Living in the Office

The title of this post is deliberately misleading. I remember the culture shock I experienced when I took a few years out of stipendiary ministry and worked, for the first time in my life, in an office. It was odd for me to spend most of the day in one place, odd to have the same people around most of the time, odd to fit in with the strange routines of who was allowed to make the tea, who was allowed to clean up afterwards, when the kettle went on... I remember the time it took me to get used to the processes for getting a cheque out of someone to pay for something, the strangeness of having to record the time I spent working (paradoxically, for something called flexitime) and the countless restrictions I had never before encountered in the very different rhythms of working as a parish priest.

You see, clergy, at least in this country, do not 'go to the office' to work. They work from home and, even if they have a desk in the church premises, they are unlikely to spend much time there. But in a very different way, we do 'live in the office'.

As I finished reading Peta Dunstan's history of the Anglican Franciscan order, SSF, I was reminded of their central role in renewing the daily offices of the Church of England and, I suspect, many other Anglican churches too. I have written before about the Anglican tradition of daily prayer, particularly in its choral forms. SSF were instrumental in creating a new pattern of daily offices, drawing from the history of the Western church and rooted in their experience of prayer together in choir. They have provided a richness and depth to these daily prayers that has lead to a renewal of the nature of praying the offices in our tradition. This is a great achievement because, although the offices have always been the bedrock of liturgical prayer, this practice has not always been given the prominence or, indeed, the resource it deserves.

Open Office Book

For clergy, the daily offices are the fixed points in each day that give shape to that day and ground us in the central emphasis of all that we do - entering into the mystery of God. The renewal of our daily prayer has made this practice more accessible to the people of God and it is remarkable to know that many thousands of lay and ordained Anglicans are shaping each day around the recitation of Psalms, the reading of scripture and the offering of prayer.

But this is no escape from the 'real world' of other offices or fields or factories. The Psalms in particular are a mirror on all of human life. They contain every emotion, every fear and every hope and they allow us to see all of it from the perspective of the One who is love. The daily offices remind us that prayer is the most real thing we can do.

Justluckie

A curious reader

07/17/2013

Living in the Office

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