Praying with the Book of Common Prayer

Sunday 9th June 2024

Jeremiah 6.16-21; Romans 9.1-13

‘Thus says the Lord:

“Stand at the crossroads and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies, and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.”’

In my days as a television producer I once made a film at an ancient Coptic monastery in the Egyptian desert. It was suffocatingly hot and the conditions were fairly primitive. We television crew and I got up in the early hours to film the Sunday morning liturgy. It was in liturgical Coptic, a mixture of Greek and Arabic, and lasted for almost four hours with a lot of chanting accompanied by triangles and percussion.

Recovering afterwards over breakfast the driver who had brought us to the monastery from Cairo and who had a great respect for the monks, said to me, ‘Isn’t the mass beautiful’ ? I was very touched by his obvious love for an ancient form of worship, which he had absorbed from childhood, though it was linguistically quite different from his everyday language.

I am delighted that Bradley Smith has come as Chair of the Prayer Book Society this evening bringing these new books to replace our rather tatty green ones. For those of us whose spiritual diet includes a regular dose of Choral Evensong it is lovely to have this new aid to worship.

For a decade or so I was on the Church of England’s Liturgical Commission, invited by the former Provost of Portsmouth, David Stancliffe. I wrote some new prayers and collects and contributed ideas to the Common Worship services we use here on Sunday and in the week when we don’t have a choir. In the process I learnt a huge amount about the Church of England and came to appreciate what I can only describe as its soul; its rootedness in history and scripture and its inclusivity. I came to understand how having forms of Common Prayer help both the Church and wider society to cohere.

Most of my ordained life, though, I have happily used our Common Worship services and value what they offer.

But I have also been for some years a member of the Prayer Book Society. The Prayer Book goes in deep because its language is extraordinarily memorable. Most religious traditions are passed on by memory. My Coptic driver knew the mass by heart. Now try as I might, I cannot reel off the words of the Magnificat in Common Worship modern English however many times I have said it, nor can I call to mind the prayer of confession we use almost every week at Holy Communion.

But the Prayer book words seem almost engraved on me:

‘Almighty and most merciful Father we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep…’

‘We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness which we from time to time most grievously have committed…...’

‘Almighty God unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid….’

Now I have been saying these words from childhood, but I have noticed that even those who come to the Prayer Book much later in life often report how surprisingly easy it is to remember.

Our choir will find that what they sing habitually here, they will know for life. Our choristers may later go far away from the Church and from choral singing, but one day they will wake up singing ‘O Lord, open thou our lips….’ and it will all come back. The things we know by heart, we know in a very particular way. It’s there in the phrase ‘by heart’.

Think of how the Prayer Book texts inspired our English choral tradition. A small example. Take the line from the beginning of the Gloria: ‘Glory be to God on high’ – and compare it with its contemporary equivalent: ‘Glory to God in the highest’. The first version opens up a whole landscape and the music settings echo that: ‘and on earth peace goodwill towards men’. But the more modern version, ‘Glory to God in the highest’ bounces along merrily as though waiting for an answer, ‘and peace to his people on earth’. It’s fine, but the slow unfolding grammar of the Prayer Book offers something a bit more.

There are theories about why Prayer Book language is so memorable, and you can read analyses of its rhythm and structure which for all sorts of reasons have not been retained in contemporary English.

But the language of the Prayer Book is not only is beautiful, it is also functional. Our forbears did not have microphones or speakers but the dry clarity of wood and the resonance of stone. You had to speak differently and use the space, but the result was, arguably more human and more resonant than that provided by microphones and speakers which always have to be turned on and off and watched and managed, and still go wrong.

So, the Prayer Book is beautiful and functional. But it is also extraordinarily economical. At the last count I had nine volumes of Common Worship services on my shelves. Yet if I was looking how to use it for my personal prayers or for spiritual growth I would have no idea where I would begin.

The Prayer Book on the other hand gives you more or less everything you need to pray, to worship, and to lead the Christian life. If I were shipwrecked on a desert island and I had a Prayer book and a Bible I would have all I needed say Morning and Evening Prayer every day of the year, to teach the essence of the Christian faith and baptise any locals who wanted to become Christian, to celebrate communion for them, marry them, attend to them in sickness, and to bury them. All from one book.

Beautiful, functional, economical.

But there’s yet one more reason for commending the Book of Common Prayer. Contemporary liturgy takes for granted the assumptions of the Enlightenment, that we are reasonable beings, that we get things wrong sometimes but in the end we are all terribly nice as long as we remember to hold correct opinions on everything.

The mood of the Prayer Book is darker, the product of an age of bitter social and religious strife and it reminds us that, as was said last Sunday, during our D-Day commemorations, that the seeds of war are in every human heart. However well-intentioned we may believe ourselves to be we are, experience suggests, toxic, treacherous and unreliable creatures in need of salvation. We need Christ to die for us and to rise from the dead for us and to intercede for us.

The Prayer Book reminds us that we are miserable sinners, sinners, that is, in need of God’s mercy, not necessarily miserable in our sense, though we may be that too.

Actually, there is quite a relief in that, a coming home to reality, permission to be not OK. The Prayer Book helps us map out the path of duty, the call to love God and our neighbours at a time when a lot of us are indifferent to God and cynical about our neighbours. So we pray ‘as well for others as for ourselves’. Our duties are more important than our entitlements.

Every Sunday and every saint’s day there is a Collect which unfolds something about the nature and character of God, something for us to ask God for and the reason why we do so. Today’s is an example:

O Lord, who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth: Send thy Holy Ghost and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee: Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake.

In this prayer, we call on God who has taught us that however busy, productive and important we are if we are doing all this without charity, love (but the word is so much more than love: caritas suggests grace, kindness, respect) - without this our works are empty. And yet we can’t generate charity, caritas, for ourselves. We are wholly dependent on God and that is why we beg him to pour it into our hearts because only God can give us the grace that makes us good.

And so the prayer carries us from death to life, from pride to humility, from self to neighbour, from my spiritual needs to the well-being of all.

‘Stand at the crossroads and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies, and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.’

Canon Angela Tilby