A NOTE FOR THOSE WHO PRAY WITH US

Why We Use This Book

A short answer for anyone who has wondered, and a longer one for anyone who wants it.

Most people who love a prayer book have never argued about one. They learned it by hearing it, they say it without looking down, and the phrases surface on their own at a graveside or in the middle of a bad night. That is the ordinary and proper way to hold a book of common prayer, and nothing on this page is meant to disturb it.

But people do ask. Usually the question arrives sideways — a visit to another parish where the words were not the same, a relative wanting to know why we are not in the church we used to be in, a newcomer who has heard the year 1928 said as though it settled something. What follows is an answer for those moments.

What the book is

The Book of Common Prayer is not a book about worship. It is the worship itself, set down in full, so that everyone in the room has the same words in front of them and nobody has to wonder what is coming next. That was the point of it from the beginning: one book, in the common tongue, containing the whole life of a Christian — morning and evening prayer, the Communion, baptism, marriage, the visitation of the sick, the burial of the dead, and the Psalms to carry all of it.

It is common in the older sense of that word. Not ordinary, but shared. The priest is saying what you are saying.

Why this one

Three plain reasons, and none of them is that older is automatically better.

It has been tested by use. The prayers in this book were not composed last year by a committee hoping they would wear well. Most of them have been said aloud by English-speaking Christians for four hundred years, and some are far older than that in Latin. Language that has survived that much repetition has survived a hard test. It does not go stale, and it does not embarrass you when you are in trouble.

It holds together. The offices, the propers for each Sunday, the Psalter and the occasional offices are one fabric, not a shelf of separate resources. The collect you hear on a given Sunday belongs with the epistle and gospel appointed for that day, and the whole year moves through the life of Christ in an order that teaches by its shape as much as by its words. Once you have prayed a year of it, you have been taught a great deal without being lectured at once.

It is the book we learned to pray. That is not a small reason and it should not be dressed up as a small reason. A congregation is not a committee. What it can say together, from memory, in grief and in gladness, is a real thing about it — and a book that has been prayed for a century by people who would not give it up has a claim that no vote can create and no vote can cancel.

What you will hear here

The service is the book. It is said plainly, in the order the book sets down, with the ancient introits and their proper psalms restored at the beginning of the Communion — these are very old, and they were part of the Sunday propers long before the Prayer Book existed. There is no ceremonial that the book does not ask for. The intention is that attention should rest on what is being said and done rather than on the manner of doing it.

If you have worshipped where the ceremonial is fuller, you will find this straighter. If you have worshipped where it is plainer still, you will find the introits unfamiliar and everything else recognisable.

Why it is not the same everywhere

This is worth saying plainly, because it puzzles people who assume that a common prayer book ought to produce identical services.

It never has, and it was never meant to. The Articles of Religion printed at the back of your own Prayer Book say outright that traditions and ceremonies need not be in all places one, or utterly alike — that they have always differed, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times and men's manners. The Preface to the American Book, on its opening page, calls it a most invaluable part of Christian liberty that different forms and usages may be allowed without offence, provided the substance of the Faith be kept entire.

Both passages give the same reason for the liberty, and it is not convenience or taste. It is that all things be done to edifying — that worship be ordered in the way that actually builds up the people who are in that room. A congregation of two hundred with a choir and a congregation of a dozen without one are not obliged to do the same things, and neither is failing.

What does not vary is the book. The words of the service, and the frame and order of it, are the common possession; how a particular church sings, kneels, processes or keeps silence is its own to settle. So if you visit another parish using this same Prayer Book and find that it looks different from this one, you have not found an error. You have found what the Church has always allowed.