It's How You Start
Or, Why I Love Morning Prayer so Much
The Joshua Tree starts with Where the Streets Have No Name, goes straight into I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking for, and then, in case you aren’t knocked out by the one-two combo, With or Without You hits you right in the chin. It’s one of the great albums of the 20th Century and it cuts right to the chase. U2 isn’t content in messing around with filler tracks to start an album.
Darkness On the Edge of Town, depending on the day, my favorite Springsteen album, starts with the pounding drums of Badlands and immediately ushers you into the world Bruce is creating. It’s a perfect first song for the album, and grabs you by the shirt collar because there’s just something you’ve got to know.
Most of us grab our phones within ten minutes of waking up. Groggy, we regain consciousness only to be inundated with all the things we are supposed to be mad about. Whiplash from a peaceful night of sleep into doomscrolling, into turning on our outragemonger TV news of choice, into worrying about the state of the whole world isn’t good for our health or our relationships.
The first thing we do in our Morning Prayer service is confess our sins, and then these beautiful words from Psalm 51 are said:
Officiant: Lord, open our lips
People: And our mouth shall proclaim your praise
When we say this, we often make a small sign of the cross with our thumbs over our mouths. In monastic prayer, this is the first thing said in the morning, the first sound of the day—it breaks the night’s silence in the monastery. If you understand your life as a gift, if you’re in on the beautiful joke the gospel of grace tells, then the circumstances surrounding each morning don’t matter quite as much. If God opens my mouth, then I will proclaim His praise.
Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.
I prefer the “traditional” version of this: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen” World without end. This world, even on this morning, with the looming problems of November around the corner, with unrest at home and abroad, with the US government still shut down, this is our Father’s world. This was the world He made and said it was “very good” and this is the world he will make new. This is the world made from nothing and the world being remade right in front of our eyes, if we have eyes to see. We praise God because He opened our lips and because he forgives our sins. The rhythm of the liturgy here is intentional. Confession, then absolution, then we praise Him. We don’t pretend that this world is perfect and doesn’t have immense problems. We don't pretend that we or our neighbor aren’t suffering the very real consequences of our own or other’s actions. We praise God because even on those mornings we’ve forgotten Him, He hasn’t forgotten us.
We praise Him because how we start our day matters. Instead of immediately grabbing my phone, immediately taking a hit of dopamine, immediately pretending I’m important enough to need to respond to emails before I shower, I should softly remind myself of my sinfulness, remind myself of God’s forgiveness, and allow Him to open my lips so my mouth can proclaim his praise. Three steps to see the tone for the day, to usher myself into the world God is creating.
I love morning prayer because I am a disorganized mess for most of the day but for 15 minutes at the very beginning I have Everything in It’s Right Place (another side 1 track 1 song that let’s you know exactly what is going to follow).
When I was in high school, one of my football coaches would remind us, repeatedly, that no one cares how you start the race, it’s where you finish it that matters. That’s true in a sports-cliche type of way. But I think how we start is the best indicator of how we are going to finish. I let most days get away from me before I even have a chance, but if I can grab ahold of the day from the start and remind myself the order of operations on this deal—that it starts in Grace and praise—then maybe I can keep that mindset for the rest of the day.
If I can’t, luckily, there’s Noonday and Evening Prayer for me. It’s all grace.