It is not sufficient to participate regularly in the Eucharist, with its unequal stress on individuality and formalism; rather we have to be eucharistic people. We have to live perpetually in the eucharistic context and this means preparation in the form of constant attempts to resolve the underlying paradoxes involved. The cosmic and the local, with stress on the former because the contemporary balance veers strongly towards the other side. Then the corporate and the personal, for the same reasons in the same order, and the immanent-transcendent balance which boils down to an application of the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity: which says it all.”
Martin Thornton, A Joyful Heart, Chap. 11
INTRODUCTION
From the earliest moments of the Christian Church, in part influenced by our Jewish heritage, a fundamental aspect of the life of the disciples of Jesus was to enact formal set-prayer. Jesus bestowed upon us the “Our Father” prayer, the Pater Noster. It is the model for set-prayer: particular words in a particular order to give thanks as a body to God the Father. We now call this the Divine Office.
In simple terms, the purpose of the Divine Office is to praise God and to magnify God, day by day: an “office of praise.” Christians do so because it teaches us who God is. This habitual activity becomes what William of St Thierry termed “necessary obedience.” God is Maker, Lover, and Keeper of all creation; His truth indeed endures forever, and knowledge of Him invites deeper participation in the goodness of Christ’s eucharistic holiness. Internalizing who God is prepares us to receive the Sacraments and to see all of creation eucharistically.
Nonetheless, relationship with God is always conditioned by societal context, and today many Christians increasingly live within media-rich environments where travel over significant distance is the daily norm. God works within our conditions, and so must our prayer life: grace perfects nature, as St Thomas taught. Yet, oddly, the Divine Office form standard today for Anglicans remains largely unchanged over almost 500 years, then introduced to a late-medieval, rural society of largely illiterate peasants ruled by a monarch; theirs was a society that lived and worked under the shadow of the village church. Ours is a post-industrial “global village” where the preferred church can be several miles away.
Social conditions change. Just as St Benedict and Thomas Cranmer boldly and pastorally revised their Divine Office forms so as to tune into God more efficiently, given their social conditions, the proposed revised form seeks a twenty-first-century Regula by balancing the demands of orthodox obedience to the Blessed Trinity with the jumbled, even dissociated, conditions of a mobile, secularized society in an satellite-driven information age. When the routine of life for the Faithful finds little space and clearing for the Divine Office — a baptismal obligation — the pastorally minded corrective begins by going “back to basics” as means for creative, necessary renewal. But how do we do that without sacrificing orthodoxy and catholicity, nor the enduring insights of Benedictine spirituality, nor the basic worship pattern of the Prayer Book?
THE THEOLOGY BEHIND THE DIVINE OFFICE
The key is to see corporate prayer as a dynamic, theological whole. At its core, orthodox and Catholic prayer is responding to God within our baptismal status, and has been since the cosmic explosion of the Pentecost event. “Faith’s name for reality is ‘God,'” wrote Anglican theologian John Macquarrie. Prayer life can be said to be full, integrated, embodied, Catholic, and orthodox when it is an active and intentional response to God-named reality.
But how do we name reality as God? To us it has been revealed that reality for the Christian is a diversity of three-in-oneness: reality in the dimension of its “transcendent otherness,” which is named God the Father; reality in the dimension of its “immanant nearness,” which is named God the Holy Spirit; and reality in the dimension of “incarnate mediation,” which is named God the Son, Jesus Christ, named in our liturgy as our only Mediator and Advocate. Catholic reality, and hence its prayer life — liturgical, sacramental, salvific — is ultimately derived from, and correlated with, nothing less than the Doctrine of the Trinity.
Prayer is responding to God. How are we to respond? Our triune God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — invites a threefold response that Anglican theologian Martin Thornton appropriately called Regula, meaning “pattern” or “framework.” Gloriously formulated for 6th-century monastic life by St Benedict and for 16th-century secular life by Cranmer (and in many other ways within the family of Catholic churches), Regula is described in scripture as the “apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers” (Acts 2.42). Today the terms are, respectively, Devotion (that is, baptismal ministry), Mass, and Divine Office; these are distinct, but interwoven and irreducible. More than mere formula or framework for organizational discipline, Regula is dynamic praxis; for Thornton, it is the lifeblood of participation in the divine life of the redemptive organism, the Church.
Regula, as the doctrine of the Trinity ascetically applied, orients us to the threefold reality of God. Devotion orients to the immanent dimension: increasing openness to the Holy Spirit who is infinitely variable to us in time and space and who reconciles us to Christ, the definitive revelation of the Father. Divine Office orients to the transcendent dimension: surrender to our heavenly Father, wholly and invariably otherness, our source and origin from whom the Holy Spirit proceeds to unite us to the Son. And Mass orients to the incarnate dimension: mediated communion with the real presence of Jesus Christ both deity and man — fully transcendent as the Son of God, fully immanent as human being. Yet this is all one response, one prayer life, to love heavenly God who loves us beyond measure and yearns for our spiritual growth. As St Athanasius wrote, God became human so that humans might become God — that is, through Himself and His sacraments, we might become numbered with His saints and, in the words of Walter Hilton, reformed into the likeness and holiness of Jesus.
Moments of the life of Jesus Christ reveal Regula, the fundamental pattern of holiness. Besides the Pater Noster, given by Jesus to be our set-prayer, His baptism in the River Jordan points to the Divine Office, an objective daily ritual of corporate repentence that, through Jesus, discloses God’s identity and story. The feeding miracles of Jesus point to the Mass, where we too are fed by Jesus and his love for us. And the myriad episodes where Jesus heals, preaches, teaches, and eats with others point toward Devotion, ministry to the creatures of the cosmos in relationship with Scripture. Regula, then, is the means by which we live; Regula articulates our corporate experience of being Christ’s Body, and the means by which we cultivate the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity.
THE PURPOSE OF THE DIVINE OFFICE
Through Thornton’s theology, the specific purpose of the Divine Office is clarified. First given by Jesus to his disciples as the Pater Noster (“Our Father”), as mentioned already, the Divine Office is transcendent reaching toward and joining with the unceasing praise by Angels, the Archangels, and all the Company of Heaven. The whole Body of Christ sings the Divine Office in the power of the Holy Spirit to glorify God the Father Almighty, “primordial Being,” in the words of John Macquarrie. To glorify the unchanging Father warrants an unadorned yet beautiful recounting of His radical otherness and cosmic creativity. God invites us to abandon ourselves and surrender in Holy Fear to the light inaccessible, the mystery incomprehensible. To live daily as if in the orans posture: this is what the Office is for. Its purpose is not to “sanctify the time” but to pray to the Father as Jesus would have us pray: “an eschatological proclamation of the salvation received in Christ, and a glorification and thanksgiving to God for that gift,” in the words of Roman Catholic theologian Robert Taft, SJ. Simply put, the Pater Noster is the germ of God’s theology.
Accordingly, what this revised form seeks to do is make this theology unmistakably evident within its text and enacted in its performance. In this form, we celebrate the beyond-time and space, unfathomable reality of heavenly God as mediated by His mighty acts of creation, salvation, and reconciliation, initially revealed to the Old Testament prophets and the Children of Israel, and consummated definitively in the Incarnation of Christ as announced by the Holy Spirit through Angel Gabriel to Blessed Mary, Ever-Virgin, our exemplar in discipleship and witness to Christ: Our Lady truly is the Mother of the Church. As such, the purpose of the Office, more refined, is to invite daily through praise the unfathomable presence of divine otherness that confronted Blessed Mary. This is an otherness that confounded her in holy fear, that taught her, that empowered her. And, by baptismal incorporation into the Body of Christ, this mystery can do so for us, in a continuous and gradual unfolding of God’s revelation of himself.
As Mary intercedes that we may be made worthy to receive the promises of Christ, we enact obedience to the grace of God through the Divine Office. It is prologue in that it prepares us — hones us — by means of the Holy Spirit to receive Holy Communion. Through this heavenly food we can become Christ’s out-poured and kenotic love, most precious as it is most plenteous, in the words of Dame Julian of Norwich. But as St Paul instructed, before we eat and drink, we are to discern the Body (1 Corinthians 11.29) — such discernment is our daily work: the Divine Office on Monday prepares us for Eucharist the following Sunday. To take the Christian claims seriously means every morning is a test of faith. Yet our obedience, often difficult and even dry feeling, patiently teaches us about Jesus and our baptismal incorporation into Him. A genuine sacramental outlook upon all of creation is a gift from God, yet we must always remember that Blessed Mary had her moments of arid boredom, too.
Likewise, our obedience means internalizing, absorbing, and living-out God’s theology. This ascetical responsibility coincides with the pastoral fact that in a mobile society, a “global village,” there is simply less time available for daily formal set-prayer. Might not this fact also be of divine providence? Yet we cannot forswear orthodoxy, which would deny our baptism, so an Office form that reflects an efficient and orthodox bare-bones is long overdue.
A NEW ARCHITECTURE
The fundamental change is that this revised form relocates the cycles of Psalter and Scripture. These traditionally, but not always, have been added to the middle of the Divine Office. This revised form returns both to our daily Devotional life, from which both St Benedict and Cranmer in essence had borrowed them, justifiably, given their contexts. St Benedict reacted to Desert monasticism, where all 150 psalms were often memorized and recited daily; hence his decision to incorporate the entire psalter into his Office in a manner more reasonable and realistic for his monks. Thomas Cranmer reacted to the explosive debut of the vernacular Bible, where English Christians were able to hear and speak Scripture for the first time; hence he not only followed Benedictine practice with the psalter, but added daily lections from Scripture. In both cases, the “Divine Office” was really two offices mixed together: the Divine Office of praise and a daily office of readings. Anglican liturgical scholar and priest Paul Bradshaw confirms that neither psalm nor scripture lections were original to the pre-Constantinian forms of the Office, but subsequent ascetical layers.
Instead of overlaying Devotion upon transcendent Praise, what is theologically consistent and pastorally realistic is to set aside time in one’s day distinct from the Divine Office to meditate on Scripture, including Psalms — an important aspect of Devotion, or baptismal ministry. A Daily Office of Readings is also part of necessary obedience. In this, the Scriptures, whether in appointed lectionary form or otherwise, can be read slowly and ruminated upon, read and reread, in light of our experience of fellowship within the living Church and its teaching, a point to which we will shortly return.
By unknitting scripture lections from the Divine Office, an additional theology of the Office is clarified, one obscured somewhat by the otherwise ascetical brilliance of both Benedict and Cranmer. Refined to its bare theological core, the Divine Office becomes a sturdy rock of daily doctrinal catechesis for young and old alike, experientially absorbed through memorization and singing. This points directly to the theological virtue of “Faith,” what Macquarrie called “existential knowledge” and Aidan Kavanagh called “theologia prima.” This revised form is fittingly seen as a pledge of allegiance to God, an eschatological proclamation of faith, the basis for “a school for the service of the Lord” in the Benedictine sense: it teaches as much through the mere habit of it as it does through its content. Our lives showly adjust to the truths embedded in this Office.
A FOCUS ON DOCTRINE
Another major shift is the predominant focus on doctrine. This revised form is a theological and experiential expansion of the Pater Noster by means of the Nicene Creed. Analyzed as a whole, its text proclaims a variety of authoritative doctrine, the crucibles of the Church’s historical experience. Doctrines include that of Prevenient Grace, Baptismal Incorporation, Remnant and Adoration in the Preces; God and Metanoia in the Jubilate; of Creation, Angels, the People of God and Remnant in the Benedicite; of Incarnation, the Church, Atonement, Resurrection, Parousia and Theosis in the Te Deum; of Penitence and Adoration in the Kyrie Eleison; of the Kingdom of God in the Pater Noster; and of the Theotokos and Assumption in the Ave Regina Caelorum — these and more, directly from scriptural and scripturally derived prayers primarily of patristic ethos. Yes, these are canticles and hymns, but embedded within them is Catholic imagination: tremendous theology and glorious doctrine ecumenically celebrated.
Why the focus on doctrine? Because to sing this Divine Office form is to confess doctrinal truth, a constant need in the Church no matter the age. And as in the patristic era, particularly prior to Constantine, doctrinal confession manifests through joyful performance and almost secretive memorization: to memorize is to internalize, to internalize is to embody, to embody is to teach by example, with or without words. We are to serve the Lord with gladness and come before His presence with a song (Psalm 100). Singing forms us, and formation through catechesis, as theological reflection in relationship with doctrine and experience, is the beating heart of evangelization.
Given this daily habit whereby we are immersed in doctrinal affirmation, the story of God, which outlines our baptismal status and invites theological reflection and mystagogy, the role Scripture plays in regula — whether in a Daily Office of Readings or in Mass — is also clarified. Our “back to basics” lens reminds us that Scripture’s purpose, from the beginning of the Church, is corporate and personal meditation and contemplation to safeguard, and to inspire, Catholic imagination, or sacramentality. Just as Jesus “interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24.27), scripture ought be for us the sacramental thesaurus of our baptismal experience guided and taught by the Holy Spirit personally, particularly, and relationally through and with other people, all seeking and serving Christ in each other. The Benedictine practice of lectio divina is not merely a way to read sacred text, but training in how to interpret the cosmos. It is our Devotional life that in fact sanctifies our time, by means of the Holy Spirit, not the Divine Office.
BUT WHY NOT SCRIPTURE LECTIONS DURING THE DIVINE OFFICE?
The problem, and it is a serious one, with Scripture lections (including Psalms) within the Divine Office is that praise to God transcendent of all time and space is hardly the time for Bible study. In the Cranmerian form, we are compelled to pass too quickly through the readings, the Word not allowed to work on us, to form us, on God’s time rather than our own. Mere recitation out loud is useful only the very few given such a unique gift. The rest of us need to sit with Scripture for it to be effective. This explains the ascetical necessity to preach on Scripture in the Mass: doing so “breaks open the Word.” Likewise, but through different means, lectio divina or any biblical meditation “breaks open the Word,” because we sit with it and allow it to work upon us sacramentally. When Scripture is recited during the Office without pause or reflection, as if by a machine, Scripture, as glorious as it is, tragically risks reduction to mere information.
What the revised form recognizes is that reading for information is distinct from reading for formation. The activity of reading with the intention of formation means reading again and again — “slow reading,” or in Cranmer’s words, to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest Scripture. Many people who say the Divine Office privately in their homes often report that during it they tend to read the Scripture lections slowly — this demonstrates the need for the Bible to be absorbed formationally, not informationally; that is, as Devotional office of readings, not Divine Office of praise. Scripture should never merely pass in one ear and out the other. This is a point on which Prayer Book liturgists remain confused, and the Church suffers. Indeed, Scripture is always healthy nourishment. But to include lections within the Office is not only to risk reducing the biblical revelation to information, but it is also to obscure the underlying, and original, purpose of the Office: Marian awe in the face of otherness.
Scripture is the authoritative means for theological reflection, and it may be that relocating it within Regula discloses again its true role in corporate and personal discipleship. Equipped with the doctrinal content of this revised form, we can dive devotionally into Scripture and read, interpret, and reflect still more effectively, which itself teaches us to interpret situations and circumstances we encounter in our lives and react more compassionately. A Church catechized through a streamlined, updated, efficient Divine Office might make for a more wildly scriptural Devotional life — which means growth in the Body of Christ in all dimensions, and is not that the point? Were St Benedict and Thomas Cranmer wrong to seek balance within Regula, a core Benedictine insight? If not, then why are we wrong to seek what they sought: a rebalanced Regula given the vastly different conditions of our day? The Body of Christ, after all, grows.
AN ORTHODOX AND BENEDICTINE PASTORAL SOLUTION
Ironically, to reconcile the pastoral situation today with our baptismal obligation, it is the more orthodox solution to make the Divine Office shorter, more accessible, more doable, more explicitly doctrinal — to move the lectionaries to the Daily Office of Readings. And it is the more Benedictine and Cranmerian solution to restore a common Office able to to be sung by laity and clergy alike — a true unity of the Church Militant. An effectively clergy-only Divine Office, too often our situation today, upends the entire theology of historic Prayer Book worship. It is called the Book of Common Prayer not for nothing.
All of which is to say, this revised form is pastorally attuned for a missional Church in a mobile, “post-Christian” society. It is doctrinally vigorous, yet ascetically realistic. It does not require paging through books, does not discriminate against the illiterate, young or old, and can be sung anywhere and at any time, whether in the morning, noonday, or evening: whenever the holiness of beauty is disclosed (Psalm 29).
This Office is also family-friendly. For those with young children, its second half — Kyrie Eleison, Pater Noster, and Ave Regina Caelorum — is a gentle place to start for adult and children alike, and it is quickly memorizable. Subsequently, the Jubilate can be added, followed in turn by the Benedicite and Te Deum, first in portions and then in their entireties. Because even the youngest of children, through the help and example of their parents, day by day can magnify God, and worship His Name ever world without end. May we join Ananias, Azariah, and Misael, the three holy children — saved by God in the fiery furnace of His abundant and gracious love. And in so doing, may we sing — may we trumpet! — our love of our heavenly Father, who confers upon us our very being, and who gives for our salvation His only Son, Jesus Christ.
As a final note, the reason that the revised form uses non-contemporary language translations is two-fold. The first is to be consistent with the sensibility of the Pater Noster, the prayer that controls the theology of the Office; despite it too being non-contemporary, it is nonetheless beloved today — “art,” “thy,” and “thine” are familiar precisely because the prayer is used. Likewise, the more one uses the Jubilate, Benedicite, and Te Deum, the more “ye,” “hath,” and the rest become familiar and second nature.
And the second follows from the first. Without question, the “Elizabethan English” translations simply sing better: the phrasing and literary sensibility of that era have more musicality and hence more poetical allure. Contemporary does not necessarily mean improved, and a persuasive case can be made that contemporary translations of these prayers obstruct rather than edify. The translations selected here are better to sing, theologically more transparent, and, in the case of the Benedicite, shorter. The choice therefore is obvious. We are, after all, to bring the first fruits of our ground into the house of the Lord our God (Exodus 23.19). Not only Truth, and not only Goodness, but also Beauty adores our Maker, our Lover, and our Keeper — for He is their source.
CONCLUDING PRAYER
Heavenly Father, who bestowed upon your Church from its first baptismal moments the grace of regula: capacitate us to love you, the Lord our God, with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our Mind; and likewise enable us by your presence to love our neighbor as our self, that our life in response to you can indeed become holy, holy, holy; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, our comforter, one God, now and forever. Amen.
Icon by the hand of Monica Thornton.