Why pray daily?

- The Rev. John Beddingfield

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The greatest strength of daily practice of prayer is that the habit of praying, the rhythm of praying, gets into our bodies.  This habit then becomes a natural part of our life, as natural as breathing.  In many Episcopal Churches, prayer is offered every day and there are thousands of Episcopalians/Anglicans who pray one form of the Daily Office.  

Last year a member of my church became ill.  It had long been his personal devotional practice to pray Compline every night before going to sleep.  When he went into the hospital, he continued ending each night with this short form from the Prayer Book.  Eventually, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer which even involved his losing his ability to speak.  Because his family knew the importance of Compline to him, they continued reading the prayers for him each night in the hospital room.  I learned about this after our friend’s death.  We were at the funeral home during the visitation hours for the family and friends and a member of the family asked me if I could bring them a Prayer Book.  They wanted to end the visitation time, the vigil really, with Compline because, as they put it, “it just seems like the right thing to do.” 

When we become familiar with the layout of the Prayer Book, we will find that even when we have no words to pray, the Prayer Book supplies them for us.

History of Daily Prayer

We have a variety of prayer practices that come from scripture.  Much of the prayer life of the people of Israel was shaped by the patterns set in the Jewish temple and its rhythm of morning and evening sacrifices.  Once the temple was destroyed, various traditions developed.  Prayer was often based upon such citations as Psalm 55:18 “in the evening, in the morning, and at noonday, I will complain and lament and [God] will hear my voice.”  Jesus sometimes prayed alone, sometimes with his disciples, and often in the synagogue. 

The Christian monastic tradition, especially as it evolved by the fifth century A.D. and was systematized by Saint Benedict, drew guidance from Psalm 119:164 “Seven times a day do I praise you.”  Based on this, Benedict developed the monastic pattern of two times of prayer during the evening or very early morning (Vigils and Matins), and then seven of prayer throughout the day (Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline).  

By the mid-sixteenth century, church leaders were looking for ways to simplify the worship of the church and to make it more accessible to the people.  When Thomas Cranmer edited the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549 he vastly reduced the complexity of the prayer times.  The first Book of Common Prayer provide for Matins and Evensong—basically, Morning and Evening Prayer.  Subsequent prayer books have added a very simple form for prayer at Noon (Noonday Prayer) and a simple form for ending the day (Compline).