Vespers

"And the evening and the morning were the first day" (Genesis 1:5). Following that biblical order, the Church counts her liturgical day from sunset — so Vespers is not the last service of a tired day but the first service of a new one. Saturday evening Vespers already belongs to Sunday; the eve of a feast already sings the feast. The other services of the daily cycle — compline, the Midnight Office, Matins, and the Hours — follow from this evening beginning.

The order is also a theology. The day, like the world, begins in darkness and moves toward light; Vespers is the Church settling into the dark confident that the Light is coming. That movement — creation, fall, and the promise of Christ — is the hidden plot of the whole service.

Vespers opens where the Bible opens. Psalm 104 (Psalm 103 in the Septuagint numbering the service books use) is sung or read while the priest censes the whole church: a long, delighted hymn to God the Creator — "O LORD, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all" (Psalm 104:24). The Great Litany follows, praying for everyone and everything, and then psalms appointed for the day from the Psalter.

At the heart of the service stand the "Lord, I call" psalms, beginning with Psalm 141 — "Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice" — sung while incense fills the church. Between their final verses the choir inserts stichera, hymns that carry the particular theme of the day: the resurrection on Saturday nights, the saint or feast being kept. On the eve of Sundays and feasts, Great Vespers adds a solemn entrance with candles and censer, and the prokeimenon — a psalm verse announcing the day's theme — follows; on great feasts, three Old Testament readings are added. The service closes with evening prayers, the Song of Simeon — "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace" (Luke 2:29) — the Trisagion prayers, and the troparion of the day. On festal eves Vespers may open into the All-Night Vigil, with the blessing of loaves, wheat, wine, and oil.

The center of every Vespers, at the moment the evening lamps are lit, is the hymn Phos Hilaron: "O Gladsome Light of the holy glory of the Immortal Father, heavenly, holy, blessed Jesus Christ. Now we have come to the setting of the sun and behold the light of evening. We praise God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For it is right at all times to worship Thee with voices of praise, O Son of God and Giver of Life, therefore all the world glorifies Thee." As the sun sets, the Church turns to the Light that does not set.

The hymn is among the oldest Christian hymns outside Scripture that is still in daily use. Already in the fourth century St. Basil the Great could cite it as an "ancient form" whose author no one remembered — evidence that Christians had been greeting the evening light with thanksgiving to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit long before the great councils. Every evening since, the Church has kept that appointment. For a newcomer, Vespers is the easiest first service: quiet, mostly sung, typically under an hour in parish use (more here), and carrying two and a half millennia of Israel's psalms and the Church's earliest song.