The Book of Common Prayer

As everyone who knows me or reads this blog is aware, two of my spiritual, literary mentors are C. S. Lewis and Sheldon Vanauken. Both were shaped in their spiritual lives by the Book of Common Prayer and used the Prayer Book daily in their devotional lives. Through them, in recent years, I have been led to a use of the Prayer Book in my own devotional life.

C. S. Lewis had this to say about the benefits of what he called a "ready-made" form of prayer, including that from the Book of Common Prayer....

First, it keeps me in touch with "sound doctrine". Left to oneself, one could easily slide away from "the faith once given" into a phantom called "my religion".

Secondly, it reminds me "what things I ought to ask" (perhaps especially when I am praying for other people). The crisis of the present moment, like the nearest telegraph-post, will always loom largest. Isn't there a danger that our great, permanent, objective necessities--often more important--may get crowded out? By the way, that's another thing to be avoided in a revised Prayer Book. "Contemporary problems" may claim an undue share. And the more "up to date" the Book is, the sooner it will be dated.

Finally, they provide an element of the ceremonial. On your view, that is just what we don't want. On mine, it is part of what we want. I see what you mean when you say that using ready-made prayers would be like "making love to your own wife out of Petrarch or Donne". (Incidentally might you not quote them--to such a literary wife as Betty?) The parallel won't do.

I fully agree that the relationship between God and a man is more private and intimate than any possible relation between two fellow creatures. Yes, but at the same time there is, in another way, a greater distance between the participants. We are approaching--well I won't say "the Wholly Other", for I suspect that is meaningless, but the Unimaginably and Insupportably Other. We ought to be--sometimes I hope one is--simultaneously aware of close proximity and infinite distance. You make things far too snug and confiding. Your erotic analogy needs to be supplemented by "I fell at His feet as one dead." (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Letter 2)

Tomorrow I will share something about Sheldon Vanauken and The Book of Common Prayer that you may find helpful....

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Will Vaus

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