spirituality

One thing I love about older liturgical traditions is how they’ve had time for through-lines to accumulate, connecting different services, feasts, and readings together across the year. One of my favourites is the praying, in the Byzantine rite, at communion of a part of the Paschal canon, the tradition’s great Easter hymn. Today, as we … Continue reading More Perfectly Partaking of Christ: O Christ, Great Most Holy Pascha

After a two-day hiatus in honour of the Annunciation, today we return to reflecting on pre-Communion prayers. On Monday, we looked at a traditional Anglican prayer prayed right before receiving Communion; today, we’ll turn our attention to prayers of the Christian East. Before going up to receive communion, the faithful pray three quick prayers in … Continue reading Of Your Mystical Supper…: Pre-Communion Prayers

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, today is the Feast of the Annunciation. It’s a time when our thoughts naturally turn to the Virgin Mary. But when we look at the tradition, most of the things done or said that set Mary apart, are really about setting Jesus apart. We saw that yesterday when looking … Continue reading Blessed and Highly Favoured: A Reflection for the Annunciation 2026

Tomorrow is the feast of the Annunciation, when we remember the Angel Gabriel’s world-changing visit to Mary announcing her pregnancy. And so in preparation for that I thought today was a good moment to step back and reflect on hymns glorifying Mary, which are some of the most cherished in the Eastern and Roman Churches, … Continue reading More Honourable than the Cherubim: Axion Estin

In many churches, the second half the twentieth century was marked by a lot of wrangling and division surrounding liturgy: Whether to update the language, and if so, whether to update the theology of the prayers at the same time. In my own Anglican world, this was particularly divisive and resulted in less of a … Continue reading Not in Our Own Righteousness: The Prayer of Humble Access