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In this week’s issue, St John’s Music Director Tom Morgan and I team up to write about Compline: its monastic origins and long history, and its valuable place in the spiritual life of the contemporary Christian. Choral Compline is offered at St John’s one Sunday evening a month, at the traditional hour of 9:00 pm. Tom directs a professional Compline Choir and the half-hour service is stunningly beautiful.
Tom extends to the reader a personal invitation: “We’ve been presenting the service of Choral Compline at St. John’s for almost five years now. Compline is a 1500-year-old tradition that developed in the early monastic communities. It is the final service of the day in the Christian tradition of canonical hours. If you haven’t experienced it, I encourage you to join us this Sunday evening, March 10, and try it out!”
Goodnight John-Boy. Goodnight Daddy.
Goodnight Elizabeth. Goodnight Mama.
Goodnight Mary Ellen. Goodnight Jim-Bob.
If you are over forty (or if you watch TV re-runs from the 1960s and ’70s) you will recall the sweet and iconic nightly ritual from the show “The Waltons.” No matter the crises or misunderstandings of the day, night was a time when the family members reaffirmed their love for one another, and “set things to right” in their relationships, at least for the hours of rest.
In a sense, that’s exactly what the office (service) of Compline is—Christians just before bedtime setting to right their relationship with God, letting go of whatever failings or anxieties that arose in the day just past. Good night, God. The day is complete, for better or for worse. Keep me safe this night. Give me good rest. Remind me that tomorrow I begin anew. Good night, God, I love you.
Christians have been saying (or often, singing) this good-night to God since the 4th century. On the southern coast of the Black Sea, Saint Basil was praying a good-night liturgy around 375CE. Some years earlier, on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, in present-day Israel, Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, also wrote of such a practice of prayer. So likewise did contemporaries St. Ambrose (Milan) and John Cassian (France) and others. It’s evident then that the practice of praying before retiring was widespread in the early church. [1] Psalms were part of this praying, and Psalms 4, 90, and 133 were often memorized by heart so one could recite them in the dark. These psalms speak of night, rest, dwelling in the protection of God the Most High as well as the angels, and so in this way are appropriate to the end of a day. [2] (Interestingly, only Psalm 4 is featured in our contemporary service of Compline—see The Book of Common Prayer, p. 128. Other psalms offered include 31, 91, and 134.)
The first known mention of the word “Compline” to describe this prayer practice was at the beginning of the 6th century, by St Benedict (Italy) in the rule he composed to order the common life in the monasteries he established. “Compline” comes from the Latin “completorium”—the completion or end of the day. [3] The early monastics (who in additional to Compline prayed seven other established times during the day and night) understood themselves to be bathing the world in continuous prayer as the earth slowly turned on its axis and made its stately journey around the sun.
Today, churches all over the world offer regular services of Compline, many of them sung. In the Episcopal Church, congregations with markedly different theologies unite—if only for a short while—in the singing of Compline: Christ Church Anglican in Savannah, Georgia, a congregation so theologically conservative that it broke away from the Episcopal Church in 2007 and left its historic 200-year-old building, offers a beautiful service of Choral Compline. [4]
On the opposite side of the country (and on the opposite end of the theological spectrum), St Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, Washington, likewise offers its own beautiful Choral Compline service. At St Mark’s Compline has been sung every Sunday night since 1956 by a trained, auditioned, volunteer choir. The first choirmaster led the choir for fifty-three years! During this time the service grew in popularity and now attracts up to 300 attendees every week. An additional estimated 9,000 listen to the service broadcast on the radio and on the web. St Mark’s has successfully tapped into a hunger in the city—and beyond—for a time of rest and peace and worship. [5]
At St John’s, Tom Morgan has been offering a beautiful service of Choral Compline for nearly five years: “Our Compline Choir presents the service from the back balcony of the church, unsighted by the congregation. The space is dark and quiet; there are candles, but no cell phones, no responses to have to follow, no preaching. It’s short: just 35-40 minutes. People are free to sit on the floor, sit up around the altar; some even bring pillows and lie down on the pews and allow the music to wash over them. It is a come-as-you-are experience of the presence of God, through music and prayer, using the beauty of our liturgy. It is a sacred space for people at the end of their weekend, before the busy-ness of the week.”
“Not only is this an unusual service in St. John’s schedule, it’s a unique event in our culture these days, as it is an event that has almost no visual component, just the flickering of the candles. It is wrapped in silence (as Rumi says, the “language of God”) and is a purely auditory experience. In this respect, it’s almost a guided meditation; there are moments of familiar words and phrases, molded and shaped by composers into beautiful sonic sculptures that allow us to perceive the ancient words in new ways. There is the ebb and flow of the breath, as the voices of the choir arise from the silence and gently fall back into it.”
Tom’s thoughts about Compline as an auditory-only experience call to mind an observation made by Dr Sam Boyd in Sunday’s lecture after church. In his talk Sam touched on the Transfiguration (our gospel reading for Sunday) and mused that Peter, John, James, Jesus, Moses, and Elijah are there on a mountain top. Jesus is shining, glowing, radiant. As if that wasn’t dazzling enough, Moses and Elijah, long dead, stand with him! And what does the voice of God say from the cloud? “This is my son. LISTEN to him.” Not look at him; listen to him. In the visual clamor that surrounded them (and often surrounds us) God’s call is to listen. Perhaps then the experience of Choral Compline prepares us for prayer, which many say is simply the act of listening to God.
When our service of Choral Compline ends, people leave in silence. This is customary—even St Benedict called for it. In his Rule of Life, he wrote that monks leaving at the conclusion of Compline should do so in silence. Only the abbot of the monastery (or a guest with a pressing question) should be allowed to speak, and then only if necessary. Monks who broke this rule were to be punished, although not harshly. [6] At St John’s, no one will punish you for speaking as you leave the church at the end of Choral Compline, but my guess is that you will not want to break the sacred silence.
In the centuries since its inception, a great many composers—famous and lesser-known alike—have composed musical settings for Compline. At St John’s, Tom enlists an ever-changing array of composers and instrumentalists to accompany the choir. In other words, the Compline service you heard several months ago is different from the one you will hear on Sunday night and from those you will hear in the future. And yet, the basic structure and rhythm of the service is the same, and that familiar sameness is conducive to surrender and rest.
Over the past five years, those who attend Choral Compline have offered comments that for Tom—and for me—capture something of the sacred power of this service. One person wrote: “When I close my eyes and listen to it, the to-do list stops ticking in my head and I am reminded in my soul that I am not a machine made to complete tasks but a human-made to love.” Another said: “It feels like floating in a bathtub full of warm water and grace.”
Tom himself acknowledges “how experiences like Compline can help us on our journey.” He cites Mother Teresa: “We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature—trees, flowers, grass—grows in silence; see the stars, the moon, and the sun, how they move in silence...we need silence to be able to touch souls.”
Night is the time for silence. It is the time when we practice surrender. We thank God for what has been: the good things we have enjoyed and the trials we have endured, and we ask that neither plague our sleep. We confess our regrets about the day which has come to its close, and we release them so that they too do not torment our resting hours. We entrust ourselves—our souls and bodies—to the care of God alone for the night ahead of us, and in this way, we practice for our eventual dying.
From the Compline service: “Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’ sake. Amen.” [7]
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compline
[2] https://christdesert.org/prayer/opus-dei/compline/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compline
[4] https://ccasav.org/our-history/
[5] https://www.complinechoir.org/faq/
[6] https://christdesert.org/prayer/rule-of-st-benedict/chapter-42-silence-after-compline/
[7] The Book of Common Prayer, p.134
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