Because we can never talk enough about liturgical beauty, here is a letter I wrote to a colleague in my liturgical group about Night Prayer from St. Stephen Walbrook, one of my favorite parishes in London, whose distinctive altar we discussed earlier in the thread, in which I segued into a discussion of BCP editions, which members may find interesting or boring beyond belief (by the way
@Paidiske , did I link you to the YouTube videos showing how the massive round main altar at that church is used? They do basically just use the edge; occasionally a wreath or other decorations might be in the center. This may be of interest to
@Shane R ,
@PloverWing,
@Philip_B ,
@Andrewn and
@Deegie, or it may not, but it seemed worth it to share, since at a minimum, I really love the nightly Night Prayer videos St. Stephen Walbrook does, as well as their monthly Choral Evensong and weekly Choral Eucharist services, which are beautifully done, and available on YouTube. So here is my letter:
https://ststephenwalbrook.net/night-prayer/
St. Stephen Walbrook now has a daily Night Prayer said service, with some Gregorian chant in the background; there is a new service daily. I believe they normally use Compline as found in the English Deposited Book of 1928.* The service lasts under ten minutes and features a homily, while being fully liturgical; thus is accomplished by omitting some or all of the four Psalms normally sung at Compline, which if included, stretch the service out to fifteen minutes, a justifiable omission, considering that the service is read by one person. The said recitation of the Psalms is not devoid of beauty, but there are better ways of experiencing them; in a sense, this service is the opposite of the sung Compline at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle, which has gorgeous Gregorian chant and related music by a dedicated choir, and which attracts a dedicated audience, which proves that the Divine Office can and should be a part of the worship services in many places where it has been set aside in favor of only doing a Sunday Eucharist, or worse, a Sunday Ante-Communion with monthly Eucharists. And the clergy shortage does not have to impact Divine Office services, since you don’t need a priest, a deacon or even a formally licensed reader for any of them, although I think encouraging lay leadership of the Divine Office should entail equipping the leaders of different services with the skills and dignities appropriate to the job, depending on the rules and rubrics in the church in question.
*This is the superb, beautiful Anglo Catholic refurbishment of the 1662 BCP, which removed all of the Cranmerian ugliness while leaving in the good bits, and adding to them, with provision for the reservation of the sacrament, and a new office of Prime and of Compline. Of course, even though the majority of Anglican MPs voted to approve the 1928 Deposited Book** , a small group of low churchmen formed an alliance with Church of Scotland MPs, and non-conformist Calvinist and low church evangelical MPs from England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and thus had enough votes to defeat it. Fortunately, the Church of England slowly introduced bits of the book into use in the coming decades, and now has liturgical autonomy, except I don’t think they can call a new liturgical text the Book of Common Prayer, but as an example, the beautiful 2011 Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton at Westminster Abbey was basically using the 1928 marriage service, which is now in the modular Common Worship facility that most C of E parishes use.
Additionally, the offices of Prime and Compline also appeared, along with an extremely short Midday Prayer, in the 1962 Canadian BCP, which would be one of the four best versions, along with the 1928 American BCP, the 1929 Scottish BCP, and the 1938 Melanesian BCP, except they had to go and delete potentially offensive verses from the Imprecatory Psalms, rather than explaining their meaning. I think it might not be a bad idea in the case of Super Flumina (Psalm 137/ Psalm 136 LXX) to attach to the Psalter an explanatory homily to be read with that Psalm explaining the meaning of verses 7-9, in that, if we read it, as we should, with a primarily Alexandrian typological-prophetic context, it is not encouraging the murder of the children of Babylon, or Seleucia-Cstesiphon, or Baghdad, or any other children, Mesopotamian or otherwise, but rather, Babylon is a metaphor for the domain of the evil one and his demons; their little ones, their offspring, are sin and death, and the psalm is predicting our Lord Jesus Christ defeating these in his Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, Ascension, and in the Eschaton at the dread day of judgement. This could be used any time that Psalm came up, which would be arbitrary if we used the monthly Psalter, although using the system of Kathisma and Stases, since there are 60 stases, I devised a plan whereby each Sunday in the year could have set Psalms, while the other Psalms could be read on a six day, seven day, twice weekly or monthly format, and if using a format other than the six day schedule, an extra divine office could be added called Psalmody** which would consist of the singing or reading of any Psalms displaced by the alternate Psalms on Sunday or perhaps on certain feast days, and like Night Prayer, Psalmody would be a great online service.
**in a nod to the Coptic tradition (although Psalmody in their case really refers to Vespers, Vigils and Matins; I could write a lengthy article on how the Coptic Rite uniquely combines three different divine office systems, the monastic Agpeya, or Hours, the Morning and Evening Raising of Incense, which look like a vestigial Cathedral Office, and the Psalmody, which is a normal sung monastic office of vespers, the midnight office or vigils, and matins, where the Old Testament is read, and which is less meditative and more liturgical than the Agpeya, which seems like it was optimized for individual use by monks who read all the Psalms in it daily as a kind of Hesychasm, but which is now also used congregationally on top of the other divine two divine offices.
By the way, the fourth best BCP edition I would controversially propose is the 1979, since it is public domain, it has the only marginally tolerable contemporary vernacular liturgical texts I have encountered, it preserves the traditional language material in Rite I, but it adds the hymn Phos Hilarion to Evensong, which is brilliant, because Mattins has always had in the same place Veni Creator Spiritus; it also included “Rite III” which has enabled parishes to celebrate various Holy Communion services not in the 1979 BCP, for example, the 1549 liturgy, or the Sarum Rite mass, or the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. And it has a rubric allowing the conversion of the entire book to traditional language, which happened, with the 1994 Anglican Service Book, which is exquisite. This displacement is more because what is in the 1962 Canadian BCP is mostly available elsewhere; its communion service is above average but low church,en still had too much influence, so it is not as high church as say, the 1928 American, 1929 Scottish, or 1979 American BCP (most controversial changes in the 1979 were in a high church or Anglo Catholic direction, for example, the deprecation of the 39 Articles to a historical reference document, and the new catechism), because the 1979 BCP does follow in the footsteps of the 1962 Canadian BCP regarding imprecatory psalms.
Now, at first glance, it might seem to be a misstep on the part of John Wesley in his Sunday Service Book for the Methodists in North America, in which he outright deleted the imprecatory Psalms and replaced them with other things, including hymns by his brother Charles - although, I think he could in that time and place have been justified in doing so, because at that time especially, the Protestant tendency, especially in North America due to Puritan influence, was to read everything in a super-literal way, and the Imprecatory Psalms could have been, in the inept hands of the Puritan heretics, a contributing factor to Puritan acts of cruelty, for example, the Salem Witch Trials, and there is a pastoral justification to not include in the lectionary or psalter things which in the absence of well trained clergy and well catechized laity, could be misinterpreted in a dangerous way. In obeying Christ’s command to feed His sheep, we do on occasion have to use baby formula (As the Holy Apostle Paul asserts in 1 Corinthians 3:1).
If you view the service, you may get a different impression than I did - specific service I watched featured an Anglican Prebendary doing a brief, informative although not particularly good hagiographical/biographical sermon on St. Wilfred of Rippon, using the aforementioned Compline from the 1928 Deposited Book, which he pronounced in an elegant way, but did compress by omitting the four Psalms - the service otherwise takes 15 minutes with no homily. (I assume you know what a Prebendary is; basically, for the most part, honorary canons who are assigned seats in the very comfortable top and back row of the choir in English cathedrals, who are usually distinguished parish priests who also assist the residential canons in the administration of the cathedral church, so essentially, an archpriest; however, historically, it referred to a type of benefice that was financed by estates belonging to a cathedral or collegiate church; only one collegiate church of the original form survived that great evil act of avarice which was the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII (as opposed to the neo-Collegiate Church we see in Westminster Abbey, which ceased to be an Abbey and was for most of the rest of the 16th century the cathedral of the City of Westminster, but it was then decided to merge the diocese of Westminster with that of London, so St. Paul’s became the cathedral for Westminster once more, and Westminster Abbey formally became the Collegiate Church of St. Peter, but it retained the cathedral system of management, and became a Royal Peculiar (under the personal jurisdiction of the Queen, not part of any parish; the Savoy Chapel, the Chapels in the Tower of London, and the Chapel Royal of St. George in Windsor are some examples of these), so the last traditional Collegiate Church is St. Endellion in Cornwall, which is run by six prebendaries, including the rector, four vicars from neighboring parishes (which now form with St. Endelion a parish cluster), and Dr. Rowan Williams.
** The 1928 English Deposited Book is at risk of confusion with the exquisite 1928 American BCP (which has a supplementary Office of Compline, which predated it by a number of years, being a supplement to the 1892 BCP, which is also a very good and very underrated BCP edition, in fact, the edition that one would assume St. Tikhon of Moscow reviewed when he was Bishop of New York, working with St. Rafael of Brooklyn on Anglican-Orthodox relations; his analysis of the BCP led to the development of the revisions which enabled Western Rite Orthodoxy to use it, and indeed, the adapted version is called by the Antiochian Western Rite Vicarate, in St. Andrew’s Service Book, the Divine Liturgy of St. Tikhon.
