"All perils and dangers of this night": the Prayer Book and eerie, dark times

... when the intransigently weird discloses itself and overturns our safe presumptions, how can we cope with it?

The question was posed in an excellent recent Earth & Altar article addressing experiences of the eerie.  It is, of course, an appropriate time of year to ask this question.  It is not only the proximity of All Hallow's Eve.  We are entering into a liminal time of year, a season haunted by intimations of mortality, as "the year's midnight" approaches, as the leaves fall, and darkness comes in late afternoon.

As the Earth & Altar article notes, we can be "haunted by all manner of phantasmic stories, both the overtly paranormal as well as the more banal sorts of spiritual darkness which choke our faith, hope, and love". Rather than merely dismiss this as 'superstition', "Anglicanism from its beginning has dealt with the anxieties and fears of parishioners with earnestness", providing "practices which viscerally link us to the living Christ" when we are assaulted by fears of the eerie.

While the article points to the Third Collect at Mattins - "who hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day" - and the exorcism in the 1549 Baptism rite, we might point to other aspects of the Prayer Book tradition which provide a means of ministering to heart and soul in face of experiences of "the intransigently weird".

The Third Collect at Evensong must, of course, be particularly recognised, with its deeply resonant petition "Lighten our darkness".  Note too how it beseeches deliverance from "all perils and dangers of this night": that "all" is not without significance.  There is a similar character to the "all" in the Litany's petition - repeated every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday - "From all evil and mischief, from the craft and assaults of the devil ... Good Lord, deliver us".  Daily and three times each week, then, we pray for deliverance from all aspects of the powers of darkness. 

The fact that the Lord's Prayer is frequently repeated in the Prayer Book tradition - twice at Mattins and at Evensong, at the conclusion of the Litany, twice at the Eucharist - should also not be overlooked.  Rejecting Puritan criticisms of "our oft rehearsing of the Lord's Prayer", Hooker noted that "this very prayer is of such efficacy and necessity" (LEP V.35.3), something which most Christians with any experience of the eerie will probably affirm.  Likewise, the twice daily repetition of the Creed roots us in the mystery of salvation, the Lord's triumph over the dark powers, a proclamation of the Cross and Resurrection to bring us assurance in the face of that which unsettles us.

While post-1549 Baptismal rites lacked an exorcism, the use of the Sign of the Cross in the Sacrament has relevance in this context.  When Canon XXX of the 1604 Canons separated this usage from "all Popish Superstition and Error", the superstition in question was the ascription of power to the ceremony itself.  The Canon, however, affirmed that it was a sign of "the Force, Effects, and Merits of His Death and Passion, with all the Comforts, Fruits and Promises, which we receive or expect thereby", "Benefits bestowed ... in Baptism".  To recollect that we have been signed with the Cross in Holy Baptism, therefore, is an assurance of the reality of the grace bestowed in the Sacrament, of our fundamental identity in Christ which delivers us from the powers of darkness.

We might add to all this how Compline has found a place in the Prayer Book tradition (included in Ireland 1926, the Proposed Book of 1928, Scotland 1929, and Canada 1962).  Alison Milbank has referred to Compline's "sense of gothic", a recognition of darkness and vulnerability which is, however, surrounded and embraced by the love and light of God: "The Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end"; "Keep me as the apple of an eye: Hide me under the shadow of thy wings"; "and when we sleep we may rest in peace".  The inclusion in most versions of Compline of the collect petitioning for deliverance from "the enemy" and for the presence of the holy angels provides a particular focus for this understanding of the office:

Visit, we beseech thee, O Lord, this place, and drive from it all the snares of the enemy; let thy holy angels dwell herein to preserve us in peace.

The Earth & Altar article superbly summarises the theological and pastoral meaning of these texts and practices:

it is a pastoral application of his completed mission to the eerie and foreboding things which threaten our sanity, our very sense of order and reality ... The Prayer Book has always sought to verbally bring these things within the net of the delivering Word which the darkness has never comprehended or extinguished.

It is this which raises important questions about how contemporary liturgies often reduce or remove such texts and practices.  The Lord's Prayer is prayed less in contemporary versions of the Daily Office.  The Creed is often omitted while "Lighten our darkness" is usually not one of the unchanging evening collects. The petition in the 1662 Litany, while a version of it is retained in TEC 1979, is not to be found in the Common Worship Litany. In other words, there are important ways in which contemporary liturgies have less resources to allow the Church to comfort guide, strengthen, and sustain those whose "very sense of order and reality" can be undermined by the eerie, by the dark, by the enemy.  It might, then, be necessary to re-engage with traditional Prayer Book liturgies if the Church is to have a means of responding to those experiences which unsettle and disturb:

But the Christ who made a spectacle of the defeated powers is not unconcerned with the terrors that afflict us. He doesn’t tell us to grow up. But he also doesn’t use our fear and our need to amass power at others’ expense. He regards those who are haunted by all manner of phantasmic stories, both the overtly paranormal as well as the more banal sorts of spiritual darkness which choke our faith, hope, and love. He’s confronting these powers now, disenchanting their efforts to colonize our lifeworlds and fearfully enchant us. Wherever the uncanny is disregarded as superstition and yet manifests itself, Jesus Christ is ready to believe you, to come to your aid and overcome these powers. Amen.