The Daily Office: Readings from the Early Church

One spiritual practice that I adopted some time ago, is to read a passage from Saint Benedict's Rule prior to saying Compline.  This gives me a time of reflection from something grounded in tradition, non-Biblical of course.  Recently, I accidently left my copy of The Rule at my brother's house whilst on a family trip and so I turned to my book shelf to find something suitable as a replacement.

I quickly located my copy of Bob Wright's classic, Readings for the Daily Office from the Early Church (New York: Church Publishing, 1991) and his supplemental They Still Speak:  Readings for the Lesser Feasts (New York: Church Publishing, 1993).

Those who know this giant scholar, priest, and historian in The Episcopal Church know that these two volumes represent sound research, a faithful translation of the texts, and shaped according to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer Daily Office calendar.

J. Robert Wright is the Saint Mark's Church in the Bowery Professor of Ecclesiastical History at The General Theological Seminary in New York.  He was awarded the St. Augustine's Cross by the Archbishop of Canterbury for his contributions to the wider Anglican Communion.  Friends of mine who have had him as a teacher in seminary speak reverently about him.

While the publishing date may seem old to some, these texts still "speak."  The readings are arranged daily and contain sermons and writings from the early Church Mothers and Fathers.  He has included works from Dame Julian of Norwich as a move to be broader.  Wright offers in the preface his task of compiling the readings and dealing with issues of sexual inclusion in language.

A good example of how these two texts bear relevancy with the Daily Office. The Old Testaments readings for Morning Prayer, recently, have been covering the Jacob v. Esau story.  Wright paired these with a sermon by Irenaeus who brought a Christian interpretation to these texts from Genesis.  It was fascinating, for me, to have incorporated this insight from the Patristic era into my daily prayer life.  It was then that I was sold on using these texts with my Daily Office readings.

Those of my brothers and sisters who fancy The Anglican Breviary will already know of a similar incorporation of Patristic sermons and texts which are combined in the breviary.

I commend any practice of incorporating these additional non-Biblical readings from the early Church into our corporate opus dei.