Why We Should Do Small Compline instead of Vespers at Home

We are so accustomed to going to Vespers at church, that most of us have never thought about why what service is done when. That is all we know. And now, when we cannot go to church, it would be natural to feel a need to do the same thing at home, to "go to church" home and do the same things we would have done in the church building.

But we can't do that! Almost nobody out there, besides the choir director and maybe a reader, knows how to put Vespers together. Could we learn? Sure. Are most people going to do that? No.

In the recesses of Church history, there is a point that could really help us out. There were two main avenues by which our services were developed. Keep your eye open for which of these two avenues sounds the most like our COVID-quarantined situation.

One avenue is the "cathedral rite", which primarily comes out of Constantinople and is based on the services as they were developed in the cathedral, that is, around the patriarch, near the emperor, with multitudes of clergy, massive choirs, and every other imaginable resource you could ever want. Vespers developed in this context. It is not impossibly complex, but certainly built on a wealth of resources.

The other avenue of development was from the monastics. Don't think of large monasteries with a compound of buildings. Imagine the solitary monk, or maybe a small community of "desert" dwellers. The services that developed in this context were formed to be served without a priest and without a choir. Compline developed in this context.

Small Compline is not made for monastics, but rather, for isolated contexts. So, if you feel like your choir director works magic knowing when to turn to what music, Small Compline is for you. If you wonder if it is possible to have a Church service without a priest, you should give Small Compline a try.

I am so thankful (especially now under quarantine) that the new prayer book from St. Tikhon's Monastery does waste space in a home-use prayer book with Vespers and Divine Liturgy, because the only use of that would be to follow along at church, but rather has made sure services like Small Compline and Akathists are in there, which are all the more valuable now that we are locked out of our parishes and forced to "go to church" at home.

Not that we need to become monastics, but more than ever before, we need to turn to the lessons, the tradition, the practice, the experience of our desert-dwelling father and mothers. Let us turn to our icons, take up our prayer books, make the sign of the cross, open our hearts to God, and "let us pray to the Lord".