent?’Footnote ¹²⁷ The texts used to prompt mediation are very eclectic. So at Sext in Epiphany, Leo Tolstoy is quoted: ‘In the name of God, stop a moment, close your work, look around you’;Footnote ¹²⁸ at Compline in the same season, Denise Levertov’s poem ‘Candlemas’;Footnote ¹²⁹ at Prime in Epiphany a quotation from Terry Tempest Williams, about the colour of birds’ eyes.Footnote ¹³⁰ The meditation for Compline in Lent is another about birds, though this time from the eighth-century Chinese poet Li-Po:

For None in Holy Week, the fifteenth-century Sikh guru KabirFootnote ¹³² is quoted:

For Terce in Easter, a Native American prayer is used,Footnote ¹³⁴ and for Lauds along the ordinary time theme of creation, a Dakota hymn is offered, including a portion in its original language.Footnote ¹³⁵ This is one instance where DPFAS advances EOW’s concern for multicultural and multilingual material. Brief fragments of languages other than English, such as ChineseFootnote ¹³⁶ and Spanish,Footnote ¹³⁷ also appear.

Daily Prayer for All Seasons: Affirmations and Questions

Many of these aspects of DPFAS might well be regarded as attractive features of the new book; yet at the same time, some of them may perhaps provoke questions. On the affirmative side, in its own way DPFAS can be seen as a way of putting daily prayer into the hands of the people, and so in continuity with the clear intention of the 1662 BCP, and what it presumed to be daily services for everyone, hence, in the case of the seventeenth-century service, to be heralded by the ringing of a bell so that parishioners might join. In its own time, DPFAS accepts that communities might now be ‘scattered like raindrops’ and yet hopes that praying persons, in the midst of their different routines, might still converge around DPFAS’ resources, albeit in many cases adapting them as need may be. So DPFAS can be praised as an ‘attempt to make the daily services more accessible and widely used’.Footnote ¹³⁸ On the other hand, perhaps more negatively, it might be questioned whether the restoration of multiple hours will be as helpful as hoped, at least for some people. The book, initially at least, may seem very complicated (a critique to which some other recent offerings from around the Anglican Communion – and not least the 902 page CWDP – are arguably also vulnerable, for all that they in their different ways try to promote accessibility). For DPFAS, the fixedness of the default orders, their presentation without adaptation, is one way of trying to nurture user-friendliness, though perhaps clues might have been taken from the production of such as CWDP as to how more attention to graphic design could have helped that aim. Using page headers and footers that indicate the season is just one simple way in which presentation might have been improved;Footnote ¹³⁹ making more careful use of sense lines for the texts might be another.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Given the book’s presumption of lay leadership (in, for example, its use of assurance of pardon rather than absolution),Footnote ¹⁴¹ more care about style matters may be crucial for future editions.

Other questions, arguably more theologically important, present in terms of the content of the resource. While Scripture is, in one way or another, part of every hour, a constant in every service, the provision of default texts only – without notes about how some kind of lectionary scheme might be incorporated, nor connections made with practices of Quiet TimeFootnote ¹⁴² – there is an unacknowledged/undiscussed shift away from what was unquestionably regarded as the principal point of daily prayer in the early Anglican tradition, and for many subsequently. While DPFAS may not contradict the affirmation made in CWDP that ‘[a] church in which people pray the Bible together becomes a church which is equipped for proclamation and service’,Footnote ¹⁴³ the attempt to so equip praying persons is quite different in DPFAS and, for example, CWDP. Of special relevance in this respect, too, is the place of the psalms, used only in ad-hoc ways in DPFAS. The centrality of psalms to the Benedictine tradition is not what DPFAS has appropriated from the Benedictine legacy. Indeed, in the cases of both psalmody and lectionary, it might be thought that DPFAS presumes that those who are busy and find prayer a challenge need not be much encouraged to engage either deeply or extensively with Scripture. Paul Bradshaw has recently asserted that ‘the traditional Anglican assertion that the Daily Offices ought to be founded upon the recitation of the whole Psalter and the systematic reading of the Bible is at least questionable’,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ and DPFAS may be the first Anglican resource to enact that questionability. While other aspects of a liturgical spirituality are foregrounded, and foregrounded well, in DPFAS – for example, the strong pattern of the annual calendar marks it – it is hardly defined by Scripture as its core resource.

This judgment might be made at least in terms of comparison with the role that other Anglican resources for everyday prayer give to the place of Bible reading. And in this and in other ways, DPFAS is, by and large, strangely disconnected from wider recent Anglican developments, including from where Enriching Our Worship left off in the renewal of worship in the Episcopal Church.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Also striking is that rather than promoting the flexibility of forms now found in many places elsewhere, DPFAS opts to restore a rather fixed approach to the monastic hours. Other churches in the Anglican family have expanded morning and evening prayer to noon-day and night-time, and provided very flexible forms for anytime, but none have gone as far as DPFAS to restore the full monastic cycle. Of course, DPFAS encourages adaptation of what it does with the hours.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ But then there are, unlike the material in CWDP for example, no models of adaption, nor guidance about how to do it.

In a contemporary context, especially one in which Benedictine patterns are not familiar, the manifold prayer-times in DPFAS may perhaps look to have taken clues from the patterns of prayer of Muslim friends and neighbours breaking their daily routines for salat, the brief five-fold daily prayer which is a pillar of Islamic observance. There is nothing wrong with that, and indeed, it may be a very good thing, but the point to note is that it is a tactic unlike the one taken in the (albeit partial, piecemeal) similarities evolving around the Anglican Communion about the shape of daily prayer. The new Episcopal Church resources may well enable those who use them to punctuate their day with opportunity for praise and for moments of meditation. And that may be ideal for some commuters on the subway, or drivers able to pull into a lay-by, or homemakers settling down for a few minutes of rest with coffee in hand, able to duck into prayer before diving back into their tasks and routines – and, moreover, Muslim colleagues sometimes doing something similar might very well embolden them. But DPFAS may be less strong as a resource which enables Episcopalians to pray with a lively sense of solidarity with their Anglican peers elsewhere in the Communion whose patterns of prayer, for all that there is considerable diversity, nevertheless may look more like each other’s, whereas DPFAS strikes out on different paths. Some years before DPFAS it was of course already the case that ‘Anglicans no longer pray the same psalms, proclaim the same portions of scripture, sing the same canticles, or pray the same litanies or collects’,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ but now DPFAS has propelled that dynamic of increasing difference.

Anglican Identity and Liturgical Diversity

When DPFAS is placed alongside developments elsewhere, as sketched above, questions might also be raised about what the churches of the Anglican Communion count as the basic resources for daily prayer. Perhaps the Church of England has done the most extensive work to reconsider notions of ‘common prayer’, defining such around a ‘common core’ which might discipline diversity:

1. – a recognizable structure for worship

2. – an emphasis on reading the word and on using psalms

3. – liturgical words repeated by the congregation, some of which, like the creed, would be known by heart

4. – using a collect, the Lord’s prayer, and some responsive forms of prayer

5. – a recognition of the centrality of the Eucharist

6. – a concern for form, dignity and economy of words

7. – a willingness to use forms and prayers which can be used across a broad spectrum of Christian belief.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

CWDP is marked by these dynamics, in obvious ways (clearly bar the third to last one). The International Anglican Liturgical Consultation, although it has made some concentration on liturgical formation,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ has not yet gathered for a wider conversation on daily prayer. If and when it does, it may be a challenge to chart a course between – or to encircle – the pathways in quite different directions recently taken by constituent churches with respect to their everyday services. The differences may of course be deemed appropriate to different cultural contexts, and if so, then debate about prayer will reflect dynamics about many other issues facing the Communion. And whatever the inter-Anglican scenario, a further question relating to the challenge of inscribing some commonality into Anglican forms of daily prayer arises from comparison to efforts to renew daily prayer among ecumenical counterparts. Evangelical Lutheran Worship is the latest of a larger pool of resources that have emerged across the North American ecumenical spectrum, at least of old-line churches.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ To say, as does John Gibaut, that

may well be correct, but it is not to distinguish Anglican tradition from other traditions in any highly distinctive way. DPFAS has added new texture to this scenario.

Learning again and again to pray may require encouragement from world Communion and ecumenical partners, the example of friends and neighbours of other faiths, knowing things about monastic communities, gleaning from emergent church practices, learning disciplines of Scripture reading, and taking a wide view of ‘common worship’ that welcomes different kinds of resources – all able to be adapted to local need and the varied circumstances of scattered companions in prayer. At least, all of this has a place in contemporary Anglican openness to the God before whom everyday unfolds, who in their varied prayer Anglican Christians seek and praise: ‘Who is this that appears like the dawn, as fair as the moon, as bright as the sun, majestic like the stars in procession?’ (Song 6.12 [niv]).