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CONCERNING EVENSONG

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PERHAPS nothing is more peculiarly Anglican than the ORDER OF EVENSONG. It has been sung daily in the Anglican Church since the sixteenth century. Originating from the monastic hours, its beauty consists of the distinctive parts of the ancient office of Vespers and Compline as set forth by Thomas Cranmer in The Book of Common Prayer 1549. Today’s ORDER OF EVENSONG is taken from the Book of Common Prayer 1662 and the 1962 Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Church of Canada.

 

There is a formality about the service which often seems far removed from the uncertain, large incoherent beliefs of many who attend; it is a choral service with little opportunity for the congregation to take an active part. Yet to some extent the formality is deceptive: the words used result from the long quest of generation after generation of Christians for ways to express their thanksgiving and their hope. The preface to the ORDER OF EVENSONG used in King’s College Chapel offers a further explanation:

 

If you are prepared to join in this turning towards God, you will find this is a service in which you can join, though perhaps in ways that are unfamiliar. Here is a liturgical, architectural, and musical space into which, without fretting too much about the words, you may gather the preoccupations and anxieties of your own life and hold them together with a recollection of the God whose acts we celebrate. But many have found that once they have quietly offered the preoccupations which are chattering in their minds they are free silently to go on to offer to God all that they are. The service becomes the medium for our self-offering. By that offering we become open to receive again the love and mercy of God. So we begin again in the Christian life, which is life lived in response to that love and mercy.

    [Michael Till, Dean of King’s College, Cambridge 1970-1981]

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