Compline
at Christ Church
9:00
pm on Sunday nights when Yale is in session
Listen
to Recordings of Compline
On
Sunday night at Christ Church Episcopal in New Haven, Connecticut,
people gather to hear the singing of Compline, the final prayers
of the day. The Compline rite is over a thousand years old. Its
beginning in shrouded in history; How old is the urge to pray
in the gathering darkness? How old is the fear of night, the fear
that dark will not always be followed by day?
The
early Christian Church established a daily cycle of prayer called
the Hours. The eight Hours marked the day from dawn to fading
light. The earliest formal description of Compline is found in
St. Benedict's Rule, written in the early seventh century. St.
Benedict called the final hour of the day Compline, from the Latin
complere : to complete. He described in fewer than thirty
words the form Compline would take for the next thousand years.
He wanted the prayer kept simple: Psalm, hymn, chapter, blessing,
and dismissal. "After Compline," wrote St. Benedict, "no one may
speak."
In
the early sixteenth century, the Reformation swept Europe , and
the Anglican Church broke with Rome . King Henry VIII dissolved
all the monasteries, where for hundreds of years monks had measured
their days according to the Hours. The first Anglican Book
of Common Prayer , published in 1549, collapsed the eight
Hours into two: Matins in the morning, Evensong at sunset. Compline
was subsumed into Evensong. It would not reappear in the Anglican
Church as a separate office for another four hundred years.
The
night prayer of Compline is practical again now in a way unforeseen
during the Reformation. At Christ Church in New Haven , people
use it not as part of a daily cycle of prayer, not as one of the
monastic Hours, but as the sole point of calm in a hectic week.
Compline at Christ Church serves a new kind of worshipper. Through
music that is centuries old, it draws people of all beliefs, or
of none, and it joins them to one another.
Darkness
and incense - heavy silence greet those who enter Christ Church
on Sunday nights. Candles offer the only light. Sheathed in colored
glass, red, blue, green, they cluster at the foot of the shrine
to the Virgin Mary; they drape the High Altar; seven lamps hang
suspended in the sanctuary like the Pleiades. People in their
street shoes walk slowly up the long center aisle; some genuflect,
bending a knee and crossing themselves. Some simply stare. They
slide into seats that seem to be the right distance from the light,
from the altar, from the door, from whatever is about to happen.
Shortly before ten o'clock , the church bells begin to clang,
distant and discordant. And then an unseen choir begins to sing...
Kendra Mack
