With the Grain of the Prayer Book

In early February 1685, King Charles II fell ill and clergy across the country, perhaps somewhat strangely, began to pray the prayer book service for the Visitation of the Sick as a liturgy for his recovery. The vice chancellor of Oxford, for example, authorized all chapels at the university to use the form for that purpose. A pastoral liturgy designed for a priest visiting a sick person’s bedside was here being used, perhaps with some slight alterations, as a form of public worship. When Charles experienced a partial recovery, the Archbishop of York on February 6 ordered that thanksgiving prayers be inserted into Morning Prayer at York Minster for the king’s recovery. That was to be a unique service of Thanksgiving,. but may not have been used, as the king died that same day.

This is only one example of hundreds of instances in early modern Britain in which the set forms of prayer in the Book of Common Prayer were adapted to meet pastoral needs. Yet we can make three observations. First, the crafting was done to redress gaps in available forms, not to supplant what was there. Second, they were usually set within or drew on the existing material. And finally, and most important, they were crafted with the grain of the prayer book, that is, along the prayer book’s internal theological ethos.

Recently in my work as a pastor, I experienced the need for two different liturgies that are not neatly provided in the Book of Common Prayer (1979). While I could have turned to a flurry of resources both approved and unapproved, or even cooked something up myself, I found there was material in the book that could be used to meet the pastoral need if I could provide or borrow some fittings or structures, so to speak. This allowed me to pray and minister with theological and liturgical consistency. But I also want to highlight the enormous material between the covers of the 1979 prayer book that I suspect many clergy and parishes neither know about nor use.

Several months ago, a woman contacted the church office because her father, well into his 90s, had died. He was tangentially connected to our parish, and she was exploring funeral possibilities. The catch was there were five grown children (who had children and grandchildren) and, having no clear burial plan left by their late father, there was significant disagreement. Eventually — and blessedly before I made any plans — I was informed that the funeral was indefinitely postponed. They simply could not agree.

But I got another phone call. The woman who had initially called me shared with me that her wing of the family (numbering close to 30) had already made plans to come to the area from all over the country on the original date we had discussed. She was hoping that I could offer some sort of service, even though this was clearly not the funeral. She hoped for something to acknowledge his death and make prayers. In other words, she wanted a “not-funeral funeral.”

Probably one of the most unused forms of prayer sits between the Ministration at Time of Death and the Burial rites. There are, indeed, Vigil prayers on pp. 465-66. In 13 years of ordained ministry, I have never used them, nor even known many instances of their use. With the ashes on a pedestal in the crossing, I sat in a chair nearby, not my usual seat in the chancel. To the Vigil prayers I added a time for short informal remembrances, a lesson (1 Cor. 15:51-57), a short homily, the Lord’s Prayer, and a collect for mourners. In other words, I drew on existing materials in the prayer book and what I added was consistent with it. I prayed and ministered with the grain.

Another call was quite different, but wonderfully welcome. A young woman had recently been healed of sickle cell anemia. I had believed this was a lifelong condition, but recent gene therapies have proven nearly miraculous. Family members wanted to give thanks to God for this and asked for not merely prayer, but a full service of thanksgiving. I was delighted to join with them and craft something.

Most services of thanksgiving that I found resembled the Daily Office, but with some subtle changes. What I crafted used Psalm 95, the First Song of Isaiah, and some obvious hymn choices and Scripture lessons about healing and restoration. Following the Lord’s Prayer, we used the Thanksgiving Collect for the Restoration of Health on p. 841. During the prayer I laid on hands and invited the family to do likewise. Then we shifted into the Litany of Thanksgiving on p. 837 with some suitable personal additions.

Here is yet another form of prayer in the 1979 prayer book likely unused by most clergy, or perhaps only used on Thanksgiving Day. The family, being from Ghana originally, came forward to make offerings during a hymn — an act of thanksgiving — rather than passing the alms basins. This, I have learned, is a custom in parts of Africa. The point, however, is that I used what is in the 1979 prayer book and prayed and ministered along its internal logic and ethos.

These services could have easily come from the existing prayer book. When she printed the leaflets, our parish administrator remarked that she hadn’t worked with these services before. She had not realized that I was crafting something. But in truth, I wasn’t really creating anything novel. I was leading worship with the grammar of the Book of Common Prayer (1979).