Unity and the Three-Fold Rule of Prayer

Nashotah House is well known for its commitment to the daily recitation of both morning and evening prayer, combined with a daily celebration of the Eucharist. Generations of Nashotah House priests have regarded this daily hour and a half in the chapel as an essential part of their preparation for ordained life. Ask recent or long-ago graduates and you will hear the same story: the House’s pattern of worshipping together every day is what they are most grateful for, and it is what they miss the most. If you ask them to explain why, they might mention how regular worship in the chapel prepared them for liturgical leadership in the parish. And that is certainly true, but it is only a part of the story.

Press for a fuller explanation, and you will probably hear the word formation. Regular liturgical prayer at Nashotah House is essential to the deep formation for ministry that Nashotah House seminarians have experienced for more than 175 years. Prayed on a daily basis, the morning and evening offices bring the Scriptures into the ordinary warp and woof of community life. The office readings and the psalms are the common textual accompaniment to the other activities of a day at the House: the Scripture rings in the hearers’ ears as they walk together to the refectory for breakfast after chapel; for many, the readings of the day become the basis for sustained reflection in personal prayer and meditation; and it is common for faculty members to refer to the morning’s readings in the day’s lectures. In the evening, the community comes together once again to sing the psalms and hear Scripture read, which reminds us—if we have somehow managed to forget—that in Him “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). 

Praying together with such dedicated regularity takes disparate individuals and turns them into a united community, but community unity is given sacramental expression in the daily Eucharist. In his High Priestly Prayer, our Lord prayed for his disciples “that they may be one” just as the Father and the Son are one (John 17:11). The Eucharist is more than a mere sign of community friendliness; it is communion with the Father and with the Son and with the Spirit, and it creates the unity within the community that it also promises. While we may retain some doctrinal differences with our neighbors sitting in the chapel stalls beside us, we find ourselves able to love them as neighbors even if we disagree on significant or insignificant matters. This is the “Pax Nashotah” (the peace of Nashotah) that has come to characterize our shared community life. We are able to debate vigorously in the classroom and afterwards sit side by side in the chapel without rancor to share the Eucharist or to carry on a pleasant conversation at a community dinner afterward.

That is not to say that feelings never get hurt. They do, but that, too, is a part of the formation in prayer that takes place here. We learn to forgive one another as we have been forgiven—we really have little choice in such a small community. The self-knowledge that is necessary to give and receive forgiveness is often the hard won fruit of personal prayer, which takes up where our common prayer ends.  However, no prayer is really private; we are always praying in concert with the whole body of Christ, and our neighbors enter our personal prayers very specifically in our confessions, but also in our intercessions, and in our thanksgivings and in a myriad of other ways. Furthermore, we offer our personal prayers to the Father in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord and in the power of the Holy Spirit. So, even our so-called private prayers unite us to the whole Church and to the Holy Trinity. And when the reality of our unity is most difficult to experience, we take our hurts into the confessional or into the spiritual director’s study, and we wrestle there with our shortcomings and our reaction to the shortcomings of our brothers and sisters with whom we long to be one as our Lord has commanded.

This is, after all, the point of the spiritual life: we pray because we long to love God rightly and to be with Him. Our lives of prayer are an appropriate response to the love shown to us in our Lord’s incarnation, in His crucifixion, in His resurrection, and in His ascension. And so we pray together in the daily office, and we celebrate the Eucharist as a community, and we pray alone—this is the ancient three-fold rule of prayer that has been a part of Christian practice from the most ancient times. In the Book of Acts, the disciples are described as continuing “in the apostles’ doctrine, and in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers” (Acts 2:42). This is, of course, a very ancient rule of life—it is a picture of how a Christian life should look. Along the same lines, the Anglican reformers recognized the importance of a three-fold life of prayer and enshrined it in the Book of Common Prayer: the daily office was brought out of the monastic cloister and given to lay people to share; the Eucharist was translated into a language the people could understand; and the people were thereby instructed so that personal and popular devotions might be guided by apostolic teaching. Martin Thornton puts it like this: “The three-fold rule of prayer … is absolutely fundamental to all Catholic spirituality: the Common Office… supporting private prayer… both of which are allied to, and consummated by, the Mass.” This, Thornton argues, is not only “common to East and West, monastic and secular,” but it “forms the over-all [sic] structure of the Book of Common Prayer.” So, we might say, that the three-fold rule of prayer unites us to our neighbors worshiping beside us in the chapel, and to all Anglicans, and to the whole body of Christ. And in so doing, it makes us one with the Father and the Holy Spirit as well.

David Sherwood, D.Min., is Associate Professor of Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House. In 1996, Dr. Sherwood was the first librarian to be selected as a Fellow of Creighton University’s Academic Development and Technology Center. In 2000, he was named the Nebraska Library Association’s Mentor-of-the-Year. He has served on various American Library Association committees, in particular with the Library Instruction Round Table (ALA-LIRT) serving on the Steering Committee, the Liaison Committee, and the Executive Board (ex officio). He was also chair of the ALA-LIRT Newsletter Committee and Editor of the LIRT News from 1997-1999. In recent years, he has been active in the American Theological Library Association. In addition, he has written book reviews and articles in several regional and national publications within the field of library science. Having received the MTS degree, he was appointed in 2004 to the post of Director of the Frances Donaldson Library at Nashotah House.