Over the past 18 months, I’ve been using the Anglican Office Book 2nd Edition as my primary prayer resource. The book has been growing increasingly popular with Anglo-Catholics, and I’ve found my time with it enriching as I’ve used it along with supplemental resources to deepen my prayer life. I’m coming to a crossroads, with it, however. Is the AOB the best fit for me as a daily driver? Or will it become for me what the Anglican Breviary is for many Anglo-Catholics: a valued supplemental resource, full of additional prayers and devotions, but not the core of my practice? In this post, I’m going to start by reviewing the contents of the AOB, and then detail my journey of using it.

The Contents

The core of the AOB is the US Book of Common Prayer’s 1928 revision and the King James Version of the Bible. The BCP’s Morning and Evening Prayer becomes the AOB’s Mattins and Evensong, respectively. These are the full offices without any omissions- the AOB adds additional materials to them, but in a way that is designed to be 100% compliant with the rubrics. The AOB adds in many additional seasonal celebrations and saints’ days, such as the Feast of the Sacred Heart or St. Anne’s feast day. These include their own hymns, antiphons, and collects, or alternative opening sentences of scripture, usually pre-Reformation materials from Latin offices. The idea is to enrich the traditional Anglican prayer offices rather than to replace them.

With all of this material in one book, the full office can be prayed out of a single volume. But the AOB also contains the minor hours from the traditional office: Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and Compline. Anglo-Catholics who were interested in praying these minor hours before would need to use the Anglican Breviary, a translation of the traditional Roman office- either as a supplement to the BCP, or as a replacement for it. The AOB puts them all in one place and centers the Anglican office, putting you closer to the prayers of your own church.

There is also plenty of additional devotional material to supplement your prayer life. The Angelus is here, as well as an extended litany, an additional penitential office, an office for the dead, and preparation for and thanksgiving after Holy Communion. The full office cycle in the AOB already makes for a very rich prayer life, but there really is no end of content here for the dedicated Anglo-Catholic who needs something for every occasion. The entire volume is beautifully bound and with gorgeous black and white illustrations inside. There isn’t undue focus on the ornamentation, but what is present is thoughtfully and reverently put together.

The Journey

I received the AOB as a Christmas gift from my wife as I was enthusiastic to get into a deeper form of the office. At the time, I was still in the closet and attending the ACNA, where I had been diligently using their 2019 revision of the Book of Common Prayer regularly. I had felt a pull towards a more traditional expression of the office, and had been unable to decide between getting the Traditional Language Edition of the 2019, or picking up a 1928. Or should I check out the Anglican Breviary for something entirely different? Eventually I settled on the AOB as something that would be recognizably Anglican but still allow me to explore more elements of the traditional offices.

Getting started definitely had a learning curve, starting with just getting the ribbons configured. Things were no longer straightforward. The ordinary of the office and the psalter are easy enough, but it took me a minute to figure out the organization of the propers and commons of the saints, the feast days, and when to use the material in the ordinary as opposed to using the material in the propers or the commons. This had a significant level of mental overhead to it, but I was enjoying learning the structure of the book and seeing the additional material. And even once it was figured out, I still needed to bear it in mind in the back of my head. OK, the antiphon for the Magnificat is in the common of the saint day, let’s do that… and let’s remember to flip back to the antiphon again afterwards. Oops, I forgot to do that afterwards and I’ve already started another reading. Now the fact that I forgot to is in the back of my head as I’m doing the reading. Annoying.

A few months into me learning the AOB, the ACNA released the St. Bernard’s Breviary, a version of their daily office that was completely pointed for chanting. I had been talking with several people about singing the office and had been enthusiastic about the concept, so I took a break from the AOB and picked up the SBB and began to teach myself. I introduced chanting slowly, practicing one canticle at a time until I got good, focusing on the psalms until I could do those consistently, and so on. Once I was comfortably able to chant the whole office, I returned to the AOB and applied the principles I had learned there. Over time I stopped chanting the collects, but focused on chanting the rest.

Initially I kept the SBB on hand for the psalms and used it to chant the New Coverdale Psalter that I had gotten used to. My friend Rayna gifted me a copy of the Saint Dunstan’s Plainsong Psalter, and when this arrived I switched over to it for the psalms, using the same texts that were in the AOB’s Coverdale psalter. I had memorized a few canticle tones from the St. Bernard which I continued to use with the AOB, supplementing them with the SDPP’s canticle tones as well. This was starting to get a bit unwieldy- the AOB was the core, the SDPP would provide additional musical support, and I had a bible on hand as well since I don’t usually use the KJV. Performing the office was a juggling act- but I was growing in vocal confidence as I continued to sing, and I was happy to be praising. The liturgical equivalent of the Linux kid who’s always tweaking with their editor’s configuration file and has lots of new tricks, but the rest of their productivity is a bit questionable.

As I became comfortable with this and my setup became more routine, I started to look more seriously at the last holdouts for music within the AOB: the hymns and the antiphons. Of course, just speaking these defeats half the point of them. Anybody can sprinkle in additional sentences of scripture here and there, but the purpose of the antiphons is to be sung, and I had no resource that pointed all of these. They wound up being one more detail to keep in mind as I was praying, or to be forgotten and then stick in the back of my mind as something I could either backtrack for, or just charge on without.

The hymns were another story. The St. Bernard’s had a couple of the same hymns that had been pointed, and I was able to simply use those same pointings. Eventually I realized that the structure of many of the hymns were similar enough that I could use the same pointings for them but with different words. At first this was revelatory. Finally, the hymns were being sung as hymns! Many of these were over 1000 years old, and I felt a thrill in musically connecting with the patristic church and singing what other Christians had for centuries.

There was just one wrinkle- I wasn’t actually using the music that goes with these. In fact, using the same pointings on all of them was converting them into a pudding of sameness, a collection that was beautiful and had stood the test in its original language but suffered just a bit in the translation, all sounding oddly the same despite some being penitential Lenten hymns and others being triumphant Paschal anthems. In a sense I had actually regressed- by putting “sing the office” as a top priority, even at the expense of reusing the music, I had really flattened out the hymns in an important way.

Well, that was nothing that couldn’t be solved by buying another book. So at the advice of a friend I asked my wife to buy me a copy of The Hymnal Noted, which contained many (though not all) of the hymns inside of the AOB. Not the antiphons, of course. Those would still be missing. But now all I had to do to have the full resources for the office was to juggle my AOB, the Saint Dunstan’s, the Hymnal Noted, and a bible. Four books is a reasonable and easy number of things to juggle to perform the office, and this wasn’t becoming a ridiculous situation that I was afraid to post about with my friends for fear of being roasted at all.

It’s around this time that I started to more frequently just pull out the Venite app and do a spoken office from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer on busy mornings while trying not to think too hard about the monster that I had created for myself. I had genuinely learned a lot from my AOB, been in some of the longest and most fulfilling prayer sessions of my life with it, and been able to contribute to my church musically from the things I was learning on this journey. But I was hitting the ceiling on some of these issues, and trying to close the loop just wasn’t working. Others pointed out that the additional material such as the antiphons was optional and I could always just skip it. “Rubrics are meant to be broken,” as they would say. Call it a character flaw, but I have a hard time skipping that stuff without a little checkbox opening up in my head. The reason I like the daily office is that it helps me set a minimum standard for myself- once I start cutting things out, it’s easy for me to just keep cutting them.

The other problem was that The Hymnal Noted was not actually that helpful of a resource for me by itself. I have never been in a church that made extensive use of plainsong. I was able to self-teach canticles and psalms that had repetitive tones and build up my repertoire. But doing this fresh for new hymns on the regular was infeasible, especially when the hymns did not use repetitive tones and the pointings had no timing information. There are recordings online, but usually in the original Latin- which would mean an additional barrier to using them to learn. And I just don’t have time in my busy day to be constantly teaching myself these things solo. The AOB’s hymns are products of a foreign music culture to me, and I don’t have the local support to make them effective.

It would be more effective on my time to grab my church’s hymnal and use the same hymns that my church sings. After all, wasn’t that one of the reasons I recommended the AOB- that incorporating the BCP meant it was closer to my own church’s prayer tradition? But its hymns and their styles were completely disconnected from my church’s musical practice. Singing the hymns my church sings would actually tie me closer to our Sunday celebrations of the eucharist, would let me sing more confidently with the congregation, would save me the time of spending long sessions learning from Latin-focused resources. But it can’t be overstated how much of the AOB’s supplemental material is in these hymns and antiphons. My friends who were happy to just read them wouldn’t be having any issues- it was my musical journey through the office that had made me discontented.

The other problem I was having was in a number of the saint collects. Rather than invoking the saints directly, these did a sort of indirect invocation. The standard Catholic defense of invocation of the saints is that they are asking the saint to pray for you. Rather than do this directly, the AOB asks God to help you live by the examples of the saints and learn from their ministries to deepen your own life in the faith. For example, here is June 28’s collect for St. Irenaeus:

“O God, who didst give holy Irenaeus to thy Church as a worthy Spherherd and eminent Teacher: grant, we beseech thee, that as when he laid down his life for his sheep he had them with him as partners in his passion, so we being renewed by his faith and doctrine, may ever follow him both in heart and deed. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.”

My more Reformed friends would still not see any point in this, but it’s a relatively restrained invocation, especially compared with the maximalism that we see elsewhere. Other collects use language such as “by the help of his intercession, we may be delivered from the bonds of our sins.” This is still specifically referring to the prayers of the saints rather than the saints themselves. But compare these examples with July 24th’s celebration of St. Christopher:

“O God, who didst suffer the blessed Martyr Christopher to be a servant worthy unto thee; grant, of thy goodness, through his merits, that we may be enabled to carry Christ within us with whole intent of mind and affection of heart. Through the same.”

This is a reference to Rome’s doctrine of the treasury of merit and is one of my bright red lines. Why would I need the merit of a saint to carry Christ within me? What merit is any saint who needed a savior bringing to this situation? It’s Christ himself who enables me to have Christ within me. When I catch these in advance, I would avoid saying those portions- but they’re spaced out just enough that I get caught out sometimes, especially when I’m near the end of an office and I’m not alert for it. I don’t want to pray anything like this! It’s a distortion of the gospel. It discourages me from even flipping to the saints’ propers for awhile any time it happens, and at times has been a stumbling block with the AOB itself. The ideal office book is there to catch me when I’m too tired to use my brain, to help me to pray even through my own infirmities. And in this regard, the AOB falls short of being a safe friend.

A few other practical notes. The AOB is no cheap book by itself, and that really discourages having it with you everywhere you go. The minor hours are great, but not of a great help if you’re afraid to add it to your bag and take it to the coffee shop for a quick prayer break. A digital version is in the works, but it’s not here yet, and not having access to it on the go means less consistency when I do need to use something digital on the go, which means a harder time building a consistent habit. That also means you can’t just add someone who doesn’t own it to a prayer group, which adds yet another barrier. I want to use my AOB, so do I retreat off by myself, or do I invite others to pray with me and avoid my favorite resource?

And so I slowly find myself being drawn back towards the BCP after all for my daily driver. Back to a simpler office, with a more simple and consistent theology and practice. Stripping away extra elements that are harder to keep track of, leaving more time and focus for the singing of psalms and the reading of scripture. More portability, more access, an easier time sharing my daily prayer life with my friends- as I had been building up before I got focused on having a fancy office even at the expense of community. I’m enriched for having used an Anglican Office Book, and I will continue to keep it close at hand for the extra devotions when I need them. But it will no longer be the first thing I recommend to those who ask.