This article is based on a sermon first preached at Evensong for the Gloucestershire Branch of the Prayer Book Society in Cirencester, September 2015, and first featured in the most recent edition of The Prayer Book Today, the magazine of the Prayer Book Society.
The Prayer Book and spiritual formation
For many people today, the Book of Common Prayer is, at best, part of our heritage: something from our past with little immediate connection to today. If people are acquainted with it at all, it is primarily through early Sunday morning Communions or through Evensong. The vast majority of Anglican worshippers never use it. The Prayer Book has become a closed book.
And that means the Church of England risks losing touch with one of the foundations of Anglican spirituality. For the Prayer Book was never intended to be simply a book of services. Instead the Prayer Book is concerned with our spiritual formation as disciples of Jesus Christ.
That’s why the Prayer Book makes provision for how Scripture is to be read. That’s why the exhortations on the proper preparation for Holy Communion places stress on being reconciled one with another. That’s why it provides a Catechism, the means whereby the Christian faith was taught and handed on from generation to generation. That’s why the Prayer Book offers prayers for critical moments in our lives – from the safe delivery of a baby to preparation for death. That’s why it gives guidance on the giving of alms and the care of the poor.
Cranmer and his heirs grasped that spirituality is not simply about prayer. Rather Christian spirituality is about living lives orientated towards God, not as an escape from the world, but in order that we may live more fully and authentically in the world. It is in this sense that the Prayer Book is concerned with our spiritual formation, and with giving it form and substance.
The Book of Common Prayer is, then, not simply a collection of liturgies: it is a guide to living out our discipleship. If we are to rediscover and draw on this heritage in ways that are relevant for today, we need to be clear about the role that the Prayer Book has played in giving form and expression to Anglican spirituality in the past. This needs to be done in ways that rescue the Prayer Book from being seen as the special preserve of this or that section of the Church. The spiritual heritage of the Book of Common Prayer belongs to all of us. Indeed its influence spreads far beyond simply the Church of England, not only to other parts of the Anglican Communion but to other denominations and Christian traditions too.
What then, are the hallmarks of Prayer Book spirituality? Let me offer three themes: exploration, transformation and reconciliation.
Exploration
First, exploration. The Prayer Book places great stress on exploring the meaning of our worship and our faith. The opening sections of morning and evening prayer are the classic example of this. ‘Dearly beloved, the scripture moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness’ the introduction famously begins, setting out why we are being invited to make confession of our sins. But it then moves on to explain what else will happen in the service, inviting us to set forth God’s praise, hear God’s holy word and to pray for the needs of body and soul.
This emphasis on instruction and explanation runs throughout the Prayer Book, most notably in the Catechism. It underlines that Anglican spirituality is built on exploring and handing on the faith, it sets value on faith seeking understanding, and on intelligent and informed discipleship. As the concluding part of the baptism service for those ‘of riper years’ puts it:
We yield thee humble thanks, O heavenly Father that thou hast vouchsafed to call us to a knowledge of thy grace, and faith in thee; increase this knowledge and confirm this faith in us evermore.
Prayer Book spirituality commits us to go on exploring the riches of our faith in ways that engage our intellect and develop our knowledge.
Transformation
Secondly, transformation. The Prayer Book has often been criticised for placing too much emphasis on confession – how many sins can one person commit between morning and evening prayer? But that misses the point. The real concern of the Prayer Book is with what the monastic tradition calls ‘conversion of life’ – a constant turning and re-turning to God. The Prayer Book is concerned with our interior transformation as we deepen our relationship with God and then live that out in bringing transformation to the world.
The pattern of daily confession and self-examination is one of the spiritual tools for this interior transformation, but so too is the Prayer Book’s emphasis on soaking ourselves in attentiveness to the Scriptures and the praying of the psalms. Read and used in the context of worship, they are to shape our understanding of ourselves, of God and of the world, renewing our minds and hearts. This emphasis is beautifully captured in the collect for the nineteenth Sunday after Trinity:
O God, for as much as without thee, we are not able to please thee, mercifully grant that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts…
The spirituality of the Prayer Book is a spirituality of interior transformation and renewal.
Reconciliation
And then the third hallmark: an emphasis on reconciliation.
The Victorian theologian F D Maurice, in his classic commentary on the Prayer Book, wrote that it expresses, at every turn, the worship of a community: as the opening responses at morning and evening prayer remind us, we pray together: ‘O Lord, open thou our lips’. The Prayer Book is a stranger to our own age’s emphasis on individualism and the spirituality of ‘me’.
Consequently the spirituality of the Prayer Book is concerned with the right ordering of both church and society, with promoting unity, and with what we nowadays call the ‘common good’. That’s why, for example, the prayers for rain and for good harvests are there – they arise from a recognition of our mutual dependence on each other and the world. That’s why there is a strong emphasis on prayer for the Queen and parliament: good governance and the maintenance of justice matter. That’s why the giving of alms in Communion is not to pay for the upkeep of the church, or even the vicar’s stipend, but is for the relief of the poor: we have duties to each other. Such prayers and directions give expression to the injunction of Jesus to set our minds on God’s kingdom and justice. They remind us that we are called to be not just the Church of England, but a church for England. The spirituality of the Prayer Book commits us to working for reconciliation and the good of all.
So the Prayer Book embodies and provides us with three hallmarks of Anglican spirituality: a commitment to exploring the riches of our faith, a commitment to our own interior transformation, and a commitment to the pursuit of reconciliation and the common good.
The genius of the Prayer Book is that it gives form and content to this spiritual vision. It recognises that how we pray, shapes what we believe, and what we pray and believe shapes how we live.
There is great spiritual wisdom to draw on here. Just as many in the church today are finding inspiration in other patterns of spirituality we inherit from the past, such as the Rule of St Benedict, or the writings of the desert fathers and mothers, so we can also encourage each other, and those who know little or nothing of the Prayer Book itself, to discover afresh the well-springs of Anglican spirituality in ways that speak to our age.