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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
ECPA Top Shelf Book Cover Award An Invitation into God's Grace As we race to work in the morning, have coffee with a friend, or fall into bed exhausted, we want to feel God's presence, to sink into his grace. Yet too often he feels aloof, absent. Our prayers feel trivial. But as Julie Lane-Gay discovered, the Book of Common Prayer is designed for just this purpose: to root Christians in the riches of God's grace. Lane-Gay has written this book to share the treasures she has found in the Book of Common Prayer. It's not a history of the prayer book nor a guide (though it will certainly help readers get their bearings). Instead, using stories from her own life, Lane-Gay shows what it means to live in the prayer book: to allow its prayers and patterns to shape an ordinary Christian life. Discover how the Book of Common Prayer can anchor us—our prayers, our daily lives, our hearts—in Christ.
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FOR MAXINE AND THENA
a small token of enormous thanks
AND FOR CRAIG
who shares the riches of the prayer book, and His grace, so wisely
Contents
Introduction
Nearly fifteen years ago, I was at a weekend retreat off the coast of Washington—there were wood cabins, homey food, occasional views of the snowcapped Olympic mountains. Good friends were the speakers, and I went largely to hear and support them. On the wet Saturday morning, colorful raincoats draped and dripping over unused chairs, we were divided into groups of eight and asked that we go around the circle sharing our names, telling where we were from, and answering the question, “What has shaped you as a Christian?”
My stomach tightened hearing the last question, and more so as my turn got closer. Was I pathetic not to know? The complete absence of faith in my childhood? The books of C. S. Lewis? Our group’s leader clearly wanted something more specific than “the Holy Spirit” or “Scripture.” As the woman two to my left was telling us about her time working in Uganda, I suddenly realized my answer. The Book of Common Prayer. It was a surprise—and made total sense.
Week after week, in the pews at church, praying at home with the small red book, texting a collect to my sister late at night, the prayer book’s words had steadied and shaped me. When my kids were small and I was too weary to form a coherent thought, when marriage was so hard I wanted to give up, when my sin felt so acute I was too ashamed to pray, when I knew I was supposed to praise God but felt little enthusiasm, the prayer book was my life preserver. Its words of grace and confession, its prayers in their set patterns, have been the primary means of God’s love and grace to me.
When it was my turn and I answered, “the Book of Common Prayer,” there were raised eyebrows and perplexed stares. Was it strange that a 450-year-old British book could have that capacity? Did my circle-mates find it odd that I had been shaped by saying the same antiquated words every Sunday? I was dressed in my green fleece and faded jeans, but perhaps they thought the prayer book was only for people who wore tweed jackets and read dead English poets.
I knew my answer was true—and the more I have reflected on it since that rainy morning, the more I know I was given a gift. The language is old, and the prayers are set, but the prayer book has been constant in showing me God’s tender understanding of my heart and in conveying His loving character and steady presence—for being what the prayer book calls a “means of grace and hope of glory.”
Theologian Lesslie Newbigin writes, “The business of the church is to tell and embody a story.”1 I would add the church’s business is also to watch for that story, to watch for God at work in the world, to be like my sky-watching husband who stays up into the early hours of the morning looking for a galaxy. The prayer book has been my window on that story, showing me God in our midst and leading me to become more skilled at doing so. The prayer book hasn’t become a substitute for the Bible but a means to live into it.
I first picked up a prayer book when my husband, Craig, and I went on a short trip to western Canada. Amid spectacular hikes and salmon dinners, we decided to attend an Anglican church near where we were staying. In my early twenties, I had no idea what the words “Anglican” or “Episcopal” meant, much less that the people in the pews followed a set liturgy, a script between a pastor and the congregation that was laid out in a historic prayer book. The book intimidated me. The old words—thy and beseech and manifold—felt pretentious and old-fashioned. There were so many directions in italics. Which page were we on? Where was the spontaneity? The joy? Why were the leaders in front dressed in long black robes, and why did they repeatedly get down on the ground to kneel? How did anyone know when to stand or kneel? What was an Absolution? The Lectionary? The Creed?
But as we concluded Holy Communion (was it okay that we went forward to receive it?), I was also amazed. Moving through the script—the progression of confession, Scripture, praise—the service had prepared us for this meal; we didn’t jump right in. As we knelt to have the body and the blood of Christ placed in our cupped hands, the magnitude of the gift sank deep.
To my surprise, our feelings and responses were not the focus of the service, nor were the pastors. The only personality we attended to was God’s. Instead of my trying to create enthusiastic, thankful feelings toward Him, I recognized that God was initiating, waiting for us. We were responding. When we knelt and prayed, “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid,” I felt I was handed the world’s best invitation—to sink into God’s arms just as I was. Even as the worship felt awkward, it ministered to my longing.
Several years later when we began to attend an Anglican church regularly, the archaic words and prayers started to draw me in rather than distance me. I had a sense I was joining into something deep and sturdy.
My passion in life is plants—be it pines, roses, or daisies. I study them, grow them, find experts on them, love them. And as I have done so (Craig might say, as I have obsessively done so), I have learned their language, the Linnaean system of naming (and often describing) plants in Latin. Pines are all pinus, but there are 126 different kinds of pinus, 126 different species. Pinus longaeva is the Bristlecone—it’s the oldest, and the Latin means “ancient.” It is far easier to know the personalities of pines, and all plants, when you understand something about their Latin names; when you know to whom they are related. It places them in the world of trees, within all plants. So it has been with the old words of the liturgy. They have become not only a blessing, but a means of context, of learning.
As Craig and I participated in the services week after week, we memorized their words without even trying. The thys and thees and beseeches became part of the prayer book’s song; the poetry deepening meanings rather than distancing me. The lyricism began to find its way into different parts of me; as a friend says, “sidling into my right brain as well as my left.”
I soon borrowed a prayer book from the back of the church (I have yet to return it) and began pulling it out when I knew I needed to pray. It felt easier than thinking up apt words myself. I said a collect as I headed out the door in the morning, and before I started work. When I went to bed, I plunked my worries into His keeping as I said, “Preserve us, O God, waking, and guard us sleeping, that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.” I began praying more frequently because I didn’t have to conjure up the words.
Hearing the preambles to the prayers that began with the attributes of who God is, “who is always to have mercy,” “who of thy tender love towards mankind, has sent thy savior, Jesus Christ,” transformed my experience of knowing His love. I wasn’t learning of God’s love through the direct statement “God loves you.” I was learning of his love through the qualities that emanated from Him.
I assumed that saying the same words over and over, week after week (and eventually day after day), would soon feel contrived; that I wasn’t being honest with God. But again, I was surprised. In saying the Lord’s Prayer repeatedly, I saw more of its brilliance, not less. In saying the Confession each week, I became more honest, more specific. And unlike scrolling on my phone (which I also do repeatedly), saying the words of the prayer book brought hope and deep goodness into my parched heart. Hearing myself say the prayers, hearing others say them, reiterates that God knows me and loves me deeply. The prayers convey over and over how relational God is. These are words I want to hear over and over.
Not long after that weekend retreat, a tall athletic fellow who had been in my group asked me if I had ever considered using the Celtic Book of Daily Prayer. “What made you pick the Anglican prayer book?” he wondered. I admitted while I was aware of the Celtic Book of Daily Prayer (and the Northumbrian community that has shared it with the world), I had never looked for a system of prayer. I fell into the prayer book and stayed. The more it pulled me closer to God, to the love of Christ, I didn’t want to let it go. I have occasionally read parts of other “systems,” such as Phyllis Tickle’s collections of daily prayers, The Divine Hours (I love that she organized the prayers by season), Paul Miller’s “index cards” method, and Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals with its great assortment of historic prayers and readings in contemporary language. I’ve enjoyed and learned from them all. But I have stuck close to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, not only for its thorough rootedness in Scripture but also for how pointedly it speaks to my personal longings (and insecurities) and for its magnitude. The prayer book anchors every day of the year, every Sunday in worship, every season, every birth and death and in between. Knowing the same prayers are being said each Sunday in Rio, Rotterdam, and Reno, and have been said for hundreds of years before me, holds me in the community of God’s people, in God’s story.
Thirty years after being intimidated and awkward, being lost amid the words of the Te Deum and the Venite, the prayer book is now in my knapsack, my glovebox, my office drawer, my iPad. When I feel anxious about the demands ahead, I hastily say the Collect for Peace. When I hear my husband, kneeling next to me, saying the General Confession, “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts,” I find it far easier to forgive him for snapping at me in the car; the Confession has shown me that I am often the one who’s rude first.
Over time I have become what my kids describe as “big” on the prayer book. Several years ago I took a class on the Psalms and the professor was speaking about the need for our worship to “catechize us,” to teach us about God, about His work in the world. I saw my opportunity and called out, “We need the Book of Common Prayer!” A good friend laughed at my predictability and said, “Julie is like the kids at the children’s time in church. When the minister asks the kids a question, the answer is always ‘Jesus!’ Julie’s answer is always ‘the prayer book!’”
I’m not a priest, historian, or theologian. I am not inclined to prayer and I am not naturally disciplined. This book is not a guide (a friend teased me that it’s more like an “enlarged travel brochure”). It’s a vista of a layperson living in the prayer book, one who is still learning. I want to help you be more comfortable with it, blessed by what you’re participating in. I’ve included history and instructions here and there, but mostly I have tried to show how the age-old prayers and liturgies have drawn me, and others, closer to God, how we have become more attentive to Him, and how He has drawn closer to us.
The prayer book still intimidates me. Some parts still mystify me. Finding my way through the vast number of versions of the Anglican and Episcopal Books of Common Prayer, printed from 1542 to 2019, occasionally overwhelms me. Editions have been updated for language, pertinence, and theology. There are versions that use words and phrases appropriate to 1662, such as “heartily sorry for these our misdoings, The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burthen of them is intolerable,” and others that use the language of 2019, rendering the same phrase as “deeply sorry for these our transgressions; the burden of them is more than we can bear.”
To further complicate this plethora, there are different editions of the prayer book in England, Canada, Singapore, New Zealand, Kenya, the United States, and elsewhere.
One silver lining amid these versions of time and location is the similarity of what’s in them; the order of the table of contents is relatively similar between versions. Almost all prayer books begin with the daily prayers (what most of us would say at home) titled as the Daily Office. These are the services of Morning, Midday, and Evening Prayer. Some versions include Compline (the service just before bed) and the Litany (a service of intercessory prayer). The second section of almost all prayer books covers the two services of the Sacraments: Baptism and Holy Communion. These are always communal, to be done in a church community with a priest leading us through them. The next section of the prayer book is the “pastoral rites”—the gigantic moments—services for marriage, children, and dying. The fourth section is usually the Psalter, offering all 150 psalms (in order) but separating them into a morning and evening reading for each day of the month; it’s the longest section in the prayer book. The Psalter is followed by the services related to church life, such as the ordination of deacons, priests, bishops, and archbishops and the sanctifying of a church building or a graveyard.
I was recently at the service where one of our parish priests was being ordained to become the bishop of Canada. The service was held in a large church filled with countless clergy in long white gowns, greeting each other with hugs and laughter (I silently wondered if Dumbledore was there too). A tall, gold shepherd’s crook was carried up to the altar and vast candles flickered luminously. We were all there to witness Dan make momentous vows. In a loud but humble voice, he promised to “renounce all ungodliness and worldly lusts, and live a godly, righteous and sober life in this present world,” to show himself “in all things an example of good works for others, that the adversary may be ashamed, having nothing to say against you.” It made marriage vows look easy.
The final sections of the prayer book guide us through the Liturgical Year with a collect for each week of the year and the designated Bible readings for each day throughout the year (the Lectionary).
To squeeze all this in, most prayer books are more than seven hundred pages long.
Living in Canada for most of my adult life (that first visit turned into a long stay), the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer has been the one on my desk and in my car, but there are equally good ones across the world.2 For weekly worship, my own church weaves together the 1962 edition, the 2019 Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) edition, and occasionally the 1662 edition. Again, it’s confusing. In this book I have generally quoted either the 2019 ACNA edition or the Canadian 1962 edition. My hope is that the chapters will focus on the similarities of these versions, minimize the confusion, and most importantly, give you confidence that you can find your way.
As I tell those navigating their way into the prayer book, there are no liturgical speed traps. No one is waiting to catch you. No one will be upset if you read the wrong prayer at the wrong time, stand at the wrong time—or if you forget to use the prayer book at all.
May this book be a friendly welcome mat, an encouragement to venture into the prayer book’s pages, into its rhythms and prayers, into God’s abundant wisdom, love, and grace, into His amazing and trustworthy Story.
1
Morning andEvening Prayer
I’m late yet again.
I pull in behind the police station (where parking is free on Sundays) and race over to our tall, sandstone church. I wish I’d gotten here earlier to hear the musical prelude. The music quiets me, gives my soul a little breathing room. It’s worth getting out of the house five minutes earlier but I’m lousy at doing that.
The foyer runs along the back of the sanctuary and Tricia, warm and good-humored, opens the side door and hands me my bulletin. I must look sheepish because she shrugs and smiles in a way that says, “Don’t sweat it. You aren’t the only one who is late. You got here.” Her kindness softens me for worship.
The sanctuary is almost full. Soccer moms, university professors, bartenders, and computer programmers fill the pews. There are shorts and ripped T-shirts and dark suits with neckties. Depending on the season, rain boots, Adidas, and flip-flops abound. Like me, these people can be self-absorbed and high maintenance, but when cancer erupts, kids are arrested, jobs are lost, or spouses cheat, they are right there with you.
There are no wood-hewn beams or stone pillars; no stunning stained-glass windows. It’s not the Canterbury Cathedral. The organ is adequate; the piano might be better. The choir is wonderful but there are not a hundred cherubic children in white robes with perfect pitch. With its sturdy tan pews and red carpeting, the sanctuary is comfortable at best. I’ve come to value its ordinariness; it doesn’t inspire awe, but when you track in a bit of mud or a baby cries during the sermon, no one feels like they’re ruining anything. It’s never a performance.
As I move across a middle row to sit closer to the center, I squeeze the shoulders of our friends Michelle and Ben in the pew in front of me and get acknowledging smiles. It comforts me to find them week after week, year after year. I hope I’m that presence for others.
My jacket barely off, the congregation settles back onto the pews as the organ’s last notes of the opening hymn fade. This morning’s service is Morning Prayer, and while the prayer book compilers intended the service to be said daily (and many do say it daily), our church is unusual in that we alternate on Sundays, celebrating Holy Communion on the second and fourth Sundays of the month and Morning Prayer on the first and third. It’s an oddity I’ve come to appreciate.
Some people say the services of Morning and Evening Prayer (together called the Daily Office) each day at home. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, a number of people at our church gathered online twice a day to say these services together, and they have carried on ever since. They take turns leading and reading the Scriptures. I continue to hear it described as a “lifeline” and a “crucial framework for my day.”
The Daily Office has a deep history. Long before Christ, the Jewish people voiced their prayers of praise and sacrifice in the temple at 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.; they knew that their rituals were what taught and formed them.
Some days at home, I say Morning Prayer by myself. Sitting at the kitchen table or my desk, I read it like a script, saying all the parts and prayers aloud. It was awkward till I got used to it, until hearing the words mattered more than the clumsiness. Some days I don’t get to all the Scriptures; too often I just read the Psalms.
The Daily Office offers a way to shape our workdays and remind us who we are—created, known, and loved by God, people whose work is prayer. It gives us a way to move closer to Scripture’s encouragement to “pray without ceasing.”
Our rector (or head pastor) begins this morning’s liturgy with the Opening Sentence, a call to worship that sets the tone for all that we are about to do. He reads, “I was glad when they said unto me, ‘We will go into the house of the LORD’” (Psalm 122:1). It offers a transition from the parking lot to worship, but it also contains an important acknowledgment. Pastor Tim Challies writes,
The Call to Worship is a means of acknowledging that God’s people come to church each week weary, dry, and discouraged. They have laboured through another week and need to be reminded of the rest Christ offers their weary souls. They have endured another week of trials, temptations, or persecutions and come thirsty, eager to drink the water of life and to be refreshed by it. They have walked another seven days of their journey as broken, sinful people and need to be reminded of who Christ is and who they are in him. Church is urgent business! Instead of being asked how they are, Christians need to be reminded who they are. Instead of being asked where everyone else is, Christians need to be reminded where Christ is.1
Chosen according to the church calendar (or Liturgical Year), the Opening Sentences vary by the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. This calendar marks our days and months within the eternal rather than the pragmatic. As poet Malcolm Guite says, the church calendar offers a way of “sacralizing time,”2 of shifting us to see Christ’s birth, Baptism, ministry, death, burial, and resurrection both in the past and in our midst.
In the much older versions of the prayer book, the Opening Sentences tended to focus on penitence. Services began with verses such as “I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son” (Luke 15:18-19). The intent with this emphasis was to start with the bad news of our sin and set us on the path to repentance and to grace, to remind us that from the outset, absolution and grace are always waiting.
After the Opening Sentences, our rector declares the Call to Confession (some prayer books call this the Exhortation). Before we can praise God, hear His Word, or even thank Him, we need God’s grace, we need the reminder that everything in our relationship with Him comes by His grace. The rector reads:
Dearly beloved, the Scriptures teach us to acknowledge our many sins and offenses, not concealing them from our heavenly Father, but confessing them with humble and obedient hearts that we may obtain forgiveness by his infinite goodness and mercy. We ought at all times humbly to acknowledge our sins before Almighty God, but especially when we come together in his presence to give thanks for the great benefits we have received at his hands, to declare his most worthy praise, to hear his holy Word, and to ask, for ourselves and on behalf of others, those things which are necessary for our life and our salvation. Therefore, draw near with me to the throne of heavenly grace.3
“Draw near with me” is always a bonus. I’m not the only one who came through the sanctuary’s doors this morning immersed in myself.
Sometimes I make a small, silent addition to the ending of the Exhortation—“Lord, show me mine.” I try to make myself ask, “Lord, where have I sinned? What did I do, and what did I not do? Show me where I need to repent.” God’s answers come more frequently than I would expect and often surprise me—a conversation when I wasn’t really listening, a comment in which I tweaked the truth about myself to impress someone. I have come to find it a great sign of God’s love that He shows me my sin when I ask.
While it once was daunting, naming my sins has become a means of grace, a means to know its riches. Sin explains the mess of the world, thousands of years ago and this morning. We aren’t expected to heal ourselves, only to be humble and ask for God’s help. Phrases such as “our many sins and offenses” (in older prayer books it’s our “manifold sins and wickedness”) and “with a humble and obedient heart” now land on me with relief. “Sins” and “wickedness” are countercultural words, but they bring life-giving freedom. They remind me that we live in a thoroughly fallen world, and they pull me again to seek God’s forgiveness.
Some years ago there was a media outcry in the United Kingdom when, in planning his wedding with Camilla Parker Bowles, Prince Charles insisted on keeping this Exhortation in their ceremony, including the words “manifold sins and wickedness.” People were horrified. Surely in light of his earlier affair with Camilla, the prince ought to eliminate the language once and for all, naming the affair as something other than “sin.”
Charles apparently said that to the contrary, this was the right language for their actions, and the best way to begin his new marriage.4
The first time I participated in the service of Morning Prayer, I was visiting to hear a famous preacher. Still happy with the contemporary worship in the church we attended, the set pattern of worship again felt like work. The service guide filled nine pages with small print. Listening to the pastor’s calls and saying the responses, we again seemed to skip some parts and say others. There were hymns and songs at seemingly random times. I worried Morning Prayer would take several hours.
But I also noticed that the scripted dialogue between the pastor and the congregation—the liturgy—was again restful. The service was not about expressing what I was feeling toward God, nor was it about the pastor’s entertaining style. The service’s words and music and dialogue expressed Christ to me, pouring His love and redemption into each of us. Saying the age-old words that carried such scriptural depth, I felt a relief at not having to conjure up piety or weightiness on my own. There was an intentionality I felt more than understood.
I began to wonder if the contemporary service Craig and I attended was missing something. As Scripture says to us over and over, “Remember!” I was seeing in these scripted prayers and patterns of worship what I frequently skipped over: what God had done in the past and the glorious future ahead.
I was hearing the good news of the gospel not only in the sermon and prayers but in the pattern of the prayers, their content and their sequence. I began to see that the parts of this service were created as a whole. They were steps placed in an order that enabled me to practice behaving like a person who was following Christ, and hopefully over time, with the presence of the Holy Spirit, become like that person from the inside out.
Following the steps of the pattern brought a change in my vantage point, as if I had climbed down an embankment and gotten onto a barge on a big flowing river to experience the land from a new perspective. In this liturgy I was participating in a different narrative of the world, a different telling of its story. Again I sensed the change more than I understood it.
All societies have ways that we “narrate” the world to make sense of it and structure how we live in it. As pastor Eugene Peterson wrote, “We keep sane by telling stories. . . . Stories tell us who we are, tell us what we can do.”5 One of the most common stories we tell in Western society might be summarized as “hope in progress,” that with every advance in science and technology, our lives can and will keep getting better. Electric cars, stem cell treatments, finely tuned antidepressants, and personal investing will provide the power and capacity to make our lives easier and happier, even healthier. Rich and poor alike can be healed from cancer and Covid-19. With all the recent advances, children can be better cared for and become better adults.
But as much as I like air travel, antibiotics, and instant messaging, these technologies aren’t solving the deeper problems of our world or our hearts. We aren’t becoming better or happier people, or sadly, better parents.
As Christians, we have been given a different narrative from the one that says science and technology will consistently keep making things better. We don’t get to make up our narrative, or even amend it. It comes to us. The Christian story of the world is God creating, our rebelling, God redeeming in Christ and His coming back to restore all things as they were meant to be. It is both hard to see this story and, once you look carefully, hard to miss it. Our world was created with stunning beauty and brilliance—trees, mountains, whales, dragonflies, and newborn babies show this in abundance, and consistently, but we have messed it all up with our selfishness and greed. God has given us His own Son to redeem us, to save us from the ultimate consequences of what we have done, and He’s committed to one day restoring us and our world.
The great advances can be helpful tools, but they do not save us or even love us; they rarely meet our longings to be known, loved, and cherished, to know God is personally with us, waiting for us.
Philosopher Jamie Smith says that this naming, these liturgies of a different sort, can “carry within them a kind of ultimate orientation. . . . They bend the needle of our hearts.”6
Morning Prayer began to bend mine.
Following the Call to Confession Exhortation, our congregation lowers themselves onto the red cushions beneath us. We kneel, acting out our script with our bodies as well as our words. Jackets rustle, rain boots squeak, and heavy soles scuff the floor. There’s a communal thump—a settling that always signals “home” to me. This is what my people sound like. We’re readying ourselves to confess together, to do something we agree we need to do, and that we need to do on our knees. We aren’t here to be entertained, we are here to participate. Together we say:
