This year, Ascension falls on May 9th. It marks the conclusion of forty days of joyful Easter celebration, during which the Church recalls the 40 days when Jesus appeared to his disciples many times and told them about the kingdom of God. On Ascension Day, we tell how he left this earth and returned to his Father, ascending into heaven to take his throne over all dominions and powers.
“Compline” is the ancient monastic service of “Completion”.
In the 8th century, Benedictine monks began a pattern of praying 8 eight times a day: Matins (before dawn), Lauds (at sunrise), then Prime, Terce, Sext, None, and Vespers throughout the day (each about three hours apart). Finally, at bedtime, Compline. Today, Anglican prayer books offer four such ‘offices’ – morning, midday, evening, and night. Like most prayer offices, Compline includes a confession, a reading from the Psalms and other Scriptures, written and responsive prayers, and a time for silence or extemporaneous prayer.
This final service of the day is an opportunity to reflect on the day that has passed, to peak through a small window of Scripture into the Big Story of God’s ongoing encounter with his people, and to draw on words hallowed by tradition as “a way to wade into the ongoing stream of the church’s communion with [God],”* as Tish Harrison Warren expresses it. She goes on to explain “Scripted prayers—the prayers of Compline, the Psalms, or any other received prayers—are not static. As we pray them, we read our own lives back into the words we pray. Our own biographies shape our understanding of these prayers as much as these prayers shape us and our own stories.”
* Warren, Tish Harrison. Prayer in the Night (pp. 7, 125).
Want to find out more? A good place to start is Tish Harrison Warren’s excellent book “Prayer in the Night; for those who work or watch or weep”. An American Anglican priest, she combines her own personal experiences of prayer in a time of suffering [trigger warning: miscarriage and bereavement] with a rooted and thoughtful unpacking of the wonderful ancient tradition of Prayer in the Night.