Sometimes the poets of the Psalms express this “appetite for God” in visceral terms, evoking a desperate hunger or thirst. Psalm 42, for example, evokes the image of a deer seeking water in the wilderness to quench its thirst:

“Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks,
so longeth my soul after thee, O God.
My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God. (Ps. 42:1–2a)
Or again, the psalmist likens himself to a countryside cracked and pitted by drought:

My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh also longeth after thee,
in a barren and dry land where no water is. (63:2)

Or, even more starkly:

“My soul gasps to you like a thirsty land. (143:6b)

It is astonishingly vivid language. What sort of soul expresses such visceral longing for God? Is it simply a person who happens to be spiritually thirsty? Or perhaps someone in dire straits who is longing for help? Maybe it is someone who had once known a certain intimacy with God and who now longs to experience that sense of closeness again? Maybe it is like a longing for home that is an almost physical feeling in the pit of your stomach? Could it also be, I wonder, a picture of the universal human condition?

“My soul is athirst for God.” It seems to me that this is true of all of us, at all times, whether we are conscious of it or not. You and I are thirsty for God. This is simply what it means to be a creature. Without God, we will die of thirst. Only God can fill our lack. Only God is our life. Sometimes we are more aware of this than other times — as when tragedy strikes or when we know failure or pain — and then we may more earnestly seek God. But whether or not we recognize it, our soul is always thirsty for God. As Augustine prayed in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Sometimes the Psalms express an “appetite for God” in more relational terms, speaking in the voice of someone who longs to be with a dear friend, or lover. They want to be with God. Nothing delights them more. “In thy presence is the fulness of joy,” they say, “and at thy right hand there is pleasure for evermore” (16:12).

Or again:

My soul hath a desire and longing to enter into the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God. (84:2)

One day spent with God is better than a thousand elsewhere (84:10). They want to remain with God, for nothing to separate them. “O knit my heart unto thee,” they cry (86:11). Evelyn Underhill, the saintly Anglican spiritual writer, once had the temerity to write to the Archbishop of Canterbury, reminding him that “God is the interesting thing about religion.” “People are hungry for God,” she insisted. She urged the clergy to remember this and to not act like “consecrated philanthropists,” but to make “Communion with God” their first duty. She called the Church to put nothing before the adoration of God, to worship God with “adoring and disinterested delight.” In “The Parish Priest and the Life of Prayer,” she called priests to live as “one devoted to God, willing and glad to suffer all things for God, penetrated by the attractiveness of God.”

The Psalms often give compellingly expression to this sense of being pierced “by the attractiveness of God.” And Psalm 27 contains my favorite example. The psalmist writes:

One thing have I desired of the Lord, which I will require;
even that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
to behold the fair beauty of the Lord, and to visit his temple. (27:4)

Like Mary of Bethany, who sat at the feet of the Lord Jesus and listened to him, the psalmist has found the “one thing” truly necessary (Luke 10:42). The psalmist wants nothing more than to be where he can continually “behold the fair beauty of the Lord.” He is caught up by “the attractiveness of God.” He burns with a desire to see the Lord’s face, desire which the Lord has awoken within him: “My heart hath talked of thee, Seek ye my face: Thy face, Lord, will I seek.” (27:9)

He has found everything desirable — everything beautiful, everything true, everything good — in God. I am reminded of a passage again from Augustine’s Confessions, one which the Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion has described as “a seduction scene.” Augustine, addressing the Lord in the second person, writes,

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

Notice how emphatically Augustine emphasizes the initiative of God in awakening our desire for him. Our appetite for God is always, already a response to God’s prior action. In this sense, our love for God is always late, always following upon his coming to us, always responsive to his voice, his touch. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

Reading the Psalms can awake within us an appetite for God. Perhaps this is why they have been given to us. Certainly it is something we may rightly, with C.S. Lewis, “hope to be infected by as we read.”

In this second part of my reflections on the Prayer of Humble Access, I want to consider the phrase that was left out of the current American prayer book, namely, the following portion of the conclusion: that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, and our souls washed through his most precious Blood. Let’s call it the “petition for cleansing.” It makes a distinction between the effects of the Body of Christ and the Blood of Christ, connecting the first with the cleansing of the body and the second with the cleansing of the soul.

The liturgical scholar Marion Hatchett dismissed this distinction as “a medieval concept,” but its roots extend down through early Christian teaching, down into the deep soil of Scripture. The fourth-century Latin writer known as the Ambrosiaster, in a passage that influenced medieval theologians, expressed the teaching thus:

… the mystical cup is for the protection of our bodies and souls, because the blood of the Lord has redeemed our blood, that is to say, it has saved the whole human being. The flesh of the Savior is given for the health of our body, but his blood was shed for our soul, as Moses symbolized. For Moses had said: Flesh is offered for the body, but blood is for the soul …” (comment on 1 Corinthians 11:26)

The allusion here appears to be the overall shape of the sacrificial system — in which generally the flesh of sacrificial animals is offered to deal with bodily impurities and their blood is offered to make atonement for sin — rather than to a specific text of Scripture. Yet in the background there is a text of Holy Scripture that specifically relates blood to the soul: “The life [Latin Vulgate: anima, “air, breath, life, soul”] of every creature is its blood” (Lev. 17:14).

With the weight of biblical authority explicitly relating blood to the soul, it was only natural for the Latin tradition to apply this to thinking about the effect of the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ. The obvious correspondence of our bodies to the body of Christ was complemented by relating his blood to our souls. And while it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees, notice how the overall thrust of the argument is to show the reasonableness of claiming that the sacrament is for “the protection of our bodies and souls,” for the salvation of “the whole human being.”

What I love about the petition for cleansing is the way in which, taken as a whole, it acknowledges the redemption of my whole self: the Lord Jesus gave himself to redeem not only my soul, but also my body. To quote William Durand of Mende (c. 1230–96), the great liturgical commentator: “Christ assumed the totality of human nature — namely, a body and soul — so that he could redeem it in its entirety” (Rationale 4.42.1, trans. Thibodeau).

The prayer acknowledges that our whole nature must be cleansed and healed if we are, for evermore, to dwell in Christ, and he in us. It asks that eating the flesh of Jesus and drinking his blood will not leave us as we are. It desires the body and blood of Christ to be the means of our healing, the source of new life. It emphasizes, as it were, the therapeutic nature of the Sacrament, that it is, as Ignatius of Antioch put it, “the medicine of immortality, the antidote we take in order not to die but to live forever in Jesus Christ” (Eph. 20:2). Holy Communion is a foretaste of the resurrection of the dead. As our Lord himself promises, “Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever” (John 6:51), and again, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day” (John 6:54).

Notice, too, how the petition for cleansing recalls the Collect for Purity, in which we pray: “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.” There, at the beginning of the liturgy, we asked for cleansing; here, just as we approach its consummation in Communion, we ask again to be made clean, to be cleansed and sanctified through and through (cf. 1 Thess. 5:23). We pray that our whole selves — our souls and bodies — might be made fit for union with the Lord of all.

The mercy of the Lord extends beyond mere acceptance; it involves our transformation into the likeness of the Lord Jesus. Our merciful Lord, “in his manifold and great mercies,” makes us fit to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4), to be made like God. This is the great theme of patristic theology, which the formula of St. Athanasius expresses so cogently: “For [the Word of God] was incarnate that we might be made god” (On the Incarnation, 54, trans. Behr). And it seems to me that this theme echoes in our prayer: 

Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, and our souls washed through his most precious Blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.

The Prayer of Humble Access: The Case of a Missing Phrase

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, and our souls washed through his most precious Blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.

This prayer has led something of a nomadic existence, moving from place to place in the liturgy. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer composed it for his 1548 Order of the Communion — the first (incomplete) Communion service in English. Cranmer designed the Order (which consisted of exhortations, general confession, absolution, comfortable words, and what would become the Prayer of Humble Access) to be inserted into the Latin Mass after the priest’s Communion and before the Communion of the laity. The Prayer of Humble Access entered the first Book of Common Prayer (1549) in a similar place, namely, after the canon, before Communion. But in the 1552 Prayer Book, Cranmer placed the prayer before the prayer of consecration, following the Sanctus — which is where it has remained in the English prayer book (1662). It remained in this same place in the first editions of the American prayer book (1789 and 1892). But in the 1928 American revision, it moved back to its approximate location in 1549 (immediately before Communion)—and it is found in roughly the same spot in the Rite I service in the 1979 BCP.

While Cranmer’s second placement of the prayer has its merits (perhaps especially because the movement from the Sanctus to the Prayer of Humble Access parallels the response of the prophet to his vision of the thrice-holy LORD in Isaiah 6), I prefer its original location as a Communion devotion, simply because this is where I know it.

What of the prayer itself? The Prayer of Humble Access is Cranmer’s own composition. Characteristically, he makes good use of biblical language and draws from the riches of the Church’s historical liturgies. (More on these below.) Notice, first, the balance of the prayer; it divides perfectly into two halves of 53 words. Each half is beautifully proportioned. The first half is made up of two parallel thoughts, which, as in the psalms, build upon each other:

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness,
but in thy manifold and great mercies. [25 words]

We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table.
But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy. [28 words]

The second half is similarly balanced, although weighted toward the final clause:

Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ,
and to drink his blood, [21 words]

that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body,
and our souls washed through his most precious Blood, [20 words]

and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. [12 words]

Thus, in the structure of the prayer, our unworthiness is counterbalanced (and subsumed) by our merciful Lord, who, through his “manifold and great mercies,” gives himself to us, to the end that “we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.”

Let’s look more closely at the language of the prayer, considering it line by line.

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies.

This sentence follows closely the structure and language of a prayer of the prophet Daniel: “We do not cast our prayers before thee in our own righteousness, no: but only in thy great mercies” (Dan 9:18, Great Bible, 1539, modern spelling). Cranmer basically quotes this, adding manifold for amplification. Looking at the full prayer in Daniel reveals further resonances with Cranmer’s prayer. For example, Daniel prays, “O Lord, righteousness belongeth unto thee, unto us pertaineth nothing but open shame” (9:7). And again, “Unto thee, O Lord our God, pertaineth mercy and forgiveness” (9:9). Cranmer follows Daniel in basing his plea on the character of the merciful Lord.

We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table.

The imagery of gathering up crumbs from under a table comes from the Gospel story of the Syrophoenician (Canaanite) Woman (Matt. 15:21–28; Mark 7:24–30). Traveling near Tyre and Sidon — important centers of the Phoenicians, the people renowned in antiquity as seafarers and traders — Jesus encounters a Phoenician woman, who begs him to heal her daughter, who has an unclean spirit. Jesus rebuffs her, first with silence, and then (apparently) harshly, saying to her: “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs” (Mark 7:27). To this, the woman responds, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (Mark 7:28). (Or, as Matthew has it: “Yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table” [Matt. 15:27]). And Jesus says to her, “For this saying you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter” (Mark 7:29).

Luther says that the woman “catches Christ in his own words”:

He compares her to a dog, she concedes it, and asks nothing more than that he let her be a dog, as he himself judged her to be. Where will Christ now take refuge? He is caught. Truly, people let the dog have the crumbs under the table; it is entitled to that. […] Now whoever understands here the actions of this poor woman and catches God in his own judgment, and says: Lord, it is true, I am a sinner and not worthy of thy grace; but still thou hast promised sinners forgiveness, and thou art come not to call the righteous, but … ‘to save sinners’ [1 Tim. 1:15]. Behold, then must God according to his own judgment have mercy upon us. (Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent, Church Postil, [WA 17/2])

Likewise, Cranmer makes the woman’s words his own. He invites us to approach our Lord alongside this Gentile woman, to share in her faith, to take her words on our lips, remembering that we “who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ” (Eph. 2:13).

But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy.

This sentence belongs with the previous one and completes its thought. Its language comes from a collect in the Gregorian Sacramentary, first translated by Cranmer for his 1544 Litany:

O God, whose nature and property is ever to have mercy and to forgive; Receive our humble petitions; and though we be tied and bound with the chain of our sins, yet let the pitifulness of thy great mercy loose us; for the honour of Jesus Christ, our Mediator and Advocate. Amen.

I know this prayer from the Ash Wednesday service in the 1928 American prayer book, and I find it deeply moving to pray in that context. Both prayers name the Lord as having the “property” of always having mercy. Which is to say that it is utterly characteristic of the Lord to have mercy; the Lord just is merciful. It belongs to the very nature of God to be merciful. It is who God is.

Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood … that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.

The second half of the Prayer of Humble Access draws on Christ’s great Bread of Life discourse in the Gospel of John:

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. (John 6:53–56)

This text, of course, is central for the Church’s teaching about Holy Communion. And it is a text that Cranmer draws on elsewhere. For example, in his Exhortation, he writes of the great benefit that we receive, “if with a truly penitent heart and lively faith we receive this holy Sacrament”: “for then we spiritually eat the Flesh of Christ, and drink his Blood; then we dwell in Christ, and Christ in us; we be made one with Christ, and Christ with us.”

This, in the end, is where the Prayer of Humble Access leads: to union with Christ. This is the desideratum, the end that we seek, in coming to the Table of our merciful Lord. Or, perhaps it would be better — and more true to the spirit of Cranmer’s prayer — to say that this is why our Lord brings us to his banquet and bids us welcome at his Table: that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.

To begin, let’s distinguish between what we might call active waiting and passive waiting. We do not wait for the Lord’s coming passively, as we might wait in a long line, or for a delayed flight, or in a traffic jam, or for the spinning wheel on your computer screen, or for morning during a sleepless night.. Instead, our waiting for the Lord’s return is active, a waiting of eager anticipation and preparing: like a child counting down the days to a birthday, or parents waiting for the birth of a child, or waiting for the arrival of someone you love very much.

That said, we do often experience waiting for our Lord as a lack of something desperately needed. This occurs when we are vividly aware of the brokenness of the world, of the damage and devastation of sin — the conflicts in the Holy Land and Ukraine, the persistence of poverty and injustice, the poverty of our politics, the pain and sickness and suffering in the lives of our loved ones — or our own. It is when we are most aware of such suffering that we can learn to long especially keenly for our Lord to come and set things right. Then we cry out, with the suffering church throughout time and around the world, “How long, O Lord? Thy kingdom come, thy will be done! Come, Lord Jesus!” (Ps. 13:1; Rev. 22:20).

Notice, though, that such cries of lament are a form of active waiting. To cry out How long, O Lord? is a form of hope, borne of the conviction that Christ will come again and make all things new; it is an act of faith. One of the most powerful expressions of this is found in Psalm 130. Listen to what the psalmist says:

Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord!
Lord, hear my voice!

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning.

O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and with him is plenteous redemption.
And he will redeem Israel
from all his iniquities. (Ps. 130:1, 2, 5–8)

The figure of the watchman suggests the seriousness and consequence of the Christian life. The work of a watchman is a matter of life and death. A watchman cannot afford to be complacent. Neither can you. Neither can I.

Thomas Merton ends his book The Sign of Jonas with a beautiful epilogue (“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”). Merton narrates an evening he served on fire watch in his monastery, the Abbey of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky. He describes how, as the other monks went to bed, he takes the watchman’s sneakers and flashlight and keys, as well as a heavy clock that he carries on a strap over his shoulder. He starts in the pitch blackness of the cellar and works his way methodically through every passage of the monastery: through the kitchens and the refectory and scriptorium, past the sleeping monks in their cells, down the empty hallways of the old guesthouse, through the mysterious shadows and sounds of the empty church, up “the trembling, twisted stair into the belfry,” and then out through a door that opens to the stars, out onto the roof of the monastery, having satisfied himself “that there is no fire in the tower, which would flare like a great torch and take the whole abbey up with it in twenty minutes.”

At the same time, Merton’s narrative traces a spiritual journey, in which his exploration of the monastery is also a searching of his life, a questioning of his monastic vocation, an examination of the nooks and crannies of his soul. As he puts it:

The fire watch is an examination of conscience in which your task as watchman suddenly appears in its true light: a pretext devised by God to isolate you, and to search your soul with lamps and questions, in the heart of darkness.

Merton’s fire watch deepens our sense of what it means to keep watch. Let me put it this way: Think of yourself as a watchman, like Thomas Merton looking for fire in his monastery, discovering God searching your soul “with lamps and questions.” Go on fire watch in the house of your soul. Examine your conscience. Search for exposed wires and faulty fuse boxes. Go over every aspect of your life to be sure there is no sin smoldering away, hidden in the dark. When you find fire, do not delay in putting it out. You would not delay if you smelled smoke in your home, would you?

The consequences of complacency to sin are far more severe. Now is the time to change your life. Repent. Turn from your sin, and turn back to your Lord, “who knows the secrets of every heart” (Ps. 44:21), to whom “every one of us shall give account of himself” (Rom. 14:12). Say with the psalmist,

Search me out, O God, and know my heart;
try me and know my restless thoughts.
Look well whether there be any wickedness in me
and lead me in the way that is everlasting. (Ps. 139:22–23, 1979 BCP)

“Watch ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know now then the time is.” Thus far, we have emphasized the seriousness and consequence of keeping watch. But, without diminishing anything I have just said, I want to end, as it were, with a change of key, returning to the image of waiting and watching for the arrival of someone you love very much. We must not forget that the Master for whose coming we are to remain vigilant is none other than our good Lord, who not only calls us servants, but also friends. We ought not to fear or dread his coming, but to watch and wait for our dear Lord, as we would watch and wait for our most Beloved; to long for and prepare for his coming, as you would if you were in love. Think of the experience of being in love, how it shapes your whole life: how you spend your time, how you spend your money, what you want and what you fear, your sorrows and your joys, all your decisions and everything you do.[1]

Just so, our Lord calls us to live our whole lives, waiting and watching for his coming, not only as vigilant servants, but also as those who are in love with God.

[1] Following closely Bernard Lonergan and Joe Whelan, S.J., as quoted in Richard G. Malloy, “What Lonergan (and Arrupe) can teach us about God, love, and being human,” America: The Jesuit Review (Dec. 23, 2019).

This summer, the book caught my attention — I use the phrase deliberately. It was almost as if the book was lying in wait for me, ready to catch me unawares, waiting for me like a fisherman’s lure. I was on a retreat at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico (go there someday if you are able), and I was browsing the bookshelves in the guesthouse when I came across this book at random (but I don’t think there was anything random about it). It caught my eye, and I started reading — and I found myself hearing exactly what my soul most needed to hear at that moment.

This little experience of mine connects with a central theme of the book. “The life which Christ brings us,” Tugwell says, “the life of fellowship with God, does not consist in our drawing God into our world, but in his drawing us into his world.” Prayer is fundamentally about a relationship with God; it is (as Clement of Alexandria put it) “keeping company with God.” And Tugwell emphasizes that keeping company with the living God is not something that happens on our terms: “It is always God who calls men to keep company with him, never the other way about,” he says.

What Tugwell says about reading the Bible makes his point concrete. He commends the practice of reading Scripture with the imaginative liberty of free association. Here’s a taste of what he says:

Provided there is not too much deliberate control, we may find ourselves getting tremendously involved, not in scientific exegesis, but in a living relationship with the living Word. It may convict us, humble us, excite us, challenge us, move us to tears of joy or despair or contrition … the important thing is that it should get into us, get under our skin, and that it should engage us at a level deeper than that of our own deliberate choice.

After all, God’s word is addressed to us as we really are, not as we like to present ourselves; he speaks to our heart, not to our mask. It is not only that little bit of us which we have, as it were, colonized and made subject, that is involved in the Christian enterprise. It is the whole man.

[…] Then our Lord can really get hold of us, below the level of our deliberate control. He can get us hooked—he is, after all, a fisherman—so that, even though we may kick and scream and try to get away, he will at the end be able to land us safely at his feet.

As this quotation suggests, Tugwell is not focused on prayer in a narrow sense, but on the life of faith as a whole. Throughout, he draws on the riches of the Christian tradition to illuminate the various aspects of a life lived in company with God. He discusses a wide range of topics in ascetical theology, including, among others, the unselfconsciousness of true goodness (He asks: “Why should we ever want to be in a position where we can be sure of our own goodness?”) and the right use of anger (by way of a stimulating discussion of the psalm text, “Be angry and do not sin”).

For me, the most moving part of the book is Tugwell’s discussion of what he calls “the doctrine of the entire sufficiency of God.” In coming to us in the humility of the Incarnation, Tugwell says, Jesus is essentially “giving himself, giving his own life, giving his own spirit”:

That is the gift he has to give us. If we forget that, if we forget the poverty of God, then we shall keep demanding everything except the one thing that he has got to give us … Whatever our problem is, whatever the anxiety we bring to the Lord, he has got only one thing to say, only one answer: himself.

And again:

God has only the one thing to say, which is himself, he has only the one thing to give, which is himself. And he invites us to hear that Word, to treasure it in our hearts and find in it the source of all our bliss. He wants us, quite precisely, to enter into the joy of our Lord.

I hope these passages are enough to convince you of the power of this little book. I commend it to you for spiritual reading. For my part, I think this book will stay with me for the rest of my life.