O Lord Open Thou Our Lips

It being the first Sunday in the month, we would normally have a non-eucharistic Family Service in the morning at Swanvale Halt church, and a communion service in the evening, but as next week is Mothering Sunday and there's always a Family Service for that we swapped the weeks around, and in the gap this evening popped a quiet Evensong. My thinking was that I have to say the evening office anyway, so might as well make something of it. I thought originally that it would be only myself and Lillian the Lay Reader attending, but in the event there were a whole six of us, and everyone gamely joined in with singing the Psalms, canticles, responses and Office Hymn, in a lowly-lit chancel. 

Of all the Prayer Book liturgy, Cranmer's combination of the monastic offices of Vespers and Compline into Evening Prayer has perhaps the most remaining power to move. My companions this evening drew the responses from the back of their drawer of liturgical memory, and universally admitted to a warm nostalgia, but Evensong seems capable, peculiarly, of arousing that sensation even in those who haven't actually been brought up with the service in the first place. It washes over one with a calming order. It achieves one of the great initial tasks of the spiritual life, the binding of the mind. Certainly it does if not performed by a choir which is not quite as good as it thinks it is, attempting complex anthems and singing the psalms according to that appalling musical enormity known as Anglican Chant. But we can talk about that another time.