Note: this is the seventh in a series of reposts from my Sabbatical blog, ‘An Anabaptist Anglican’, from thirteen years ago. This post was originally posted on May 2nd 2007.
This ‘Anabaptist Anglican’ blog has been heavily tilted toward the ‘Anabaptist’ side lately, so I want to pause for a moment to tip the hat to a very fine resource I’ve discovered on the Anglican side of my spiritual pedigree – from the Church of England, no less!
Most people I know who pray the Daily Office – daily Morning and Evening Prayer, that is, using one of our service books such as the Book of Common Prayer or the Book of Alternative Services – will admit to having a love/hate relationship with it. Sometimes we find that the structure strengthens our ability to pray through dry periods; at other times we find it inhibiting of true encounter with the living God who can’t be captured between the pages of any book. Sometimes we find having a book with lots of alternatives helps us avoid monotony; at other times it just makes prayer times confusing (it’s so much effort just to look up those darn canticles and responsories!).
The Church of England has recently produced a daily office book called ‘Common Worship: Daily Prayer’ which has literally hundreds of pages of texts for daily prayer. This, however, is not the resource I’m recommending. I have just discovered a little extract from that book, called ‘Time to Pray’. It includes two specific resources:
-
- ‘Prayer During the Day’, an outline for a daily ‘quiet time’, with a few liturgical texts to bring focus and a lot of freedom for experimentation (you’ll find an online example here). There are outlines for ‘Prayer during the Day’ for every day of the week, plus special outlines for the seasons (Christmas, Easter etc). I find there’s enough structure to give my prayers shape, but not so much that I feel constricted. For instance, no lectionary (i.e system of daily Bible readings) is given in the book; people are encouraged to find a system of Bible reading that they like and to use it in combination with ‘Prayer During the Day’ (some suggestions are made in the introduction).
- ‘Night Prayer’, which is the Church of England’s contemporary version of the ‘Compline’ service, traditionally offered in monasteries last thing at night. I’ve yet to meet someone who doesn’t like Compline, and this modern version of it keeps all the features we’ve come to love over the years, but updates the language and structure a bit.
Morning and Evening Prayer can be ‘ho hum’ sometimes, but so far for me ‘Prayer During the Day’ and ‘Night Prayer’ have been spot on. I hope that the Anglican Book Centre in Toronto gets some copies of this little book very soon, and makes them widely available in Canada. I think this book could do a lot to help people who are struggling with the discipline of daily prayer.