“…To Ready Us for Heaven”

The Prayer Book has been revised numerous times since it made its first appearance in 1549. The initial version was revised four times in 120 years. The first American Prayer Book was revised three times more till 1928 (four times, if you count the Book of Common Prayer for Use in the Confederate States of America—which we do, where I’m from).

In all the intervening years and through all its revisions, the Prayer Book retained its essential form, until the radical versions of the 1960s and 70s altered its basic “shape.” It wasn’t simply the “shape,” the “outward and visible sign” of the Prayer Book that changed with those revisions. Its “inward and spiritual grace,” what it was designed to do, was lost. Books of “Common Prayer” still sit in the pews of Episcopal and Anglican Church of Canada parishes, but what those books were meant to do is quickly being lost.

Though many of us use the 1928 American revision of the Book of Common Prayer (there was a proposed but unsuccessful English 1928 Prayer Book, too), the Prayer Book remains an essentially English book. Not merely in its quasi-Shakespearean vocabulary and occasional quaint phrase, but more importantly in its structure and intent. It’s a book designed for use in an English country parish.

In spite of the soaring vaults of Westminster Abbey and the classical columns of St Paul’s Cathedral, the Prayer Book is most at home in a village church. It’s designed for use in a community that lives within the sound of its bell, a community which has celebrated the Eucharist, baptized its babies and buried its dead in cycles of centuries, a community where the gravestones tell of four and five and a dozen generations past. The Prayer Book envisions its users living their lives in close proximity with each other, and all the joys and sorrows that entails.

That doesn’t sound much like us. Americans change residences, on average, 14 times in the course of their lives (I’ve done it for the last time—when the time comes for my next move, they’ll be carrying me out in a box). We change jobs 11 times (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics); the American Society of Genealogists tells us most Americans don’t know the names or birthplaces of our great-grandparents. Over 50% of Americans now living say that they’ve converted from the religion of their parents. None of those statistics, it’s fair to say, are reflective of 16th century English country life.

Still, the Prayer Book can be wonderfully effective in the swirl of 21st century America. One thing its late-medieval view does for us is give us ground. It stabilizes us in an increasingly unstable and swiftly-changing society. Its steady, year-round, unending cycle of worship—Daily Morning and Evening Prayer, Masses every Sunday and Holy Day—together with its sacramental shepherding of the major events of our lives from birth to death, ensure that God is always with us in very obvious ways. That’s one of the basic things the Prayer Book was made to do, and it still does, if we want it to.

The Prayer Book fixes common prayer and the Sacraments in a central place in our lives, but it does much more. It forms in us a fundamental Christian understanding of life, of our society, and of the world. It’s an understanding, not of the 16th century, but reaching back to Jesus Christ Himself. The Offices of Instruction and the Catechism teach us essential truths of the Faith, but the regular use of the Prayer Book, participating in its worship over weeks and years and decades, builds in our souls—almost imperceptibly—an assurance of its truths.

This is the genius of the Book of Common Prayer: it brings the ancient Faith, unchanged and full of grace, to the circumstances and surroundings of our ever-changing lives.

Sadly, some of the fundamental understandings the Prayer Book looks to form in us are slipping away. We no longer live in a world formed by it. Over the next few weeks, we'll look at some of what we're losing, ask if those things should be lost, and why their loss might very well be our loss, too. The Prayer Book isn’t about Shakespearean language, as grand as it is. The Prayer Book forms Christ in us: it’s been handed to us to “ready us for Heaven.”—Fr Gregory Wilcox