Christian Liturgy

Liturgy is a Greek word, meaning work. Like the Latin phrase ‘Opus Dei’ (Work of God, referring to Morning and Evening Prayer), it reminds us that the first duty and final purpose of humankind is the worship of Almighty God. Some prefer to reserve the word Liturgy to describe Eucharistic or other sacramental worship, but in common use it has come to refer to any ordered act of worship within the Church. It is a fussless, ‘just-get-on-with-it’ sort of word which describes perfectly the theological reality and daily experience of Christians: it is work, sometimes hard, sometimes not immediately rewarding, sometimes dull and rather tedious, sometimes backbreaking, sometimes invigorating and satisfying, sometimes eminently joyful. It is the primary duty of this and every cathedral not merely to provide photogenic ‘lovely services’ for ecclesiastical interest groups, but rather to lead our communities every day of the year in that ordered and rhythmical waiting upon God which is our duty and our delight.

Morning Prayer

Morning Prayer (also sometimes called Mattins) is part of the daily round of corporate worship which has been offered by the Church since the earliest times (for a history of the Divine Office consult a work such as George Guiver CR: ‘Company of Voices’). In the medieval monastic rite, offices were said in the evening and during the night and at various stages of the day: the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (the definitive Anglican liturgical resource) conflates night and morning offices into one service of Morning Prayer: this contains psalms, bible readings and intercession, and is distinguished from Evening Prayer by principal canticles of Benedictus (The Song of Zechariah, Luke 1.68ff) and Te Deum (We praise thee, O God). Until the Liturgical Movement of the 20^th century restored the Eucharist to a position of pre-eminence in most cathedral and parish churches of the Church of England, Morning Prayer would have been the main act of Sunday morning worship. There was also, in the last quarter of the 20^th century, a revival of interest in the Divine Office: many simplified versions of the Office have been made available by dioceses and Religious communities, and by those who stand firmly in a particular strand of Church Tradition (for example, the Celtic). Priests of the Church of England (and of the whole Catholic Church) are required to recite the office every day; many laypeople also use it as the backbone of their own prayer daily, a welcome re-appropriation of what is essentially a lay (and ecumenical; even interfaith) form of worship.

Eucharist

The Eucharist (Greek, = Thanksgiving) is the rite that Christians perform in fulfillment of the Lord’s command on the night before he died (alluded to in 1 Corinthians 11:24–25, though not in Mark 14.22-25) to break bread and share wine (his ‘body’ and ‘blood’) in his memory. Distinct traditions within the Church attribute different significances to the rite: for Catholic and Orthodox Christians the Mass or Liturgy is an entering once more into the saving events of Christ’s dying and rising, an opportunity to be immersed through broken bread and flowing wine into Christ’s bloody sacrifice on Calvary, and to receive an assurance of the Lord’s real presence in the sacrament of the altar. For Evangelical Christians, the Lord’s Supper is a fellowship meal, free of sacrificial freight, a memorial re-enactment of what Jesus did at his own Last Supper.  The Church of England is, in this as in all matters, charged with the task of keeping the mean between any sets of extremes. The Holy Communion service of 1662 was a radical reworking of the content and order of received texts. More recent liturgical revision (Common Worship Order One) has restored the Eucharist to its classic western shape: this is the form of the liturgy which is characteristically experienced in Anglican cathedral and parish churches today.

Evening Prayer (also called Choral Evensong)

Evening Prayer (also known as Evensong; ‘Choral Evensong’ when sung by a parish or cathedral choir) conflates in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer the evening office of Vespers and the short bed-time office of Compline. The canticles proper to Evensong are therefore Magnificat (My soul doth magnify the Lord: the Song of Mary, Luke 1.46ff; see also 1 Samuel 2) and Nunc dimittis (Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace: the Song of Simeon, Luke 2.29ff). Anglican liturgical revision at the turn of the third millennium restored this distinction: Common Worship Daily Prayer offers two separate services, each with its own distinctive canticle. Perhaps because 1662 Mattins is so rarely experienced today, Evensong has taken on a new intensity and its cultural distinctiveness is cherished, not least by those who listen to weekly broadcasts of Choral Evensong at four o’clock on Wednesday afternoons on BBC Radio 3.