Praying the Daily Offices in the COVID-19 Era

By Robin G. Jordan

The prophet Daniel opened his window and prayed three times a day, once at dawn, once at midday, and once again at dusk. The apostle Paul urged the church at Thessalonica to pray without ceasing. In other words, to punctuate the day and the night with times of recurring prayer. The early Church, modeling its practices upon those of the synagogue adopted a daily cycle of prayer. It began the day with the service of Lauds shortly after cockcrow when the sun first peeks his face over the horizon and concluded the day with the service of Vespers when the evening shadows fell and the lamps were first lit. In this way the entire day was sanctified, set apart to the service of God.

While we may associate the offices of Lauds and Vespers with the monastic daily cycle of prayer, the dawn and the dusk offices predate the monastic round of prayer. They were originally popular services, in which the whole community participated, gathering each morning and each evening to praise God and to pray. In some communities the dawn office may have included a homily, a survival from an earlier time when the morning assembly was used for instruction.

The rise of monasticism in the late third century would lead to the disappearance of Lauds and Vespers as services of public worship. The two offices would be incorporated into the monastic cycle of prayer and would become the domain of cloistered religious. A few monasteries permitted devote laity to listen to the offices from a barn-like structure adjoining the monks’ church. This structure would evolve into what in later times was called the “nave” and the monks’ church, the “choir” and the “chancel.”

We do not see the recovery of the dawn and dusk offices as public services of worship until the sixteenth century and then by what may be described as a fortuitous accident. In England in the sixteenth century Archbishop Thomas Cranmer undertook the reform of the daily offices of the monastic cycle of prayer. He conflated them into two services—Matins and Evensong—and mandated the attendance of the laity. Clergy were enjoined to publicly read the offices and to ring the church bell to summon the parish to join him. Cranmer was a strong believer in the power of Scripture to transform the individual. He incorporated into these two services the monthly recitation of the entire psalter and the reading of the Old Testament once in year and the New Testament twice in a year. The purposes of the reformed offices would be “the setting forth of God’s glory and honor and the reducing of the people to a most perfect and godly living, without error or superstition.” They would be one of the primary means by which England would be transformed into a godly kingdom.

In more recent years a growing number of Anglican Churches have recognized the need for daily prayer services that are less didactic than the traditional Anglican services of Morning and Evening Prayer and more devotional. They have also recognized the need for more flexible daily prayer services which may be tailored to the occasion on which they are used and the size, resources, and other circumstances of the churches using them. Orders of service for Morning and Evening Prayer that reflect the growing body of scholarship into the evolution of the daily offices have been developed and published. The Daily Services and A Service of Light of the Anglican Church of Australia’s A Prayer Book for Australia (1995), The Divine Office of the Anglican Church of Canada’s The Book of Alternative Services (1985), Daily Prayer of the Church of England’s Common Worship (2000), and Daily Prayer and Psalter of the Scottish Episcopal Church are examples of these newer services.

The last century saw an explosion of paraphrases of the canticles, the psalms, and other Scriptural texts that could be sung to familiar hymn tunes. It also saw an outpouring of new tunes to which these paraphrases might be set as well as new arrangements of older tunes. A wealth of responsorial settings and choir arrangements accompanied this renewed interest in the music of the daily offices.

In Anglican Churches the English cathedral choir has dominated the music of the daily offices since the reign of Elizabeth I. Its repertoire, however, is beyond the abilities of the choirs and congregations of most Anglican parish churches, even more so the abilities of mission church congregations. The latter often lack strong musical leadership and have limited musical resources.

One might have expected that all the daily offices music produced in the last century and since then would have been a boon to parish and mission churches. But due to rigid notions of how Anglican churches should worship, few such churches have benefited from this music. They cling to the notion that cathedral music is the standard that they must attain. Being unable to attain this standard, they fall back on reciting the psalms and canticles and singing a few hymns. The result is rather dreary services that hold no appeal to anyone except who have become inured to worshiping in this depressing manner. While visitors to these services may be too polite to say that they experience the services as lifeless, it is what they are thinking when they leave and is one of the main reasons that they do not return.

As can be seen from the videos that I have been posting with the prayer services on the All Hallows Murray weblog, an abundance of music that is within even the abilities of the congregation of a small mission church is available to Anglican churches. While the COVID-19 pandemic is restricting how we can worship, it is also creating an opportunity to explore this music and to learn, practice, and master it. One of the reasons that I have been posting these videos is to show what music is available. I have been avoiding posting much cathedral music because I do not want to reinforce the notion that it is the standard for the daily offices.

I have also been using the newer orders of service for Morning and Evening Prayer to introduce readers to them. These orders of service have a greater degree of flexibility than the traditional Anglican services of Morning and Evening Prayer. This degree of flexibility makes them more adaptable to not only online use but also to the circumstances of a congregation—its size, its ministry target group, its musical leadership, its musical resources, the setting in which it gathers when it gathers, and the like.

The present order of service for Evening Prayer comes from The Book of Alternative Services. It is adaptable to a wide range of settings. In better times a small group of Christians could gather together in the living room of one of the group’s members and have a prayer service, using this order and singing the Phos hilaron, the psalms, the Magnificat, and the dismissal hymn without musical accompaniment. The group might use CDs, videos, or mp3s to accompany the singing. Such a gathering might serve as the group’s primary worship gathering for the week. Microchurches like the one which I just described may be the future of the Anglican Church in many parts of North America.

In the midst of a pandemic the praying of the daily offices is not only a good way to structure our time if we must stay at home and stay away from other people but also to draw near to God in a time of need. We can pray for others as well as ourselves. Among those who need our prayers are those who are sick, those who are dying, those who are caring for the sick and the dying, those who are mourning, and those who are out of work. Pastors and other church leaders also need our prayers as they make tough decisions—what may be life-and-death decisions.

Whether we use one or more of the daily offices or pray in silence or spontaneously, now is a time to recommit ourselves to prayer or to commit ourselves to prayer for the first time. It is the time more than ever to seek God's face.

I have always found it helpful to think of formal prayer as the prayer of the throne room and less formal prayer, extemporaneous prayer, as the prayer of the audience chamber in which we converse more freely with God. We approach God upon his throne with formal prayers, seeking a private audience with him. He graciously invites us into his audience chamber and to unburden our hearts to him. The One who greets us in the audience chamber is Jesus himself. In the privacy of that chamber we can share with him our joys and sorrows and plead for ourselves and others. When we stumble for lack of words, God who is the God of all grace provides us with the needed words for God himself in the person of the Holy Spirit indwells us.

We should not fear seeking God in prayer. If unrepented sin has become an obstacle to our prayer, he will provide a remedy. God desires to hear the prayers of his children and to answer them.