The Divine Office (and Franciscan Spirituality)

1 TSSF Scottish study week (27th June - 1st July 2011) The Divine Office (and Franciscan Spirituality) This paper is based on a seminar for a group of SSF and OHP novices. It owes a lot to George Guiver CR (Company of Voices) and the explanatory essay in the current and previous editions of The Daily Office SSF. Introduction Desmond Alban SSF My focus is on the Divine Office, a word which comes from the Latin Officium meaning the performance of a task, as in the famous Civil Servant s Hymn in the English Hymnal, Ye servants of the Lord, each in his office wait! An office is a place where we work. An officer is someone with a task to perform. The Divine Office is also a task to be performed, the work of God or Opus Dei. We ll touch on the history of the office, its spirituality, what it s actually for, why we bother with it and on some of its structure and content. 1. History I have in itunes a version of the ancient Jewish Shema, Hear O Israel that claims to be a reconstruction of how that music would have been heard in the time of Christ, but I don t know if I m convinced. You can t be too confident about the sound of music that was played and sung 2000 years before the invention of sound recording. Similarly, there is a danger of overconfidence if we try to say too much about how the very first Christians prayed. We simply don t have detailed descriptions, and Jewish synagogue worship too was not yet settled in to the patterns and structures that get described in historical documents later, but it is undoubtedly fair to describe the Office as a Christian Flower from a Jewish Stem, so if you really want to know where it comes from you probably need to go back at least six centuries before Christ! Going right back to the settlement of the Israel in the Promised Land, the people would be found to be worshipping and using embryo psalms up and down the country at holy places such as Gilgal, Shiloh and Dan, most of which had very likely already been regarded as sacred to the gods of Canaan. Later, at the time of the monarchy, Jerusalem gets added to list, both because it is the royal city and because it houses the Ark of God. In the last quarter of the seventh century BCE, Josiah sweeps away the local shrines and all their corruptions and makes Jerusalem the only place of worship, but hardly has that happened before Jerusalem is captured, the temple despoiled and the elite of the people are carried off to Babylon. In Hebrew worship at that time, to see the Lord, as they put it, was to offer sacrifice to Him, which was only possible in the Temple. So, for instance, in Isaiah 38, when King Hezekiah believes he is dying and laments, I shall not see the Lord in the land of the living he means I shall never again attend a temple sacrifice. 1

2 So in exile, what are they to do? There plight is desperate, and they do the only thing they can. They already have some precious scriptures and they practice their faith by meeting together in groups here and there, in private houses, to read the scriptures, to exhort each other to remain faithful, to teach the young and to pray. Gradually, as numbers increase and when the political climate is tolerant enough they will have special buildings for their meetings, though they never total supersede the private houses, and wherever they are the worshippers eyes and attention will focus on Jerusalem. One thinks of Daniel, opening his window to pray towards Jerusalem three times a day. So, this pattern of non-sacrificial worship developed among the exiled Jews. But when the Exile ended and some of them went home neither they nor those who stayed behind in the Euphrates valley gave it up. Certainly attempts were made to re-inaugurate the sacrificial system amid the temple ruins, and with the rebuilding of the Temple, but both in Babylon and at home this secondary kind of worship continued because it met a need. So in time more and more synagogues as they were later called sprang up as well as the one Temple. Jesus, as a practising Jew, would have worshipped in both the Temple and the Synagogue. Jesus would have been taught to pray at three set times a day as well as at other times of day such as at meals. Prayers were offered daily in the synagogue at morning, midday and evening, and the services at dawn and sundown were the longest and most important. They both emphasised the thought of God s good gift of light, the sun s light and the lamp-light, and the spiritual light he gives to our hearts. The early Christians therefore had a rich heritage to build on, and the book of Acts seems to tell us that they too continued to observe set hours of prayer each day, at the third, sixth and ninth hours, (reckoned from sunrise) and generally the picture is of Christians praying together rather than alone. In the centuries following New Testament times people continued to pray at set times so that even if they were praying alone or in their houses, they were praying with the Church. An important example is the Lucernarium, the prayer at the lighting of the lamps. Although we keep this in this house once a week at Compline, and it is certainly associated with Jewish worship at the start of the Sabbath, in the early Church it was a daily household ritual of hymns and prayers at the lighting of the lamps, the days turning-point when people celebrated the presence of Christ in their lives. As already mentioned, the precise details of both synagogue prayer and Christian prayer in the time of the apostles are just not clear to us. However, as early as the middle second century firmer evidence appears, with consistent references to prayer in the morning, at the third, sixth and ninth hours, in the evening, in the middle of the night and at cockcrow. With respect to these last two, there are a lot of New Testament references to prayer in the hours of darkness. It was a widespread custom for people to get up in the night, pray for a while and then return to bed. Alternatively, there was also the practice of rising some time before the light in order to greet the dawning day with prayer, as Jesus did in Mark 1.35. 2

3 With the conversion of Constantine a new freedom emerged for Christian worship. But so strong too was the Christian sense of the Body of Christ, that people naturally celebrated the daily times of prayer in Church in preference to their own homes. In particular, it was very common to go to Church for a service daily before work, and again in the evening when work was done. But the services weren t much like a quiet Matins or Evening Prayer. George Guiver describes them as a kind of razzmatazz Songs of Praise service, with the clergy processing, candles, incense and rousing music sung with gusto. If people couldn t go to Church they prayed where they were, but they united themselves with the prayers of the gathered faithful. Prayer was not a private matter. This tradition lasted a very long time, but eventually it lost its fresh and popular character. By the ninth century, services in the West were beginning to be taken over entirely by the clergy and by the fourteenth century were completely transformed. They still took place in daily in parish churches, but were sung by the clerics entirely in Latin, which most people didn t understand. A whole change of emphasis on what the Office was for crept in as well. We ll consider what it was and should be for later on, but it began to become a legalistic quota of words which the clergy had by law to get through. Not surprisingly, attendance fell as such services became less popular with the people, and this seems to have been a bit of a vicious circle. The clergy began to carry out what they now saw as merely an onerous duty by reading the words in private rather than singing them with all the believers. The Church s daily liturgy was drying up. Of course, various forms of silent prayer and meditation have always had an important place, but George Guiver argues that the private prayer which we tend to assume to be the norm was in reality a compensation for having lost the proper prayer of the Church. Sometimes people adapted to the loss of the rhythm of prayer in church by keeping it going in simplified ways in the folk tradition, and other forms of prayer strayed further from the liturgy until they became free-standing forms of popular piety, such as the Rosary, with its 150 beads in 15 decades that originated in a simple way of saying the 150 psalms of the Psalter. Guiver writes These devotions largely lost their sense of being the worship of the Church, congregational worship full of a sense of the Body of Christ. They became individual acts of piety, something that early Christians would have thought sad, lonely, and lacking that strong sense of the Body of Christ which flavours all descriptions of prayer in the early years. The coming of the Friars with their itinerant lifestyle meant that it wasn t possible to carry about a whole library of psalters, canticlers and other resources. By the end of the Middle Ages most parish clergy and friars used a breviary, a simpler book of Daily Offices with the seven services for each day. However, the sense of a clerical duty persisted and it was probably common for the seven services to be combined into two large chunks said in the morning and evening in a convenient way of getting the duty to God done and ticked off the list of tasks! For those of us used to the separate offices of Evening Prayer and Night Prayer, we can clearly see how Archbishop Cranmer was following this way of combining offices when we get up to leave 3

4 a celebration of BCP Choral Evensong with a strong sense that somehow we ve already prayed Compline with its Nunc Dimittis as well as the Psalms and Magnificat of Vespers. However, Cranmer was not a rigid mechanical legalist and he was actually reacting against that clericalised form of daily prayer. Certainly, he didn t see his prayer book of 1549 as a final regimentation of Anglican worship, as is shown by his enthusiasm for further revision in 1552, with hints at the time of more revision to come (the final form of 1662 was of course after his lifetime.) Cranmer s strong motivation was actually to wrench daily prayer back out of the exclusive ranks of the clergy and monks and give it back to the people. However, whilst it s true that for middle of the road Anglicans of my mother s generation in their youth, Matins and Evensong with occasional perhaps monthly Holy Communion was the norm for Sunday worship, that wasn t Cranmer s intention. The widespread weekly Parish Eucharist that now exists in the Church of England was actually what Cranmer would have expected, and as for Matins and Evensong, well his intention was that the book of Common Prayer would enable the whole people of God, lay and ordained, to worship together on a daily basis. It was a return in other words to the origins of the Office. A word would be worthwhile at this point however about the role of monasticism and how it led to two contrasting emphases in daily prayer. The Egyptians who fled to the desert to wage spiritual warfare in the 3 rd and 4 th centuries took with them no office book. Rather, a major element of their rigorous and challenging practice was the way that they centred their whole waking life on the perpetual recitation of the entire Psalter. Semper in ore psalmus, simper in corde Christus Always psalms on the lips, always Christ in the heart. When Pachomious began to organise these hermits into centralized communities, their times of common prayer developed from this tradition and took no account of the secular hours of prayer that happened in the cities. So this desert style differed from what happened in the cities. The monks services were in essence simply a communal meditation on the Psalter, read through, as was the hermits custom, in numerical order. There were only two such services daily, but as the monks returned to their manual work they would continue to recite the Psalter. This desert tradition is sometimes called the monastic office, but in practice two types of monastic office existed in those early years. The devoti of Syria in particular began to live in community whilst continuing to worship in the local church, so their office was related to that city tradition. The contrasting Egyptian style of monasticism with its perpetual recitation of the psalter spread to Europe, especially among the Celts, but eventually faded with no direct heirs outside Egypt itself. However, as the devoti began to distance themselves from their parish base they did take on some of the Egyptian ways, and the monastic tradition that then developed was a hybrid of the existing people s and monastic prayer. We can list some of the contrasts: Lesser hours. In theory, these were a discipline for all Christians but in practice they never became popular public worship. However, they became essential in monastic prayer. Ceremonies and music. The early monks were very suspicious of these. In the Fifth Century, Abba Pambo admonished a monk who had been beguiled by Church music he had heard in Alexandria: What kind of 4

5 contrition does the monk have when he... raises his voice like the oxen? whilst another abbot pointed out that singing and melodious tones may be appropriate for secular priests and others, as a means of attracting people to church, but monks live far from the noise of the world, and such things are not good for them. The early monastic office had only very restrained music if any. Elaborate plainchant can actually trace its roots, via the devoti, to the ancient secular Church rather than the monastic. Intercession. This was important in the early people s office but was often absent in the monastic office. Readings. The monastic office included systematic Bible reading in the night office, but the people s office had no readings, except at special vigils. Psalms. The monastics, following that earlier Egyptian practice, prayed the whole psalter in numerical order. In the people s office there were just a small number of fixed psalms, chosen for their relevance. The desert style really emphasises the inward nourishing of the heart through the meditative use of the whole Psalter and extensive scriptures. Despite his emphasis on returning the office to the people, Cranmer followed the monastic or desert tradition. In the Book of Common Prayer, the entire Psalter is recited in order without taking any account of relevance. He also wanted to teach the people by having them exposed to large passages of scripture, four different books of the Bible being read in sequence in the course of Matins and Evensong daily. The psalter that was printed in our SSF Office Book in 1992, represented a return to the original city tradition, with a selective pattern of relevant psalms repeated at appropriate times. That continues in the provision for seasons in the psalms provided in the Common Worship Lectionary that we now use. However, in ordinary time the Church of England has now reverted to the monastic tradition meditating on the whole Psalter essentially in course, though some adjustment has been made so that we don t, for instance, pray evening psalms in the morning. From about 1800 to 1960 there really had been a drought in the whole tradition of daily prayer. In Catholicism it was more or less lost to all but the clergy and it nearly disappeared in Anglicanism too. Revival has come through the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Church and through the Oxford Movement and more recent liturgical reforms in the Anglican Communion. Less than 20 years ago, many clergy were seeing the Office as irrelevant to contemporary life and ministry but Michael Perham pinpoints 1992 as a moment when the tide began to turn when that new Office Book for SSF was published. As many of you will know, it was produced in two almost identical forms under two covers, the brown Daily Office SSF and the blue Celebrating Common Prayer. Although never an official text of the Church of England, the take up was enormous with many lay people as well as clergy rediscovering liturgical daily prayer. It was clear to those revising the official liturgy of the Church of England and preparing the definitive form of Common Worship: Daily Prayer in 2005 that the Daily Office SSF/Celebrating Common Prayer had really put its finger on what was needed. As Bishop Michael says, 5

6 the Church now has as its official daily office a Franciscan-led Office book. It is texts from that book that are now incorporated in the new, 2010 version of our brown book, a book simply intended to meet the additional needs of the religious life, with the additional materials needed for our specifically Franciscan celebrations. 2. Why pray the Office? Modern Anglican Liturgy in a wide variety of churches reflects the worthy aim that people should participate more fully in the liturgy and understand what is going on, that it should be worship that ordinary people can relate to. John Michael Mountney argues however that this laudable aim has also brought a ghost to the banquet: contemporary worship has become extremely-people centred. He shows how this tendency works out in a number of settings. The rich, ritualistic sung Eucharist, sometimes sought out by those who go with the intention of receiving rather than giving the liturgy of passivity The Sunday service with teaching as the driving element the didactic liturgy The services that people attend in order to leave behind the strains of everyday living the therapeutic liturgy The wide and sophisticated provision for children and young people the liturgy of nurture Baptism services timed and tailored to individual families the liturgy of childbirth Prayer meetings, house groups and vigils for special occasions the liturgy of need Special provision of worship from the Book of Common Prayer the liturgy of concession We all go to church with certain expectations and demands that we want to be met but the danger can be that it is all self-centred. By contrast, the Daily Office is not designed principally to meet any of these needs. It is the liturgy of worship and is therefore God-centred. In a way, the Daily Office makes no concessions for anyone because it is not a service for consumers. It is a service for God. That is why it is a work. We need to understand the role of each of us as priests of God! That is also why long scripture readings were not an original part of the early Office the scriptures used served the purpose of the praise of God and not principally the teaching of the people. It is also the form of prayer that has been offered through most of the Church through most of the centuries and is, in a particular sense the prayer of the Church. The whole Church is present when just two or three meet to offer the Office or indeed when the Office is recited by an individual alone, though that is not the normative way of praying! Now in what follows I am unashamedly making use of the essay Daily Prayer in the Life of the Church which appeared in both our 1992 and 2010 office books, slightly adapted in the latter. The whole text of Celebrating Common Prayer, including notes and essays, is also still available and quite easy to find on the internet. Those notes and essays are worth reading. 6

7 Christian prayer and worship is offered to God the Father, the Creator; through God the Son, the Redeemer; and in God the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier. The prayer of the Daily Office is part of that praise that the whole creation, consciously or unconsciously, offers to its Creator. Thomas Merton says that a tree glorifies God by being a tree. Through baptism, each Christian becomes part of that royal priesthood of believers able both to proclaim the word of God and, in faith and action, to respond to it, thereby giving voice to all creation in its ceaseless praise and glory of the eternal Creator, the source of all its being and life. Some years ago on retreat I noted my reflections on the different senses in which clergy, Christians, and all human beings have a priestly role. The whole of humanity is called to be the priest of creation, nurturing and protecting it and articulating praise. Believers have a particular role as priests of Christ for humanity, living his gospel. The ordained have a yet more specific calling, as, in a sense, priests for the sake of those priests! In our historical considerations we touched on how Jesus himself prayed. We saw how he prayed as a First Century Jew. He would have known certain familiar prayers taught by his parents. When he in turn was asked how to pray he gave various answers. He said prayer should be persistent and repeated, not using vain repetitions but sincere ones; he gave his followers at least one set form, the Lord s Prayer, and he set an example. Again and again, the gospels show us Jesus at prayer: Abba, he cries. His commands to his disciples are pray, ask, seek... in my name. Above all, in his sufferings and death, he showed us that it was prayer that enabled him to offer himself as a paschal sacrifice. Now, through his self-offering on the cross, and his being raised from the dead, he ever lives to intercede for us. In the communion of saints, all Christians pray with Christ and in Christ. Until the end of the world, we are joined to the heavenly worship of saints and angels; our liturgy is part of that heavenly liturgy of praise and intercession in which the whole Christ offers the whole Christ, before the throne of God. And our prayer is in the Spirit. We are only able to pray because we are in the Spirit: the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of the whole Church, the Spirit present in each baptised person. We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. In the Spirit, we can offer true prayer to God, for when we cry Abba! Father! it is the Spirit of God affirming to our spirit. It is the Spirit who unites the whole Church and brings us through the Redeemer to the Creator. Daily Prayer is also the liturgy of time. You can administer the Eucharist or Confirmation at any time of day or night, but you emphatically cannot pray Morning Prayer in any meaningful sense in the evening! Rooted, as we have seen, in historical practice, the Office consecrates moments of time so that, through praise and prayer, they become the vehicles of God s time, the time of the sovereignty of God. The ideal of course, and the 7

8 Biblical injunction, is to pray continually. The rumour of history reaches us of certain communities who aimed to do just that, offering the liturgy in choir on a shift system throughout the day and night. One of the forms of so-called New Monasticism discussed in a recent franciscan is the boiler-house prayer room where largely young people gather to offer prayer 24-7. But we endeavour to consecrate the whole of time by offering moments of time. And by the way, that means it is really important to try to be present in the moment as we pray. In fact, we make a sacrifice of time! What is the time that we sacrifice? A Catholic commentator remarks that it is something concrete, living and personal. It is historical time which is above all cosmic time, following a rhythm of days, nights and seasons. It is biological time, following a rhythm of organic life, with its phrases of activity and rest. In reality, the time that we are consecrating in the Liturgy of the Hours is ourselves! Far from being a gratuitous and superfluous pastime for Christians who are well endowed with a sense of poetry and the aesthetic, the celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours is for Christians an Office. This means that it is a duty and function of their condition as earthly creatures, who must recognize the sovereign and absolute dominion of their creator by giving him it seems a pure loss what is most personal and precious to them. Our SSF Principles speak of the danger of being present at the common devotions in a formal or careless spirit. Another little quotation from some anonymous liturgist worth pondering is this: It is more important to say the Office than to have said it! John s gospel invites us to celebrate the presence of the Kingdom here and now and always: the incarnate Christ with us and among us, God s world without end and in every moment and the Offices themselves reflect some of this Johannine feeling: the Angelus, morning, noon and evening, is a gentle reminder of the presence of God among us in Christ and of our response with Mary: Let it be to me according to your word. Morning Prayer looks back on the night and the images of darkness in life but also forward to the new day and its unknown and unexplored frontiers that await us the true dawning of our day. The gospel canticle, Zechariah s song, is Advent in tone and speaks of the coming of the Saviour among us, opening our eyes to recognise the signs of God s activity in his world and to co-operate with it. Midday Prayer again concentrates us on the God who is incarnate, the Christ who is with us in every aspect of our lives. Evening Prayer allows us to stand back from the day s activity and to reflect with Mary in the Magnificat on the opportunities God has set before us to participate in the establishment of his Kingdom. Night Prayer is the surrender of self to God heard most tellingly in the resonances of the Nunc dimittis, itself a meditative reflection on the saving grace of Christ, the light of the world. Our prayer as a local community unites us with the whole Body of Christ as we seek to express not only our own prayer but the prayer of the whole 8

9 Church, conscious always of the promise and presence of Christ in us and among us, for where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among you. Through prayer, we share in that worship which the Church and all creation is offering to the glory of God the Creator, through the intercession of Jesus the Redeemer, and in the power of the sanctifying Spirit. Morning Prayer comes at the time of day when we pass over from darkness to light. At the time of our greatest weakness, we welcome with joy Christ our light (to which the ordinary time Office hymns bear witness) who through the darkness of death has brought us redemption, in the light and power of his resurrection. This theme is powerfully recalled in the gospel canticle, the Song of Zechariah (Benedictus): You have raised up for us a mighty saviour; the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death; to guide our feet into the way of peace; you have come to your people and set them free. During the course of each day, we celebrate the light of Christ as we pray at sunrise and sunset, the pass over moments of each day. At midday, we recall the glory of the ascended Christ as the time when the sun is at its height; and, coming as it does in the middle of the day s work, we are reminded to offer the whole of our life to God our Creator through the hands of the eternal high priest. At the end of the day s work, when we have been concerned with our stewardship of creation, we are called to turn again to God, that we might be renewed by the light of God s word we have already mentioned the ancient Jewish and Early Christian tradition of the Lucernarium. The theme of God s work in creation is recalled in the ordinary time Office hymns for Evening Prayer. At the heart of the Office is the gospel canticle, the Song of Mary (Magnificat): we celebrate the incarnation of the Second Adam, the Word made flesh by a new act of the Spirit in the womb of Mary. As the world was at its evening, so the true light of Christ has been revealed in our midst. According to the biblical tradition, the day begins in the evening at sunset: witness the account of creation in Genesis: so evening came and morning came, the first day. This tradition is preserved by observing the first Evening Prayer of Sunday and of major feasts. At the end of the day, we invoke the Master s blessing of protection and peace at Night Prayer. In the Song of Simeon (Nunc dimittis) are united both the expectation and longing of humanity and the fulfilment of this waiting; that the life of the world has been placed in our hands and here is not only the end but also the beginning, for we have seen the salvation which is revealed for all people. Each day, with its rhythm of darkness and light, night and day, work and rest, we celebrate in prayer and praise God s mighty acts of creation, incarnation and redemption as we travel with the people of God towards that Day which has no ending. So the cycles of day, week and year all have their part to play. Overtones and harmonies between these different cycles are particularly important in the way that our SSF Office Book is structured with its 7 basic forms, Form 1 9

10 corresponding to Sundays and Easter, Form 2 to Mondays and Pentecost, Form 4 to Wednesday s but also Christmas. In this way, in ordinary time, the cycle of the week actually takes us through echoes of the cycle of the year. This is particularly true of what is to some extent a weekly Paschal Triduum as we come to the foot of the cross each Friday and to the victory of the Resurrection each Sunday. 3. The structure and contents What was the structure and content of the Jewish worship from which the Office evolved? Well, we don t entirely know, but it certainly included the Shema, the Jewish creed, recited by every adult male, morning and evening, Hear O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. This was preceded and followed by one or more blessings, which are really thanksgivings to God. There would also have been readings in the synagogue from the Law, Prophets and Writings of the Hebrew scriptures, each followed by an exposition. Strangely, we don t know much about the use of psalms, though it is known that the so-called Egyptian Hallel, Psalms 113-118 was recited eighteen times a year in connection with the great festivals. Psalms 148-50, Laudate Psalms of praise to God, were recited every morning, but we don t know much more about when particular psalms were used. In those rousing early Christian Songs of Praise offices the content was very simple. Firstly, the choir sang psalms while the congregation, who didn t have books easily available, joined in a refrain after every verse, just as we do in the responsorial psalm at the Mass today. The psalms were carefully chosen for their suitability with an emphasis once again on the Laudate Psalms of praise and thanksgiving. There was silence after each psalm, then a prayer, summing up the psalm. The evening Lucernarium began with a darkened church, with the lamps gradually lit, while the praises were sung of Christ as the light of the world the Phos Hilaron, Hail, Gladdening Light is very ancient. When all the psalmody was over, they went straight into the second part of the service, petition and intercession. Prayers were offered in the form of a liturgy to which, again, the people could respond with a repeated refrain. This early form gradually evolved through the various changes we have already discussed into the Office as we have it today with its three sections of Preparation, The Word of God and our response in intercession and thanksgiving through The Prayers. Our community prayer of each day in The Daily Office SSF has been divided into two major Offices, those for the morning and the evening, and two minor Offices for midday and at night. Each Office has three sections: 10

11 (a) The Preparation This section consists of the call to praise through versicles and responses, an opening canticle, and an optional hymn prayer. It is about preparing our hearts and minds that we may more readily respond to God s word. At Morning Prayer, after the opening versicles and responses, there may be an acclamation, which is followed by the opening canticle. At Evening Prayer, there are usually versicles and responses, followed by the opening canticle. At Night Prayer, this section is usually preceded by an opportunity to reflect upon the past day and an act of penitence. An Office Hymn usually concludes this section, though a prayer is also provided in our Daily Office. (b) The Word of God This is the heart of the Office and includes the proclamation and praise of the work of God through psalmody, scripture readings, the gospel and other canticles, and a response to the word. At Morning and Evening Prayer, the gospel canticle with its refrain picking up the theme of the office is the climax, bringing together the promises of the Old and New Covenant. The reading of scripture is both the proclamation of the word and works of God and also the means of building up God s people through a deeper understanding of God s ways with humanity and their response to God. Non-scriptural readings, drawn from the tradition of the Church or from contemporary sources, may also be used on occasion. Following our Annual Joint Meeting of CSF and SSF Chapters, Francis Testament is usually read: He intended it to be read at Chapters of the community, but we tend to read it during the office rather than during a session of the meeting itself. In each Office, the reading of scripture is preceded by psalmody. Through the words of the psalms, we come before God and enter into the joys and sorrows, hopes and failures of the People of God representing all humanity and finding its fulfilment in the prayer and praise in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. A lot more could be said about the psalms, but that is the subject of another paper. (c) The Prayers The pattern of all Christian prayer was given to us by Jesus in the Lord s Prayer. Again, we are reminded that Christian prayer is fundamentally corporate: Cyprian remarks that we do not say My Father in Heaven or Give me today my daily bread... our prayer is public and common; and when we pray we pray not for one, but for the whole people, because the whole people are one. This may be preceded by the Kyries and, at Morning and Evening especially, its petitions may be extended; these prayers of the Church are collected up in the collect of the day, the time or the feast and concluded, three times daily according to the Didache, with the Lord s Prayer. By the way, the collect is 11

12 the one essential element if we are to mark a particular feast or commemoration. Sometimes a minor commemoration is marked with only a collect, but it doesn t make sense to have proper antiphons and office hymns relating to a saint etc but then not to sum up what the commemoration is about in the collect. Any additional prayers and thanksgivings which the community or individuals offer are included in this section within the structure of the Office. Thus the realities and concerns of the present moment are gathered up into the prayer of the praying Christ. Finally a blessing is said and at Morning and Evening Prayer we proclaim Let us bless the Lord Thanks be to God! as we are commanded to love, serve and praise God in one another and in the world. Br Desmond Alban SSF 12