What began as a way for The Very Rev. Dr. Reggie Kidd to connect with God during the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown has now become a five-day-a-week podcast that reaches out across platforms to help others do the same. With his “Daily Office Devotions” podcast, Kidd, dean of the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, takes listeners through his personal, pastoral reflections on the set passages for the Daily Office.
A longtime tradition in churches of the Anglican tradition, the Daily Office originated from the ancient Jewish practice of daily prayer based on particular scriptures at set times of the day. The medieval church incorporated this practice into its tradition, and as The Most Rev. Thomas Cranmer wrote The Book of Common Prayer, he adapted it further, reducing the prayer times to Morning and Evening Prayer and putting the Daily Office into English, the language of the people.
“I think that’s one of the things the dean is trying to do,” said The Rev. Canon Peter Tepper, canon missioner at the Cathedral. “He’s trying to use illustrations and explanations that put the Daily Office into our common language and our vernacular, something that makes sense to someone in the 21st century. … he’s in the vein of Archbishop Cranmer.”
“One of the things that so enchanted and charmed me as I came into the liturgical world a number of years ago was how The Daily Office helps you live in God’s story,” Kidd said. “Our whole liturgy is formed around God’s story, and Jesus’ story in particular. The great gift of Cranmer in taking the monastic pattern of the prayers of the hours and bringing them over into the Book of Common Prayer and adapting them is to give us a daily lectionary that gets us through the Old Testament every two years and the New Testament every year. … Submitting my devotional time to the Daily Office was a great joy for me years ago, and then I felt like as the coronavirus was dictating everybody to take a huge break from normal life, I thought this would be a great time for me to just sit down and write out devotionals every day to help carry that storyline along.”
In March 2020, Kidd began writing his daily devotionals and sending them out via email to his congregation. Prior to the lockdown, he was in the habit of rising at 4 a.m. to go to the gym. But the pandemic changed all that.
“That time to me personally just became a precious refuge, a safe place to be with the Lord and to do the Daily Office: pray the prayers, chant the canticles, chant the psalms and just pore over the scripture and ask, ‘Lord, what do you have for me today?'” Kidd explained. The overflow of that time became his “Daily Office Devotionals.”
“After two years, which got us through to March of this year, Canon Peter Tepper and I sat down with Jason Mackey, who runs our communications and IT,” Kidd said. With two years’ worth of material, the three decided to produce a podcast and companion video featuring the dean’s devotionals.
Although the podcast developed at his initiative, “Jason Mackey is the one that actually makes the whole thing happen,” Tepper said. “He’s doing the bulk of the work.”
Kidd, Tepper and Mackey are already seeing the fruit of their joint efforts. “We’ve got about 625 subscribers,” Tepper said. “I’d like to grow the podcast a lot more, but that’s not too bad for only having done it for 65 days.”
“By the power of the Holy Spirit, I think the Daily Office is designed to help us meditate and pray intentionally using scripture,” he added. “And so the dean’s just doing that by his daily reflections on set passages in the Daily Office. And hopefully, if people stick with this podcast, they’ll have worked their way through the Bible in two years, if they journey with us over all 600 episodes we’re going to put together.”
Connect to the “Daily Office Devotions” podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube or at this link on St. Luke’s website.