The Prayer Book is a treasury of words and phrases that are still for countless English-speaking people the nearest you can come to an adequate language for the mysteries of faith. It gives us words that say where and who we are before God: 'we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep', 'we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table', but also, 'we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope of the everlasting kingdom'. It gives us words for God that hold on to the paradoxes we can't avoid: 'God... who art always more ready to hear than we to pray,' 'who declarest thy almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity, 'whose property is always to have mercy.' A treasury of words for God – but also a source of vision for an entire society: 'Give us grace seriously to lay heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions'; 'If ye shall perceive your offences to be such as are not only against God but also against your neighbours; then ye shall reconcile yourselves unto them; being ready to make restitution'.
The world has changed, the very rhythms of our speech have changed, our society is irreversibly more plural, and we have – with varying degrees of reluctance – found other and usually less resonant ways of talking to God and identifying who we are in his presence. If we used only the Prayer Book these days we'd risk confusing the strangeness of the mysteries of faith with the strangeness of antique and lovely language. But we're much the poorer for forgetting it and pushing it to the margins as much as we often do in the Church.
This is one of the reasons I love the Prayer Book. The language may be difficult and dated, but for myself, at least, it has a way of putting into words things I sometimes have trouble expressing. There is a challenge – a good challenge – in wrestling with the phrases and thoughts, one that will draw you deeper in the mysteries of faith and the wonders of God.
We do ourselves a great disservice when we cast off as irrelevant those things which require some work to understand. In the case of the Prayer Book, we miss out on some of the richest prayers and words of worship, and some of the most profound ways of expressing the timeless truths of the Christian faith.
Many biographies of Martin Luther contain the story of when he froze at the altar offering a prayer at his first mass. He later recounted,
With what tongue shall I address such majesty, seeing that all men ought to tremble in the presence of even an earthly prince? Who am I, that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine Majesty? The angels surround Him. At His nod the earth trembles. And shall I, a miserable little pygmy, say 'I want this, I ask for that'? For I am dust and ashes and full of sin and I am speaking to the living, eternal, and true God.
This recollection allows us to observe in the young Luther a limited grasp of the character of God and our relation to him. He certainly had a strong sense of God's majesty and approached him with a deep sense of reverence and fear. But it is clear that he did not yet understand the work of Christ, which enables believers to "draw near to God with a sincere heart and full assurance of faith" (Heb. 10:22). God is great to be feared, but he is also a loving Father who invites us to draw near to him.
Tracing the development of his thinking on prayer is quite interesting. Later in life, he would come to treasure prayer so much that he is reported to have spent three hours each day praying. One of his students, during the famous Table Talk sessions, recorded Luther saying,
O how great and upright and godly Christian’s prayer is! how powerful with God; that a poor human creature should speak with God’s high majesty in heaven, and not be affrighted, but, on the contrary, knoweth that God smileth upon him for Christ’s sake, his dearly beloved Son. The heart and conscience, in this act of praying, must not fly and recoil backwards by reason of our sins and unworthiness, and must not stand in doubt, nor be scared away.
Notice Luther's shift in perspective here. Where at first the majesty of God caused him to feel unworthy, now he marvels that we should not be scared away by this. He himself wrote,
We pray after all because we are unworthy to pray. The very fact that we are unworthy and that we dare to pray confidently, trusting only in the faithfulness of God, makes us worthy to pray and to have our prayer answered... Your worthiness does not help you; and your unworthiness does not hinder you. Mistrust condemns you; but confidence makes you worthy and upholds you.
Of course, there is much for us to learn from Luther's understanding of prayer. His transparency is good for us to see because many of us find our understanding of prayer developing on the same trajectory as Luther's. We might begin by trembling before our awesome God, but as we come to understand who he is and what Christ has done in reconciling us to him, we come to recognise the intimate relationship we can have with God. And in time we come to realise what a treasure it is to be able to come before a holy and righteous God with such confidence in his love for us, knowing that he hears and answers our prayers.
Discussing Christ's office of Priest in one of the essays in Knots Untied, the late-19th century bishop, J.C. Ryle, offers these words of encouragement and hope to those who may wonder about the efficacy of prayer:
We need not doubt that Christ, as our Priest, presents the prayers and services of His people before God, and obtains for them hearing, acceptance, and favour... This is a great mystery, no doubt, but one full of consolation. It is hard at any time to understand how any word or deed of sinful creatures like us can ever come into the presence of God, or do us any good. But the Priesthood of Christ explains all. Placed in His hands and endorsed by Him, our petitions, like bank-notes duly signed, obtain a value which they have not in themselves. A young Christian once said to an old one, 'My prayers are so poor and weak, that I cannot think they are of any use.' The old Christian replied, with deep wisdom, 'Only place them in Christ's hands, and He makes them look so different in heaven that you would hardly know them again.'
What joy we have with Christ as our Priest. And more, what comfort we have too from Paul's words in Romans, that not only Christ, but also the Spirit comes to our aid in prayer: 'We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will' (Romans 8:26-27).
I grew up (and largely remain in, as this is characteristic of large swathes of evangelicalism) a tradition that placed a high value on a person's ability to pray on the spot. A sign of spiritual maturity was that you could say something unique and profound every time you prayed, even if the prayers often became tediously verbose.
Honestly, I still feel a tinge of guilt when I am fumbling for words as I pray. So the other day when I picked up N. T. Wright's recent book, Simply Christian, I felt a great deal of comfort in reading these words.
There's nothing wrong with having a form of words composed by somebody else. Indeed, there's probably something wrong with not using such a form. Some Christians, some of the time, can sustain a life of prayer entirely out of their own internal resources, just as there are hardy mountaineers (I've met one) who can walk the Scottish highlands in their bare feet. Most of us need boots; not because we don't want to do the walking ourselves, but because we do...There is nothing wrong, nothing sub-Christian...about using words, set forms, prayers, and sequences of prayers written by other people in other centuries. Indeed, the idea that I must always find my own words, that I must generate my own devotion from scratch every morning, that unless I think of new words I must be spiritually lazy or deficient—that has the all-to-familiar sign of human pride, of 'doing it my way': of, yes, works-righteousness. Good liturgy—other people's prayers, whether for corporate or individual use—can be, should be, a sign and means of grace, an occasion of humility (accepting that someone else has said, better than I can, what I deeply want to express) and gratitude. How many times have I been grateful, faced with nightfalls both metaphorical and literal, for the old Anglican prayer which runs,Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Using formed prayers is relatively new to me, and at times I feel awkward trying to pray the words. The more I do it, though, the more I am learning to understand what Wright is saying here. More significantly, I'm learning to cherish the resultant intimate connection with the body of Christ that transcends space and time, and to mine the treasures of wisdom and devotion which they left us.
I hope that one day some of the wisdom Fr. Stephen posts on his blog will be turned into a book. To have a book on my shelf that says things like this would be great:
I have often read about the 'habit of prayer.' The one problem with this description is that it can be seen as an activity that we ought to do often, when prayer is, in fact, a state of being in which we should dwell constantly. We are not ever truly ourselves when we are not in prayer.
Many biographies of Martin Luther contain the story of when he froze at the altar offering a prayer at his first mass. He later recounted,
