The Daily Office in the American Prayer-Book Tradition (original) (raw)

and English Prayer-Books published starting in 1549. Throughout these editions the basic twofold regimen of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer has remained at the core the Prayer-Book tradition. However, the way in which these services are understood in relation to the other offices contained in the Prayer-Book, its structure, its content, and its purpose has changed over the Episcopal Church's existence in order to meet the changing needs and evolving interests of Anglicans in the American context. Indeed, throughout the church's history, texts supplementing or abbreviating the Offices have appeared in order increase their effectiveness in leading the faithful to the worship of God and in Christian formation. These texts seek to resolve the tension between the idea of the Daily Office as means of hallowing time through seasonally and thematically based prayer and the idea of the Daily Office as a means of systematically reading through the canon scripture and the Psalter on a regular basis. Differing parties in the church's history have often emphasized one role over the other and within the several revisions of the American Prayer-Book these influences can be seen. The Daily Office, as expressed in the Anglican tradition, is a basically a Protestant and Reformed adaptation of the medieval Catholic liturgy of hours. The medieval pattern expressed in the continental and English liturgies consisted of a daily cycle of seven hours: Matins, Prime, Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. Biblical warrant for this daily scheme of prayer can be seen in Psalm 119, where the speaker of psalm says, "Seven times a day do I praise thee Comment [k1]: Good observation Comment [k2]: Essentially lectionary versus lectio continua Radzik, David,2 because of thy righteous dealings." 1 The tradition of reciting or singing the Psalms seven times a day grew out of the monastic tradition. The Rule of St. Benedict, which was written in the 8th century C.E., for instance, lays out a specific scheme for reciting the entire psalter on a weekly basis, broken up into seven sections daily. As time went on, however, the services were expanded with increasing complexity, reflecting both the seasons of the Church year and the individual observances of feasts and fasts. In addition to the Psalms and the selected pericopes, were hymns, antiphons, and collects proper to either the season, feast, or feria. Other intricacies developed as a result of two calendrical systems: one based around moveable feasts based date of Easter (Lent, Easter, Pentecost, etc) and the other which consisted of immoveable feasts set on the same date year after year. Inevitably, this led to the possible overlapping of feasts which was handled in the church by an elaborate system of ranking feasts in order to determine which should be celebrated. The convoluted nature of this scheme led the author of Concerning the Services of the Church in the 1662 Prayer-Book to remark, "that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out." 2 This led to a series of services that were not only difficult for the clergy to follow but especially daunting to even the educated layperson of the time. Thomas Cranmer, who was influenced by the Protestant Reformers, wished to revise the liturgy of the English Church in such a way that would promote lay participation and comprehension, while at the same time would keep the liturgy rooted in the medieval practices of daily prayer and the observance of the Christian year. His revision of the Daily Office collapsed five of the seven hours of the day into the two offices of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer,