Andhämtning. Psaltare och tidegärd ur pastoralt perspektiv

Abstract

A living history of prayer! — This is what I felt when I recently, for the first time, held the new Swedish ecumenical breviary in my hand. At the same time memories came back to me from my first encounter with the breviary tradition when I was a teenager in the Youth Group of our local parish in Nässjö. One night, I think it was in 1962 or 1963, I found a book, printed in 1944. It was the first edition of  The Swedish Breviary”, edited by Arthur Adell and Knut Peters. Later on I got a copy of my own, a gift from our parish priest, a book which has been my good companion ever since.   

I got my first breviary in the midst of the normal parish life of the Church of Sweden. My young faith grew stronger, very much due to the prayer group that met for the Compline service in church once a week, where the participants found a breeding ground for growth in faith and for vocations to he discovered. Such was my first encounter with the praying Church.   

It is my conviction that the basis for prayer and growth in faith should he founded in the local Church. So, I am writing the present pages as a parish Priest, and my pastoral views shall be understood from this basic pastoral perspective. Even my missiological reflections have their basis and background in normal parish life, in Sweden and in Africa.   

The lifegiving pulse of the body of the Church is found in the sacramental heartbeats of regular Eucharist. Life is distributed from the heart to the different members of the body, so that they can he a living witness in their daily life. The Mass and the Mission are therefore inseparable.   

Something similar could be said about the corporate worship of the local Church. If the Eucharist is the heartbeat, then prayer is the breathing of the body. Strictly speaking it is wrong to call the prayer of an individual person a ”private prayer”. An African Swahili proverb says: ”Mtu ni watu” (”A person is persons”). Personal prayer can never be ”private” in the sense of being ”isolated”. It goes together with, and is incorporated into, the corporate prayer of the body, the Church. Therefore, the breviary worship is important for the spiritual growth and health of the parish and its members. This aspect of prayer as the breathing life of the Church can be    understood even by people outside the Church. To them, a Christian person who is not a person of prayer is a peculiar creature.   

The Jewish Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel has in his book "The Sabbath” reflected on the concept of time. According to his thoughts, ”time is the heart of existence”. Time and holiness go together. The great risk for modern man is ”thinginess”, being reduced to matter and space. The task for the holy people is to ”sanctify time” by celebrating the Sabbath. By entering into the time of God, and thereby bringing holiness to the world, the believers create ”a palace in time”.   

”The sanctification of time”is a good description of the task of the praying Church. Gathered for corporate worship it builds what could be described as a cathedral in time. The building stones are the regular prayers at certain times, the breviary ”prayers in tim e” (in Swedish ”tidebön”).   

The breviary tradition has been reestablished in the Church of Sweden during the 20th century, mostly due to the dedication of two parish priests, the Revd. Arthur Adell and the Revd. Knut Peters. The two men met at a youth camp in 1923, and this meeting proved the beginning of a long lasting restoration work, both musically and spiritually. At the beginning of this century, there was already an official trend of Vespers performed by the choir. The inspiration and model came from the German ”Festival Services”, and two Swedish volumes of rituals (Vesperale) were published in 1914 and 1925. This kind of service was criticized by Adell and Peters, because the services concerned were performed for the people, who were then reduced to being spectators instead of worshippers. In the breviary tradition argued by Adell and Peters, the worshippers were supposed to be active participants in a corporate worship with the prayer of the Psalms in focus. Successively, they published a series of minor breviaries leading up to the first complete edition in 1944, ”The Swedish Breviary”.   

In the restoration work of the breviary in Sweden, two main trends can be found concerning the use of the Psalms:   

a) The Adell-Peters model, where the Psalms were used only partially. A limited number of pericopes were to be used, mainly because there were difficulties for ordinary Church people to understand certain parts of the Psalms. Therefore the Anglican and Roman-Catholic tradition of using the entire Psalter was rejected.   

b) The Lindhagen model, using the entire book of Psalms. This work, carried out by another parish priest, the Revd. Lars Lindhagen, with support from the High Church movement in the Church of Sweden, led to the publication of a breviary for weekdays, containing all the Psalms, together with a number of other biblical Canticles. The first edition was published in 1961 and the second enlarged edition in 1969. Despite being printed in a limited number, these breviaries were used extensively, especially at Church institutions and in religious communities. Nevertheless, the work done by Revd. Lindhagen has to a great extent been neglected in the official research on breviary matters. To me this neglect seems to be both odd and unfair, especially since the new ecumenical breviary of 1995 follows mainly the model chosen by Lindhagen with a complete Psalter together with a great number of biblical Canticles.   

In Church history, the use of breviary worship has perhaps never been the activity of huge crowds. It has rather been carried out, throughout the centuries, by minor groups of worshippers in parish churches, cathedrals and religious communities. Not always have the worshippers been appreciated by the Church leaders, but their faithful endurance has kept the fire of prayer burning, even in times of Church hardships. The outcome of their prayers can of course not be evaluated by the use of figures and diagrams, but I am convinced that without their faithful prayers, many things would have been different in the life of the Church. If the fire of the Spirit is left to die, the Church will quickly he turned into a cold ruin!   

The Psalms used in the new Swedish breviary have been taken from the new translation published in October 1995 by the official Bible translating group. The language is fresh, strict, and full of poetic efficiency, adapted to liturgical use. On the whole, the Psalms are now finding their way back into ordinary parish life. An ”Evensong” of Anglican tradition is one way of renewing the singing of the Psalms. Songs inspired from the ecumenical monastry in Taizé is another. In quite a number of parishes, the Saturday evening service, called ”Helgsmålsbön”, is still a living reality. This service could be an excellent occasion for using the breviary Vesper. In Sweden the Compline has become a service favoured by many Church groups, supposingly because of the daily rhytm of modern society and the activities in Church life. In youth groups, the breviary services can have their appreciated place, because the order is fixed and all the worshippers participate actively.   

With the new translation of the Psalms being available — soon, hopefully — in small pocket editions, a small pocket breviary for daily use ought also to be published, to fit into one’s calendar or Bible cover. This could be a way of helping Christians to use moments of time in the midst of their daily life as means of a ”sanctification of time”.   

To pray the Word of God is to use the Word which is filled with the Holy Spirit. According to 2 Tim. 3:16, the Word of God is ”theópneustos”, literally ”breathed by God”. Using this divine Word in regular prayer means   exposing oneself to a divine formation of mind and personality, a great advantage in times of problems and the need for spiritual guidance. Therefore, using the Psalms is breathing the fresh air of the Holy Spirit and being an open channel for the divine grace to people who need sup­ port. There should be a group of people in every parish to whom prayer is a living reality, people who ”pray for those who don't pray”, thereby channeling ”life to the world”.   

The Church situation in the West of today is both a problem and a challenge. Many Christians live without proper pastoral guidance and parishes lack priests, which affects the regular worship. ”Where There Is No Doctor” is the title of a well-known handbook on village health work in developing countries. When will the Church equivalent be written with the title ”Where There Is No Priest”? There must be a plan in every local Church what to do if the priest is not available. It doesn't make sense to close a church simply because there is no priest. If the congregation is a living fellowship, it must be able to share a service of Bible readings, songs and intercessions, lead by a layman. There is already an order for such a Sunday Worship in the handbook of the Church of Sweden, but I would like to propose the use of a service called ”Service of Readings' (”Läsningsgudstjänst”) in the new breviary as a better alternative for such a situation.   

The new breviary is an ecumenical challenge, a way of uniting the Church into a visible unity. Praying together is an effective means of becoming more united into one living people of God. The new breviary is in its preface recommended by the Archbishop of the Church of Sweden, the Roman-Catholic Bishop of Sweden and the present and former Leaders of the Swedish Covenant Church. With this background it would be highly commendable that at least one Vesper a week in the major cities could be given on an ecumenical basis. Even if the breviary tradition has not been very familiar to the Free Churches, the use of the Psalms has a manifest place in their spirituality, and therefore the difficulties of introducing the breviary services might end up in less problems than could be expected.   

The new ecumenical breviary is a beautiful book and a great challenge to the Christian churches and denominations in Sweden. It must be given a fair chance. The way to a renewal of the spiritual life is mainly a way of prayer. W hat we need in Sweden is a revival of prayer in our parishes and in our personal lives. The pattern of introducing the new breviary in parish life is certainly different from place to place, but the dedication needs to be there: to breathe the Spirit of God by using His Word in worship and praise. Thereby the divine Word becomes a ”viaticum”, the bread for the journey of life and the light to show us the way to the triumphing Church in the heavenly glory.