The heart of the Book of Common Prayer is the daily offices—Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. These services nourish your soul, but not with intense bursts of devotion or with a dizzying complex of options that let you customize your devotional experience. They offer something else: simplicity, structure, Scripture.
Over the last five hundred years, Morning and Evening Prayer have been the most widely and frequently used Christian services in the English language. Unlike the services of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, Morning and Evening Prayer do not require an ordained minister. They are for everyone. Although these services are designed to be said in a group, you can say them by yourself. All you need is a Bible and a Book of Common Prayer. All you have to do is show up ready to hear God’s word, and to walk along a path of prayer that is already laid out for you. Each service will take you about half an hour. It can be a little longer depending on the day’s readings, or if you’re new to it.
Morning and Evening Prayer have two aims. First, they are meant to help us read the Bible—not just skimming our eyes across the page, but reading deeply for the good of our souls. Second, they help us respond to the Scriptures with gratitude, offering ourselves to God as living sacrifices (see Romans 6:19; 12:1).
If we keep those two aims in mind, we can better understand how Archbishop Cranmer designed these services. He drew on the ancient pattern of monastic prayer, comprising eight services at fixed times of day: Mattins, Lauds, and Prime in the morning; Terce, Sext, and None in the middle of the day; and Vespers and Compline in the evening. Cranmer streamlined those services so they could be used by all Christians. Everything he retained for these two services of Morning and Evening Prayer is meant to ensure that we approach the Scriptures with repentance and faith, and that we off er ourselves to God in prayer and thanksgiving.
Each service has four parts: preparing, praising, hearing, and praying. The last three are designed to draw us nearer to God. But because our sinfulness gets in the way of these means of drawing near to God, as the service begins we acknowledge our sin and express our desire for true repentance.
There are some small variations between the services of Morning and Evening Prayer, but the basic structure is the same, and most of the prayers are identical. Once you’ve learned one of these services, you know both of them.
As we move along the path provided by Morning or Evening Prayer, there is a clear trajectory. As the service begins, we come to God as sinners who need his forgiveness and grace. As the service ends, we find ourselves in a very different place. We have been assured of God’s forgiveness and have responded with praise; we have heard the Holy Scriptures; we have brought our petitions to our heavenly Father. The final notes are grace and peace.
In these services, we are treading a path of spiritual ascent. It’s a path that millions of other Christians have taken day after day for centuries. Taking this path, we are joining with the church in praise and prayer.
A Step-by-Step Guide
1. Preparing
The first part of Morning and Evening Prayer is preparing, but you may be in for a surprise. You may be used to servicesstarting with a call to worship, but that’s not how these services begin. Before we can even be called to worship, something has to be addressed: sin. This is a deeply biblical idea, the idea that before we worship we need forgiveness and cleansing (Exodus 19 and 40; Isaiah 6). The Book of Common Prayer ensures this preparation for worship in seven steps:
• sentences
• exhortation
• confession
• absolution
• Lord’s Prayer
• short responsive prayers
• psalm of invitation and warning (Morning Prayer)
2. Praising
The Psalter has been integral to Jewish and Christian devotions for millennia, and is an important part of the daily offices. Regular Morning and Evening Prayer will lead you through the entire Psalter in the course of a month, and you can find the psalms appointed for each morning and evening beginning on page 362. You can also chant the psalms, as discussed in chapter ten.
The Psalms printed in the Book of Common Prayer are from a translation by Miles Coverdale that was completed in 1540. Coverdale was the first person to publish a complete translation of the Bible in English. He incorporated much of the work of William Tyndale, who had already translated most of the Bible, and who was forced into exile and hiding, eventually suffering a martyr’s death for the “crime” of translating the Bible.
During Henry VIII’s reign, Coverdale twice fled to the Continent. With the accession of Edward VI in 1547, Coverdale returned and was made Bishop of Exeter. But only a few years later, under Mary, he was deprived of his bishopric, imprisoned, and then exiled. In exile he helped produce the Geneva Bible, an early and very widely used English translation. When Elizabeth became queen, Coverdale returned to England a venerable old reformer, taking up the rectorship of Saint Magnus the Martyr near London Bridge.
Coverdale had a gift for the English language that has rarely been rivaled. Even though Coverdale’s version of the Psalms is technically prose, it has often been called poetic. The poet W. H. Auden said, “All I know is that Coverdale reads like poetry, and the modern versions don’t.” (J. Chester Johnson, Auden, The Psalms, and Me (New York: Church Publishing, 2017)C. S. Lewis went even further in his praise for Coverdale: “In beauty, in poetry, he, and St. Jerome, the great Latin translator, are beyond all whom I know.” (C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2017) Another writer, Ernest Clapton, discerned the secret of Coverdale’s success in a combination that has eluded other English translators of the Psalms: “The tenderness, the soothing touch, the dignity and the majesty of Coverdale’s version.” (Ernest Clapton, Our Prayer Book Psalter: Containing Coverdale’s Version from His 1535 Bible and the Prayer Book Version by Coverdale from the Great Bible, 153941, Printed Side by Side (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1934)
The Psalms in the Book of Common Prayer are not only some of the most moving and evocative words in the English language (though they are that). They’re also medicine for our souls. Saint Athanasius, an early bishop of Alexandria, once said of the Book of Psalms that in it “you learn about yourself. You find depicted in it all the movements of your soul, all its changes, its ups and downs, its failures and recoveries. Moreover, whatever your particular need or trouble, from this same book you can select a form of words to fit it, so that you do not merely hear and then pass on, but learn the way to remedy your ill.”(Athanasius, “Letter of St. Athanasius to Marcellinus on the Interpretation of the Psalms,” in St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation: The Treatise De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, translated and edited by a religious of the C.S.M.V. (Crestwood, NY: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1953)
3. Hearing
Now we’re ready to hear and respond to God’s word. Of coursewe just read the appointed psalms, and they’re Scripture. But in Morning and Evening Prayer, the psalms aren’t presented as “Bible readings,” but as hymns of praise and turning to God, which is why they are sung or spoken responsively. In the psalms, we enter into conversation with God, both hearing his word and responding to him with the words that he gives us. The psalms prepare us to hear and respond to the other Scriptures as God’s word.
This next part of Morning or Evening Prayer has five elements. Two of these elements are “lessons,” or readings (p. 754). The other three elements are responses to the lessons. The first lesson is usually a chapter from the Old Testament, though sometimes it is from the Apocrypha. The second lesson is from the New Testament. (For more on the lessons, including why the Apocrypha is read, see chapter seven.)
4. Praying
Now we’re ready for the last part of Morning and Evening Prayer: prayer. It’s often been said that for a Christian, prayer is like breathing. The analogy works because it’s something natural and instinctive. It happens all the time, and it’s essential to life. But breathing happens without thinking about it. There are threats to breathing—like falling off a ship into the ocean—but we don’t have to worry that we’re going to get sidetracked and forget to breathe. But we do have to worry about distractions from prayer.
There are many ways prayer can “go wrong.” We can lose our train of thought (compare the prayer on p. 700). We can be imbalanced, concentrating on just one need, or only on our own needs, or only on needs—there are many elements of prayer, not only petitions but also praise and thanksgiving. We can pray for things it would be better for us not to have. We can have a distorted view of God.
The prayers of the Book of Common Prayer are an antidote to each of these infections. They offer us a path of prayer, already laid out, to help us avoid distraction. They help us see clearly God’s power, wisdom, and goodness. They offer a balance of different kinds of prayer, different kinds of petitions, and prayer for ourselves and others. As the exhortation at the beginning of Morning and Evening Prayer puts it, we “ask those things which are requisite and necessary, as well for the body as the soul.”
In Morning and Evening Prayer we follow a path of devotion that has been taken by countless Christians before you, and it will be taken by countless more in the generations to come. This path begins with honest confession. It ends with grace abounding
Contributors: Samuel L. Bray and Drew Nathaniel Keane.
Adapted from How to Use the Book of Common Prayer by Samuel L. Bray and Drew Nathaniel Keane. ©2024 by Samuel L. Bray and Drew Nathaniel Keane. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
Photo Credit Unsplash.com
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