“Could Ye Not Watch with Me One Hour?”: The Abiding Necessity of the Traditional Daily Office

Anyone familiar with the classic 1959 science-fiction novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, will remember a central theme was Christianity’s ability to survive and rebuild even when Mankind uses the creative gifts handed down to us from the Almighty to maim and murder ourselves. In the book, atomic bombs turn on their hubristic creators in a grim recapitulation of Babel’s Tower: beauty, science, and language itself are lost in the unfeeling embers of a mad, burning world. The only exceptions are the Christian communities which dedicate themselves to preserving God’s special and natural revelation for those who will follow. The inspiration for this work of fiction was the real performance of Christianity after the fall of Rome. This real-life providential perseverance can still be seen not just in the enduring work of priests and monks, but in the bricks and architectural artistry of the craftsmen who laid the foundations of cathedrals they would never see finished until they return to them in resurrected glory.

By the grace of God alone, we have not had an atom bomb dropped on us (yet), but Christians should belong to a church which could survive if such a thing happened tomorrow. The dry run for this kind of technologically driven societal collapse is already happening all around us. The internet with its various forms of cancer (social media, pornography, etc.), mass-produced fentanyl and methamphetamine, food designed to maximize profit and undermine health, unnatural sexual technologies, and the overprescription of mind-altering pharmaceuticals have had much the same functional effect of a bomb going off in the hearts of men. Madness is all around us, and it will be the job of the 21st-century church to offer a means to recover what we have lost and safeguard what we have been given.

The Anglican Way has an important role to play in this broken world through her inheritance of the daily office of morning and evening prayer. A recent article by Mr. Bart Wallace has much to commend it, as the author writes, “As a humble layman I see the Anglican Morning and Evening Prayer offices as serving the needs of the time very well, if not perfectly.” Mr. Wallace goes on to make suggestions as to how the province can go about implementing a modified version of the daily office, but the article suffers from the common handicap of those who critique the actual common prayer tradition of the Anglican Way: the assumptions of the critic are always given priority over the wisdom of past ages.

This position is not Mr. Wallace’s fault, for over the course of the last century this way of thinking became the very grammar of the triumphant religious discourse which presided over the decay of the 20th Century Anglican Way. Change and modification in any direction were the order of the day and victory was won by those who wanted to change things the most in order to keep up with the supposed demands of a changing world. The fatal flaw of this collective suicide pact was the idea that it was somehow uniquely challenging to be a Christian in the 20th century West (big news to the white-clothed martyrs who worship even now before our Lord) and that the answer to the common abuses which come from an empire coming of age was to become a church filled with eunuch chaplains incapable of saying, “No,” to the banal, soul-crushing decadence of a people turning their back on God. Whether we acknowledge it or not, all 21st-century American Anglicans (and Christians in general), have inherited this perverse way of thinking about our religion, and it is the task of those who wish to revive the Anglican Way to question the wisdom of following a path which has only brought a collapse of our holiness and an erosion of our witness to the truth which sets men free. In short, we need to be questioning all of our presuppositions handed down to us from the men and women who presided over Christendom breaking apart. “Who says?” should be written on our hearts and minds, and if the answer isn’t, “God in His Holy Word or in the unifying formularies of the Anglican Way,” we should embrace our Christian freedom and say, “No, I will not be a slave to this dying age; I will live as a Christian, and the best way to live as a Christian is through the rule of faith found in the Anglican Way.”

I do not want to be too hard on Mr. Wallace, who I believe has his heart in the right place, but I also believe he, and over two generations of Anglicans, have been failed by a lack of conviction from our clergy and laity in the necessity of fully using the Book of Common Prayer (particularly in its earlier editions) as the blessed means of living “in the world but not of it.” The idea that it is impossible for an Anglican parish to maintain the daily office is the triumph of prioritizing worldly things over our loving, obedient obligation to God. I am not just speaking to clergy here; there is no reason faithful laymen shouldn’t be assisting their clergy in keeping their churches open and praying to the God who gives us everything we have. I will, however, say this to the clergy: If Richard Hooker could pray the daily office in his church, and run his parish while writing The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, you can probably manage to spend an hour or less in church each day and do whatever else needs to be done.

The clergy and lay excuses for not offering this sacrifice of ourselves, our souls, and bodies each day tend to revolve around our fast-paced lives or our hobbies or jobs or activities (otherwise known as the stress-inducing factors of modern life which we empirically know are driving us to addictions, unhappiness, and death). As a vocal proponent of the public daily office, I find myself in the strange position of being a hostage negotiator begging people to put down the gun before they kill themselves as they tell me how stressed and unhappy they are about the very things we have been brainwashed into thinking give our lives meaning. Anglican churches should be beacons of hope offering the finished work of Christ as the very means by which we know meaning itself. We should be gardens of calming sanity through which we can raise ourselves and our families with a true focus on the cross. This focus will not come by accident, and real sacrifices will need to be made. Study after study shows the four hours a day people spend looking at their phones or devices is terrible for them; why can’t the church offer a place where men and women can be liberated from that addiction for an hour a day? We hear and see the desperate need for community and shared purpose; why can’t the church provide that community and shared purpose around the daily office?

The answer I usually hear is that not enough people will come to church to make it worthwhile. Will a faithful clergyman or trained lay reader be in God’s church by himself on occasion (maybe many occasions)? Yes, but even if the church militant cannot be counted on to be in attendance, the church triumphant will more than make up their numbers. Further, it may take a full generation of having services day in and day out to reignite the culture which saw prayer and the study of God’s Word as the most important part of our days, but what better way to sacrificially love our neighbors, our children, and the future Christians who will defend the faith than by giving ourselves over in prayer to the God who has given us everything? As an anecdotal observation, the mission where I am honored to serve, in our second year of daily services, rarely has a service where no one is in attendance.

However, one really shouldn’t have to defend this basic requirement of the faithful keeping of the daily office, an artifact of a once thriving Anglican spirituality. The question should not be: “Will lots of people come to this service at my church if we publicly worship the living God?” Rather, like a hospital, the church should be open to administer the life-giving Word to those who know they are sick. In this way, the church is open and praying when Russia invades Ukraine and people are scared of what comes next; the church is open and praying when Roe V. Wade is overturned; the church is open and praying when a young mother doesn’t know how she’s going to get through another day, and on and on. The open, praying church must be the ideal from which all other possibilities of faithful living flow.

While we are speaking of ideals, we shouldn’t be selling our congregations short, or put another way, we shouldn’t set the standard low because we think it is all anyone can handle. The church as the worshipping centerpiece of a membership spread throughout a town should hold to the standard of its Book of Common Prayer. My sincere recommendation would be the rigorous but simple to understand system set forth in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, particularly found in The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition. But, it isn’t just a matter of picking up a book in a church. One must submit to something which intentionally limits our autonomy—a service which constantly reminds us of how holy and just and loving and merciful God is and how much we desperately need Him. Thirty psalms a month, four chapters of God’s Word a day, two daily chances to unburden ourselves from the wickedness of our sins, and two daily chances to join the repentant publican in the undeserved absolution of those same sins. An hour a day where men and women can go and remember the world is dying but they are already walking on resurrected ground.

With this central, daily worship of a church in place—strictly adhering to the prayer book as closely as possible—the possibilities for adjusting to the frailties of the flesh become rehabilitative rather than normative. The parish church worshipping every day becomes a standard to which faithful households can aspire. So, while every Anglican should be thinking about ways to change their lives so that daily participation in their church’s public worship is possible, families or individuals can reproduce the daily office at home in very effective ways. At Trinity Connersville, we provide daily audio recordings of our prayer services and make them available for our parishioners as a way to assist them in getting over the hump of unfamiliarity with the structure/concept of daily prayer and to increase the intimacy which comes from praying with other people. In my experience, the biggest reason people quit the daily office is a lack of accountability from their Christian brothers and sisters, and so the example set by a pastor, curate, or a leading layman can go a long way to creating a parish culture aligned with giving God back an hour of our day.

With the goal being full participation, there are several good options to begin the journey:

1. Read the appointed psalms and lessons followed by the three daily collects. (10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes at night).
2. Read the appointed psalms and lessons followed by the last canticle (traditionally the Benedictus for the morning and Nunc dimittis for the evening) through the kyrie (if you are blessed to have it in your prayerbook), through the versicles, and finishing with the three daily collects (15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening).
3. The editors of The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition have produced some lovely versions of Family Prayer which provide roughly what the above recommend with one lesson being read (rather than two) and a printable format for use at home. Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer (15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening).
4. As you go along, week to week or month to month, add a new part of the service into your daily sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, and in no time at all, you will have liberated a half hour in the morning and a half hour at night from the shrieking demands of our fallen world.

Let us end with the words of our Lord: “And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, ‘What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak'” (St. Matthew 26:40‒41). As Anglican Christians, we have the blessed opportunity to spend an hour a day watching and praying, not to save ourselves or build up piles of self-righteousness, but rather to purge our lives of temptations and fill our hearts with the joyful good news of Christ’s victory over death itself. Every part of ourselves which rebels against the very idea of worshipping God for (at most) an hour a day through the traditional daily office of the Book of Common Prayer is a part of our hearts and minds which desperately needs to be transformed into the image of Christ. We Anglicans have the very tools to do just that handed down to us from the saints who came before us; I pray we take them up and use them.