THE COMFORTABLE “WE” OF PRAYER BOOK LITURGY
Homeless individuals sleeping in St. Boniface Cathedral. Photo courtesy of U.S. Catholic.
I remember a Sunday, long ago, when a church member stood before the congregation to ask members to call our elected officials to advocate for those who use food stamps. It was a worthy cause - but I squirmed with discomfort. Although the speaker described food stamp users as “them,” a population out there somewhere in need of “our” support and advocacy, I knew we had at least one member in the pews that day who used food stamps sometimes. And yet the speaker’s assumption - that everyone gathered for Episcopal worship is at least moderately affluent - wasn’t strange at all. In fact, it’s an assumption the Book of Common Prayer makes, over and over again.
Anglican worship is founded on the assumption - often stated as a conviction - that liturgy forms us. If we do these things and say these words, over and over again, week after week, year after year, then one result is that our minds and hearts and consciences are shaped by those words and actions, and slowly we become more fully the people God calls us to be - both individually and as a body. At least, that’s the best-case scenario.
In a thought-provoking essay called “Worship, Forming and Deforming,” Juan Oliver, custodian of the Book of Common Prayer, writes, “Liturgical meaning is a connection that we find between the liturgical action and our lives.” (1) If liturgical words and actions are set in an idiom that we cannot recognize or understand - or, worse, that expresses something at odds with what we believe and mean to say about God, church, and world - then liturgy may fail to form or even malform believers. Ian Lasch’s essay on a particular phrase from Prayer C and Jacob May’s essay on the implications of prayer book language about healing, health, and “usefulness” offer two fine examples of how the received language of our worship may carry meanings that we do not intend and would not choose.
I propose that another - and pervasive - issue is the Book of Common Prayer’s consistent assumption that the community gathered for prayer is healthy, happy, and financially secure. And yes, that’s a lot to pile together, but I’m following the Prayer Book’s lead here, as illness, suffering, and poverty are often mentioned in the same breath, with old age sometimes thrown in for good measure.
Let’s start with a particularly egregious example - Prayer #35 from the Prayers and Thanksgivings section (page 826): “Almighty and most merciful God, we remember before you all poor and neglected persons whom it would be easy for us to forget: the homeless and the destitute, the old and the sick, and all who have none to care for them.” I suspect every Episcopal congregation includes people who are old, sick, alone, and/or poor, at a minimum. Some congregations also count unhoused people among their members. Yet this prayer is very clearly in the voice of an us that excludes those kinds of people - so thoroughly that the we of the prayer is in danger of forgetting them! The us of this prayer is cluelessly comfortable, detached from any struggle or suffering, or even the aging process.
This mindset shows up in more familiar terrain as well. Consider the Prayer Book forms for the Prayers of the People (pages 383-393). Notice the use of the words those and they. Form II reads, “I ask your prayers for the poor, the sick, the hungry, the oppressed, and those in prison. Pray for those in any need or trouble.” Form III is similar: “Have compassion on those who suffer from any grief or trouble, that they may be delivered from their distress.” Form IV elaborates a bit: “Comfort and heal all those who suffer in body, mind, or spirit; give them courage and hope in their troubles, and bring them the joy of your salvation.” (Neither Form III nor IV explicitly mention the poor; apparently poverty counts as a “trouble.”) Form V has a bidding for “the poor, the persecuted, the sick, and all who suffer… that they may be relieved and protected” - immediately followed by a separate bidding to pray for this congregation.
The words those and they place a group at a distance, grammatically speaking. If we meant otherwise, we’d use words like these and we. It’s possible to read the those and they against the grain, as open to including those among the praying body - but it’s a stretch. A plain-sense reading of the texts quoted above locates those living with poverty, need, illness, or suffering elsewhere, and implicitly defines the church as an assembly of the healthy and comfortable. Is it reasonable to ask those who may already feel themselves outside the normative we of Episcopal worship to do the grammatical and emotional work of finding a way to pray these texts?
The biddings quoted above are lovely in syntax and intention, but fail in their impact. Form VI offers a ready alternative: “For all who are in danger, sorrow, or any kind of trouble…” The gracious all of Form VI feels so much easier to pray, for me - reaching out its grammatical arms to encompass near and far. What if Form II invited prayer for all in any need or trouble?
We use our own pattern for the Prayers of the People in my parish. A couple of years ago someone asked me whether it was alright to pray for themselves when we get to the bidding where we invite prayers for those going through difficult times. Now we pray, “Let us pray for those in any need or trouble, especially those on our parish prayer list: …. You are invited to name others in need of prayer, and to hold up your own struggles to the light of God’s love.” Intercession is important, but so is feeling free to name our own brokenness and need before God - and, if we so choose, before our faith community.
Listen: I’m blessed, lucky, comfortable, however you want to slice it. I’ve always had enough, materially speaking. I haven’t yet lost any of my dearest ones. I’m more or less healthy, and not yet old. And yet there are days when even I have a hard time inhabiting the “us” of Episcopal liturgy.
I’m not proposing that our shared prayers should call out those in the worshiping congregation who might count themselves among the sick, the old, the poor, or the suffering. I’d simply like to see our common language of prayer - the authorized liturgies widely used across the church - acknowledge the simple and crucial truth that a high percentage of those gathered for worship at any given service can likely check one or more of those boxes. Having moments in worship when our liturgical texts tell some among us that we are not fully part of the worshipping body - that, implicitly, we don’t belong here - inhibits the capacity of the liturgy to do its work within and among us and form us as God’s people.
A core part of Jesus’ teaching and witness is that God has a special concern for the poor, the sick, and the suffering. How exactly the ‘we’ of much of Episcopal worship ended up so far away from the “we” of Jesus’ first followers - how the voice of the Book of Common Prayer became unselfconsciously the voice of privilege and comfort - is an important question. But more important is that history does not - must not - bind us. What we have received, we can revise and renew.
Oliver, J., 2010. Worship, Forming, and Deforming. Worship-Shaped Life: Liturgical Formation and the People of God, pp.1-25.
