On the Determination of Year One and Year Two

For the greater part of Anglican history the Daily Office Lectionary was a single annual cycle. Thomas Cranmer designed the First Book of 1549 so that the whole of the Old Testament should be read each year, the New Testament three times over, and the Psalter every month; and that arrangement, with various refinements, governed Anglican use down to the late nineteenth century. The American Book of Common Prayer, in its first revision after 1789 and in every revision through 1892, carried forward the Cranmerian design without substantial alteration. The 1928 Book, as first bound, did likewise.

The General Convention of 1943, sitting at Cleveland, adopted a revised Table of Lessons for the Daily Office which departed from the Cranmerian inheritance in one striking respect: it provided for the first time in American Anglican use a two-year cycle for the appointed Sunday Lessons of Morning and Evening Prayer. Two parallel sets, designated First Year and Second Year, were printed side by side in the Table. The 1945 Lectionary — in substance the same work, with revisions adopted at the 1946 General Convention — was thereafter bound with the 1928 Prayer Book down to the end of its authorized use in 1979, and continues in the printed editions of the 1928 Book used today by the continuing Anglican jurisdictions.

The two-year cycle, as it stands in the Prayer Book, raises a question which the Prayer Book does not answer: which civil year is currently First Year, and which is Second? The Table prints the columns; it does not say which is to be read first. For many years the practical answer in Anglican-Catholic parishes was the asterisk: the 1945 Table marks certain readings with a star to indicate alternates or preferred selections, and a long-settled habit has been to choose between the two columns by pastoral judgment, often by the starred reading. This is a defensible custom, sanctioned by the 1928 Book's general latitude as to alternate Lessons, but it leaves the lectionary's design intent — that the two columns be a deliberate two-year arc — without effect.

The Episcopal Convention

The omission was supplied not in the 1928 Book but in the 1979. When the Episcopal Church adopted (and considerably enlarged) a two-year Daily Office Lectionary of its own in the Book of Common Prayer of 1979, the editors prefaced it with the explicit rubric which the 1928 Table had wanted:

“The Daily Office Lectionary is arranged in a two-year cycle. Year One begins on the First Sunday of Advent preceding odd-numbered years, and Year Two begins on the First Sunday of Advent preceding even-numbered years.” The Book of Common Prayer (1979), p. 934

Although this rubric appears in the 1979 Book and governs that Book's own quite different Daily Office Lectionary, the convention it lays down is wholly applicable to the 1943/1945 cycle as well. The structural form — two parallel columns, alternating year by year, beginning at Advent — is identical; only the readings differ. The 1979 rule supplies, by retrospective application, the determination which the 1943 General Convention did not make explicit, and is the convention which governs the present essay.

Continuing Anglican Practice

Among the jurisdictions which formally retain the 1928 Book — the Anglican Province of Christ the King, the Anglican Catholic Church, the Anglican Province of America, the Diocese of the Holy Cross, and the Reformed Episcopal Church in its 1928 use — the present writer has been unable to discover any published determination of the question. The Anglican Province of America, however, sponsors and maintains the online Daily Office at commonprayeronline.com, which serves as a kind of de facto house office for that jurisdiction; this resource, by its daily operation, must necessarily resolve the question, and the convention it employs is that of the 1979 Book. In this the APA is in practical, if unstated, agreement with the Episcopal Church.

The Anglican Province of Christ the King, the canonical home of this Fellowship, has not, to the writer's knowledge, issued a binding determination on the matter; nor has the Diocese of the Western States. The 1928 rubrics in any case permit the celebrant a measure of discretion among alternate Lessons, and parishes within these jurisdictions have therefore generally followed the older asterisk-and-choice pattern.

The Rule of the Fellowship

New Every Morning Anglican Fellowship, having considered the matter and finding no binding direction to the contrary from the Anglican Province of Christ the King, adopts as its working rule the convention of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, applied retrospectively to the 1943/1945 cycle. By this rule:

• Year Onebegins on Advent Sunday preceding odd-numbered civil years.
• Year Twobegins on Advent Sunday preceding even-numbered civil years.

In the immediate calendar, the liturgical year which began on Advent Sunday, the 30th of November, 2025, is therefore Second Year, and runs through Saturday, the 28th of November, 2026. The year beginning on Advent Sunday, the 29th of November, 2026, will be First Year, and will run through Saturday, the 27th of November, 2027. The cycle so determined alternates indefinitely from this point forward.

It should be remembered that the two-year cycle affects only the appointed Psalms and Lessons of Morning and Evening Prayer on Sundays. The Holy Days, the special weekdays of Lent, Passiontide, Easter Week, the Rogation Days, and the Ember Days carry a single set of appointed Psalms and Lessons; and on the ordinary weekdays of the year the appointed Psalms are those of the thirty-day cycle of the Psalter as set forth in the Prayer Book itself. The asterisked selections retained in the 1945 Table, where they offer genuine alternates rather than year-marked columns, remain available to the celebrant's discretion in pastoral need, as the 1928 rubrics provide.

This rule will be amended without further note if and as the Anglican Province of Christ the King should hereafter promulgate a determination of the question; until that time, the present essay stands as the working order of the Fellowship.