The Book of Common Prayer does not just epitomize Anglicanism—it points beyond it.
Credit: Thoom
I was lucky. Born in 1959, I came of age in an Episcopal Church that still intoned “thees” and “thous.” My young mind was formed by a Book of Common Prayer yet to undergo that indignity of being made contemporary and up to date. The lines are still in my head.
We have erred and strayed from thy way like lost sheep,
we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.
And:
Spare thou those who confess their faults,
Restore thou those who are penitent.
According to thy promises declared unto mankind
In Christ Jesus our Lord.
I could go on with the collect for the service of Holy Communion, another fragment of the Prayer Book welded into my memory.
Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open,
All desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid;
Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit,
That we may perfectly love thee and worthily magnify thy holy Name,
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Communion service called for a different and more searching confession of sin, this part of which rolls off my tongue to this day:
Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
Maker of all things, Judge of all men;
We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness,
Which we from time to time, most grievously have committed,
By thought, word, and deed, Against thy Divine Majesty,
Provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.
We do earnestly repent, And are heartily sorry for these our misdoings;
The burden of them is intolerable.
Clearly, the Book of Common Prayer does not promote the religion of moralistic therapeutic deism. God judges; we are His creatures and owe him homage and obedience. As the lines from Venite that stick with me put it:
O come, let us worship and fall down, * and kneel before the Lord our Maker.
For his is the Lord our God; * and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.
O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness; * let the whole earth stand in awe of him.
For he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth; * and with righteousness to judge the world, and the peoples with his truth.
Now I have gone on too long, pulling out luminous lines informed by a theology undiluted by modern sentimentality and human self-regard and cast in English language that is both crystal clear and richly poetic. Those who undertook to simplify and dumb down these and other prayers proclaimed their commitment to make the Book of Common Prayer more “accessible.” This is hogwash. At age ten, or perhaps eight, not a single word in these and other passages was opaque or unknown to me. “All desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid”—it’s the penetrating gaze of the Almighty that is daunting to a young person, not the words. The men (and they were all men at the time) who undertook the revision had secrets they preferred to keep hidden. They wanted a softer God and a less demanding religion.
By the mid-1970s, my teenage years, our local Episcopal Church was using floppy paperback versions of proposed revisions that were eventually consolidated into a new Book of Common Prayer, which received its canonical approval in 1979. It was a prayer book of many choices, including the option of continuing with a slightly bowdlerized version the earlier, euphonious thee-and-thou prayers now denominated “Rite I.” But most, including my church in Baltimore, conformed to the new era and prayed in accord with “Rite II” and its flat voweled “you.”
I long resented the change from prayers in the language of lost nobility that I could imagine myself recovering and inhabiting to something demotic and commonplace, like my banal conversations with friends in high school. But in retrospect, there was something providential at work, for my disappointments prepared me to accept the mediocrity of Catholicism’s post-Vatican II liturgies.
Fr. George Rutler long preceded me in his swim across the Tiber. Lex orandi, lex credendi: The law of prayer is the law of belief. It’s an old Anglican truism, often cited not just to signal the importance of the Book of Common Prayer for Anglican identity, but to fend off criticisms of Anglicanism’s lack of theological and doctrinal clarity and firmness. “But we have the Prayer Book!” exclaims the Anglican apologist. Fr. Rutler entered the Catholic Church in 1979, no doubt seeing that Anglicanism was sailing toward certain shipwreck.
What he possessed in superior foresight was perhaps balanced by the spiritual benefits accruing to my continued membership in the increasingly lamed Episcopal Church. When asked if there was anything he missed about Anglicanism, Fr. Rutler famously quipped, “The Mass in English.”
Catholic liturgy has gotten a bit better in the last decade. A retranslation of the Paul VI liturgy (the Novus Ordo, as it’s known, an inauspicious designation if there ever was one) was brought into use in 2011. A smidgen of dignity was restored and the willful mistranslations (and outright omissions) designed to make Catholicism more congenial to moralistic therapeutic deism were corrected.
Yet one need but attend a traditional Latin Mass, the old rite now called the Extraordinary Form, to see how much has been lost. As was the case in the old thee-and-thou Anglican forms, the prayers of the Latin Mass put God at a distance. He is above, and we are below. The mass is at once an offering up and a calling down, effectuated in prayers that elaborate upon God’s majesty and mercy and our unworthiness and trust, elaborations undertaken in many cycles of repetition. These qualities—the richly described distance and the many avenues of ascent and descent—are not absent from the Novus Ordo. But they are weakened, and I dare say for the same reasons that motivated those who took so much of the spiritual drama out of the Book of Common Prayer, reasons having more to do with clerical unbelief and self-regard rather than the proclaimed rationale of making the Mass more “accessible” to the faithful.
Modernity has been a great challenge to the churches in the West, first as an adversary, and then as an ally in many acts of self-mutilation. The Catholic Church can endure self-harm. I’ve experienced an in-breaking of the sacred at even the most dissolute liturgies, which can be much more sloppily conducted than at even the most progressive and aimless Episcopalian parish. Christ is, of course, always present in the consecrated host. But the spiritual ability to receive him in spite of bad theology and bad liturgy? Perhaps I owe this grace to Anglicanism’s decline. A child of the Book of Common Prayer, I came of age during one of those moments of self-mutilation, a strange time in which a rich inheritance was traded for the pottage of “relevance.” Was I being prepared for the perseverance of faith in the disenchanted world that tempts Christ’s church to strip her altars and ruin her choirs?
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I do not wish to paint a dire picture. The Novus Ordo need not be as insubstantial as the dewfall evoked in Eucharistic Prayer II, the one used almost everywhere because it’s the shortest. My parish in New York uses Eucharistic Prayer I, the Roman Canon that preserves something of the dignity of the old mass, which one senses in the greater intensity of language and recourse to repetition.
In the year before I entered the Catholic Church, I tried to anchor myself more deeply in the Book of Common Prayer. I asked the small group that met for Morning Prayer to use the old thee-and-thou version, saying, “It reminds me of my childhood.” They acquiesced to my wish. Those months were a gift.
May the time come when an elderly Catholic can go to mass and find himself transported to his youth by a priest facing east, whose English-language prayers echo the old patterns of beseeching the Lord our Maker, and giving thanks for the good gifts we receive from his hand.
Sourse: theamericanconservative.com
