Kenneth Peterson - Prayer as Night Falls: Experiencing Compline

EXPERIENCING
COMPLINE

Kenneth V. Peterson

2013 First Printing

Prayer as Night Falls: Experiencing Compline

Copyright 2013 Kenneth V. Peterson

ISBN: 978-1-61261-376-5

Unless otherwise designated, Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Quotations designated (BCP) are taken from The Book of Common Prayer, published by the Church Hymnal Corporation and Seabury Press, 1979.

Photographic images on the pages facing are by Gabrielle Fine, 2009, 2010. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

The Paraclete Press name and logo (dove on cross) is a registered trademark of Paraclete Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Peterson, Kenneth V.

Prayer as night falls : experiencing compline / Kenneth V. Peterson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-61261-376-5 (pb french flaps)

1. Spiritual lifeChristianity. 2. Compline. 3. PrayerChristianity. 4. NightMiscellanea. I. Title.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Paraclete Press
Brewster, Massachusetts
www.paracletepress.com
Printed in the United States of America

For Peter Hallock
founder of the Compline Choir
and its director, 19562009

A SELECTED LIST OF RESOURCES
FOR PRAYING COMPLINE

Prayer as
Night Falls

There was something numinous in the experience. I felt so strongly around me the presence of God. I knew I was sharing in something with these young people. I knew they had comebeen drawn there, in the hope and expectation of an encounter with the Holy. And so it was. In that darkened Cathedral, I felt, once again, the presence of God.

EDMOND BROWNING

As I remember, it was the first weekend in October 1964 when David introduced me to Compline. We drove in his VW Beetle from Tacoma, where I had just begun college, to Seattle, about thirty miles to the north. Eventually we arrived at the top of Capitol Hill, and I saw for the first time our destinationthe great concrete hulk of St. Marks Cathedral. I was eighteen, a music student. Dave, whom I had just met the week before, sang the ancient service of Compline every Sunday night, and suggested I try it out.

Their silence broken, they begin the daily cycle of prayer called the offices or the Divine Hours. There are as many as eight of these offices, and Compline (from the Latin word Completorium) completes the cycle.

We parked in the cathedral lot and admired the commanding view to the west: the twinkling lights of houses on Seattles Queen Anne Hill, the famous Space Needle, where I had gone to the Worlds Fair two years before, and at their feet, Lake Union, a freshwater lake connected by channels and locks to the saltwater Puget Sound.

I was full of the excitement of the last few weeksfreshman orientation, dorm life, new friends and studies, and teaching Sunday school in a Methodist church in a shabby corner of Tacoma, which was where I met Dave, an alum of my university, who was playing a Bach fugue after church on the little electric organ. We talked about music, and Dave invited me to join him the next week to sing Compline.

In the spring of 1956, Peter Hallock, the organist/choirmaster of St. Marks Episcopal Cathedral, Seattle, invited a group of men to sing the Office of Compline every Sunday night. They sang from a little booklet with the original chants from medieval times, adapted to words approved by the Church of England in the late 1920s. Hallock, who grew up in Kent, Washington, had experienced Compline at Episcopal Church camps and retreats in the 1930s. After serving in World War II, he studied organ and composition at the University of Washington in Seattle, and then attended the Royal School of Church Music from 194951 at Canterbury, where he sang from the Order of Compline, which he brought back with him to his first job at St. Marks.

After rehearsing the chants in an outbuilding that served as a temporary choir room, the little singing club (once-a-week monks?) would move into the empty cathedral, where the spacious acoustics made the chant come alive. At this time, to hear Compline sung outside a monastery would have been uncommon enough, but hearing it sung in Englishan absolute rarity.

Dave introduced me to Peter Hallock, a slender man of about forty, bright and friendly, with a hint of British reserve; finding I was a tenor, he invited me to sit behind a choir desk in the second row. There were also countertenorsmen who sang in falsetto, allowing them to sing as high as women altosan idea that was totally novel to me at the time. They sat in the first row, and baritones and basses sat in the third. We started rehearsing a psalm from a thin hardbound Psalter. Mrs. Andrews, a stout woman in her eighties who spoke in a lilting way (I had never heard a Welsh accent), brought us tea in china cups on a big tray. She offered sugar and milk, but, being unfamiliar with the British custom, I only took a couple lumps of sugar. I rested my cup on the shelf under my desk, careful not to spill on my music