I presented this session on praying the daily office as part of a Lent Course on prayer for St John’s, Devizes, in March 2023.
What about this piece of poetry as a way of exploring the meaning of prayer? Regular Radio Four listeners may be familiar with its last two words!
Prayer (I) by George Herbert
Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
Let me focus in on the first and last phrases here: “the Church’s banquet” and “something understood”.
“The Church’s banquet” – prayer isn’t just about us and our individual relationship with God. It is an act of the whole Church – and indeed, the whole church in heaven as well as on earth. When we pray, of course we need space in our own hearts with God and for our own concerns. But we should also seek to be a praying heart of the whole Church. And prayer should be a feast for the Church, something that feeds us with God’s love and truth and which unites the members of the Church, and the Church on Earth with the Church in heaven in a great bountiful party of prayer.
“Something understood” – sometimes it can be a struggle to form the words of prayer for ourselves. But God knows what is in every heart anyway. It is us who need the communion with God in prayer for our own spiritual health.
When times are tough, and especially when we are angry at God or feeling hurt by God, it can help a lot to be carried along on the Church’s wave of prayer, using words others have produced in moments of calm, rather than trying to find the right words and emotions ourselves. This can be especially important when we feel our prayers are inadequate: it can also help us avoid the trap of feeling that we do well when we articulate our prayers confidently and we are praying less adequately if we are less articulate people or are struggling to put things into words.
There is, believe it or not, a form of worship that uses fixed words, is usable both at church and at home, is rooted in the Bible, shared ecumenically, and allows us to join our prayers with the whole Church of God. It is called the Daily Office.
Why the Daily Office
“The daily office provides a means to pray on days when it’s really hard to pray or on those days you just can’t seem to find words.
“I grew up in a household where prayer was a big deal. We prayed before every meal, even at restaurants. Spiritual people prayed. Stuff happened when you prayed. Prayer was how you felt close to God. In college, I found myself in communities where praying in tongues was a big deal. You could be a “prayer warrior.” Feeling the right feelings was really important.
“I was in my mid-20s when I shipwrecked my life. I was deconstructing faith piece by piece. In the midst of that experience, a friend gave me a copy of a prayer book with a red cover and invited me to a community that used it together.
“And that was a blast of fresh air. That was new life.”
What is the Daily Office
So what is this Daily Office, exactly? Sometimes also referred to as “fixed-hour prayer” or “liturgical prayer”, the Daily Office exists in different forms in different churches, and we will talk a little about what those are later. In any version of the daily office, prayer is offered every day in a similar form at different times of the day. This prayer will involve readings from Scripture, sometimes very short and sometimes long; fixed prayers; prayers for the particular time of the Church’s year; a period for freeform prayer. No matter which one of the many forms of the Daily Office is used, readings from the book of Psalms will anchor everything.
Modern versions of the daily office trace their roots back to monastic practices in medieval times. But the practice of fixed hour prayer goes even further back than this, right back to the Temple of King Solomon in Jerusalem. The psalmist writes, “I will praise you seven times a day” (Psalm 119:164).
As Christianity emerged from Judaism, the custom of prayer in this manner came with it. So, in the book of Acts, “Peter and John went to the temple one afternoon to take part in the three o’clock prayer service” (Acts 3:1). Likewise, when Peter later sees the vision that leads him to Cornelius’ house, Peter is engaged in noon-time prayers. The early church prayed the psalms together (Acts 4:23–30).
The contemporary template for the daily office comes from St. Benedict, who ordered parts of the book of Psalms to be recited at seven points of the day, every day, for his communities. Even today, you can visit Benedictine monasteries and participate in the prayers throughout the day. Benedict said, “To pray is to work, to work is to pray.” Our modern word “office” comes from this Latin word “opus”, meaning work. Essentially, prayer like this is our daily work.
When compiling a liturgy for the Church of England after its break from Rome, Thomas Cranmer merged the eight offices of medieval monasticism – which were Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline – into just two, Matins and Evening Prayer or Evensong. Towards the end of the Victorian period, a renewal of interest in the monastic late evening office, Compline took place, and around the turn of the 21st Century, the Church of England renewed a midday office, something like the monastic sext. So, the Church of England currently offers a form of daily prayer of its own for four times of the day – Morning Prayer, Noon Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Compline in the late evening.
Clergy in the Church of England are required to say Morning and Evening Prayer daily. Lay Anglicans are strongly encouraged to join them.
Psalms
As noted, every form of the daily office is rooted in the psalms. In praying the psalms daily, we are connected with our deepest pre-Christian religious DNA, right back to the Temple in Jerusalem for which they were written, and also connect ourselves profoundly with the early Church.
Within the psalms we find a prayer for every day of our lives. There are prayers of praise and thanksgiving. There are prayers of celebration. There are prayers of lament. The psalms are a school of prayer. The psalms teach us how to talk to God and how to talk about God. The psalms give us permission to talk to God and about God honestly, rather than burying the feelings we’d like to pretend God doesn’t know about. There is a rawness and an anger in some of the psalms, and in some even a rather smug self-justifying self-righteousness. We may not find these emotions to be very godly – although never forget St Paul’s injunction to “be angry and sin not” – but they are emotions we all honestly feel from time to time. God knows this, and loves us with this being part of our character. There is no sense hiding it from him.
When Justin Welby, from a non-liturgical charismatic background, first became drawn to a more regular pattern of prayer life in the 1990s, he became a tertiary of the Anglican Benedictine community at Elmore outside Newbury (which has since moved to Salisbury). He freely admits that he initially found praying large chunks of the psalms every day overwhelmed him at first; then he began to welcome the discipline of this; finally, he found it a very liberating experience, allowing him to express his feelings to God honestly.
Options
We have two options in the Church of England for saying the Daily Office. Common Worship, completed around the turn of this Century, and the Book of Common Prayer of 1662. In addition, some Anglicans prayer the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours as an ecumenical gesture.
Comparing the Common Worship office with the Prayer Book, each has strengths and weaknesses. The BCP office is simpler, and changes less from day to day – that means it is in a much smaller and lighter book; the words of the prayers rapidly become imprinted on the memory. The down-side is that it can be rather monotonous. The Common Worship office has a richness of daily and seasonal material that the Book of Common Prayer lacks, but the trade-off is, that if you don’t want to use an app – and we’ll come to that later – the book is big and heavy. The Common Worship Daily Office Book also contains orders for Midday Prayer and Compline, not just Morning and Evening Prayer.
One thing is a matter of taste – the Book of Common Prayer rattles through the psalms in a month, which means you are going to get a heavy dose of psalmody twice a day. Some prefer it, but some find it gives them psalm indigestion.
More and more people are using the app or web client instead of books to pray the Daily Office, which means it can be prayed wherever you are without having to take heavy books with you – as long as you have a connection to the Internet. There are obviously huge advantages to this, but do remember that the mere act of praying via a screen on an Internet-capable device opens you to the possibility of distraction and also changes the focus of your eyes to somewhere much closer to your body, which can increase physical tension.
In practice, the app will be more convenient for most people most of the time, but be aware there are downsides.
If you pray regularly in a physical place at home, it can be nicer to have the books kept there and use them – you will also become much more aware of the many subtle seasonal options, particularly in the Common Worship: Daily Prayer book. You will also need a Bible and a copy of the Church of England’s Lectionary book for each year.
To download the app, simply search for Daily Prayer from the CofE on the Google Play Store for Android or Apple App Store. Or, on a web browser, just go to daily.commonworship.com.
While clergy should make praying the Daily Office a life-long practice, there is no reason why you as lay people shouldn’t experiment with it as a short-term discipline, perhaps for the rest of Lent or in Advent. You may find that it becomes a natural part of your daily routine.
You may find that you sometimes fall out of the habit. Well, if you find that happening and then you miss the practice of praying the Daily Office, nothing is simpler than just starting again. As the old saying goes, “What do we do if we fall off the horse? – Get back on.”
Finally, Praying with Scripture
If you pray the Daily Office, you will find that your familiarity with Scripture builds naturally. You will be reading substantial chunks of the Old and New Testament every week. You will also start to notice that the same parts of Scripture come up at the same time each year, and often tie in with the season of the Church’s year – so for example in November and December, we spend a lot of time reading prophecy from the Old and New Testament in preparation for Christ coming into the world at Christmas.
It can be particularly helpful to say the words of Scripture softly in your spoken voice. There is something about actually speaking the words that makes them come alive to us and commit them to our hearts and minds. There is something about speaking that helps us to listen and be shaped by the words of Scripture as we pray them.
The Church of England produces an annual series of reflections one of the readings each morning and evening which many people find helpful. If you use books and have a place where you pray, it is simple to keep this book there. Some sort of bible commentary such as the Oxford Companion to the Bible (don’t take this on holiday with you!) can also be useful.
Some Good Reasons for Praying the Daily Office
Six good reasons for praying the Daily Office from Peter Scazzero’s book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: It’s Impossible to Be Spiritually Mature, While Remaining Emotionally Immature.
There is a structure.
The daily office provides a guide for my prayer. I’m not left wondering what to say or rambling whatever is on the top of my mind.
There is beauty in these words.
The psalms are poetry, and they shape my imagination with incredible images of what God is like. They shake me out of the same old words I can get stuck in.
There is truth in these words.
Praying Scripture is praying true words about God. These words are good, rich, and mature theology. To pray these words is to pray like Jesus.
There is unity in these words.
To pray the daily office is to pray in unity with other Christians, sometimes around the world, sometimes throughout time.
These words are enough.
I don’t have to get up at 5 am and pray for hours on end in order to be a good spiritual person. It’s not about how hard I try. All I have to do is show up.
These words form and inform my feelings.
My feelings don’t have to dictate the shape of my prayer practice. My feelings are fickle things. With the office, I can allow Scripture to influence my feelings.
And a Final Thought From Me
As someone who is easily distracted, the Daily Office is particularly appealing to me as I can waft in and out of concentration even as I speak the words. The words of others hold me close to God even when my own mind wanders off.
