Lots of people who have been Episcopalians for a long time wonder what happened to Morning Prayer.
This is a simple question with a complicated answer, since it touches on how we understand scripture, the history of the church and our country, the successes and failures of the Reformation and of course our personal experiences and memories.
So first a bit of ancient history. It is very clear from scripture that as the first followers of Jesus were trying to figure out how to be faithful to Jesus’ life and teaching after he was gone, that most of them understood that Jesus’ instruction at the Last Supper, “as often as you do this, do so in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19) meant that they should break bread and share the cup in Jesus’ name once a week, and that the day they should gather for their memorial supper was not the Sabbath but the first day of the week, Sunday, the day of resurrection. This was not, at first, a universal practice – some Christians seem to have looked to the foot washing as primary symbolic action, some possibly saw the communion meal as an annual Passover event, some used other elements besides bread and wine, including cheese, fish, milk and honey – but by the second century, the Sunday assembly for sharing bread and wine and recounting the story of Jesus’ life and teaching was a universal practice among Christians, although early on, for both practical and communitarian reasons, the celebration had moved to from the evening to Sunday morning and seldom included a full meal.
Communion was also celebrated for other occasions, particularly funerals and baptisms, but the Sunday Eucharistic assembly was the main thing, before the canon of scripture was settled and the hierarchy of the church was established, that unified Christians.
A couple of things happened in the Middle Ages that, while not shifting the pattern of the primacy of Sunday Eucharist, shifted the way that people engaged it, and made a huge difference in the Reformation.
The first of these was that, in the ideological battles over heresy and orthodoxy in the church, access to Communion came to be the primary sign of orthodox belief, and the church began to emphasize Paul’s teaching that anyone who receives the bread and the wine unworthily receives it to their condemnation (1 Corinthians 11:27-29), so people were expected to make a confession and do their assigned penance before receiving communion. The penances were often harsh, or included payment of cash or goods, (especially in the late Middle Ages when the penances and indulgences financed the building of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome), so people started to avoid receiving communion more often than necessary. They didn’t stop going to church, though, so communion became, for most Christians, something to watch rather than receive. The minimum standard was to receive communion once a year, at Easter.
But while participation in Eucharist was diminishing, the number of Eucharistic services was greatly increasing, as people began increasingly to pay the church to offer requiem masses in memory of loved ones who had died with the promise that these masses would shorten the deceased’s time in purgatory and speed them to heaven. By the time of the Reformation, many churches and cathedrals were offering these “votive masses” round-the-clock in each of their chapels, and had many clergy and acolytes who did nothing but requiem masses all day. And people came to these services, not to receive communion, but to watch it, for a number of superstitions had arisen and been encouraged by the church about the benefits to health and spirit derived from merely seeing the host (wafer) after it had been consecrated. City dwellers even went so far as to memorize the mass schedule at all of the nearby churches, and visit as many as possible on a Sunday, popping in just in time to see the priest hold up the consecrated bread and say the word “hoc est corpus meum” (:this is my body,” from which we get the phrase, “hocus pocus”).
So the situation that Thomas Cranmer (the Archbishop of Canterbury who was the shepherd of the English Reformation) and the other reformers were trying to remedy was a church in which everyone was going to Eucharist, and frequently, but no one was receiving Eucharist more than once a year except the priests and acolytes. So the reformers abolished the Requiem Mass altogether (a requiem is different from a funeral) and the harsh penances at confession. and tried to restore the pattern of Sunday Eucharist which was received by all. Unfortunately, the resistance to, and fear of receiving Communion was so great that, although weekly Eucharist was Cranmer’s goal, quarterly communion was the most he felt he was able to enforce.
Of course, if Eucharist wasn’t to be celebrated every week, Cranmer was faced with the question of what was to be done in Church on Sunday, and indeed on weekdays as well, to replace all those requiems. For non-Eucharistic services in the church, Cranmer had two possible sources: the daily prayers of the monasteries and the daily prayers of the cathedral church, both of which were known as the Daily Office (“office” from the Latin “opus,” meaning “work).
The monastic prayers were a complicated, seven part ritual of prayers, psalms and scripture spread throughout the day. Participation required memorizing the entire book of Psalms and the ability to sing. The Cathedral Office was simpler, with one service in the morning and one in the evening, and the morning service in particular was intended for congregational participation, and used a limited cycle of psalms, a processional litany, and familiar prayers.
Cranmer chose to follow the pattern of the Cathedral office, but borrowed heavily from the content of the Monastic Office for the content of the new services of morning and evening prayer, which is not much changed in our prayer book from Cranmer’s version.
From the Reformation on, there was continued movement towards more frequent Sunday communion, but, for largely political reasons, the movement in America was in the opposite direction. Whatever the desires of American Anglicans may have been with regard to the frequency of Communion, for the New World church, even quarterly Eucharist was a difficult proposition due to the shortage of priests to celebrate it. The Church of England, following the wishes of the crown and parliament, never provided the colonies with any resident bishops. Consequently, the American churches were dependent on the willingness of English priests to make the dangerous sea journey to the colonies, or for Americans interested in the priesthood to make the journey twice and hope that the Bishop of London would ordain them. [Personal note: one of the English priests who was willing to immigrate to America was my nineteen-times great-grandfather, Benjamin Doggett, who became the rector of Christ Church, Lancaster Virginia in 1660, and who founded the neighboring St. Mary’s White Chapel Parish]. With very few priests, infrequent Communion was the norm for most American parishes, many of which were dependent on “circuit rider” priests to show up occasionally for Eucharist, baptisms and marriages. Consequently, Morning Prayer became the norm for the American Episcopal Church, and efforts to amend this after the American Revolution and the establishment of an independent Episcopal Church with its own bishops (in itself another fascinating story) were resisted by the congregations, which had a great deal more power in the democratically governed Episcopal Church than they had in the hierarchical Church of England.
The theological push for weekly communion as faithful to Jesus’ mandate and the most ancient tradition of the church continued, though, with people and congregations being won over bit by bit to the cause of Sunday sacrament. As early as 1856, the endowment that established Grace Episcopal Church in Georgetown directed that Communion be offered weekly to the working men of Georgetown as a condition of the gift. By the end of the 1960s, the majority of the church was persuaded, which was one of the strong arguments for the revision of the book of Common Prayer, not only to provide Eucharistic services that would support weekly use, but to change the rubrics to declare weekly Eucharist as the norm of the church.
It has to be acknowledged that the leadership of the church, as enthusiastic as they generally were for the new Book of Common Prayer, did a poor job of making the case for the change to parishes that were not already on board. Consequently, the transition to weekly Eucharistic has not been universal or smooth in all places. In addition, in many congregations that are making the transition, many miss Morning Prayer, which has its own beauty and integrity. The editors of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer anticipated this, and allowed for the use of Morning Prayer as the Liturgy of the Word preceding Eucharist.
Unfortunately, as many have noticed, this hybrid Morning Prayer/Eucharist service does some damage to the integrity of both services. Scripture and psalmody are used differently and for different reasons in the two services. In a Eucharistic service, for example, the Psalm is treated as scripture, which is why we sit for it, while in Morning Prayer, the Psalm is treated as song in response to scripture, and so we stand, and finish the psalm with the Gloria Patri at Morning Prayer. Congregational prayer has a more central and elaborate place in Morning Prayer than in Eucharist, where the focus of the liturgy of the Word is on the sermon, and the principle prayer is the Eucharistic prayer.
So we are left with what is really a generational dilemma. Those of us whose faith was formed in the practice of regular Morning Prayer miss its rhythm and its beauty, while throughout the church, most of our children’s faith and spirituality has been formed in the weekly celebration of Communion. Eventually the tension between Eucharist and Morning Prayer will fade in our congregations, and we will have to decide whether we want to put the resources into keeping it alive anywhere but in our cathedrals and seminaries.
Meanwhile, in our busy lives few of us feel we have the time to gather to pray Morning Prayer in its true intended context: as the daily prayer of the community, beginning each day with a focus on God. There are, to be sure, excellent online and phone app resources for the individual discipline of Morning Prayer (www.anglicansonline.org has links to many of them), but as a community rite it is little practiced any more. On the one hand it is sad to witness the diminishment of such a beautiful part of our heritage, on the other hand, it was even sadder to lose, for such a long time, an even more beautiful and significant part of our Christian heritage, Sunday Eucharist, and we should be glad indeed that it has been restored to us.
Bill +