UNLEARNING WORTHINESS AND THE PRAYER OF HUMBLE ACCESS, PART ONE
Traditional Icon of the Return of the Prodigal Son. Public Domain.
Editor’s Note: This is the first in a two-part series on the Prayer of Humble Access. Check back on Monday to read Part II!
If you want to get Episcopalians fighting and you’re tired of the usual methods of incitement – prayer book revision, communion without baptism, whether to use blue or purple for Advent – just ask them what they think about the Prayer of Humble Access.
If you aren’t familiar with it, the prayer in its current form goes like this:
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 we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.
Thomas Cranmer wrote those words (1) in 1548. Unlike much of the newly reformed Church of England’s liturgy, Cranmer did not adapt this prayer from any existing sources, but to have created it himself, (2) making this supplication one of the first prayers Anglicanism offered to the world. Its words are cherished by Christians the world over; I know parishioners who breathe a sigh of relief when the liturgy includes the Prayer of Humble Access, because it “feels how Communion is supposed to be!” Others take comfort in the beauty of its language which, like so much of the best of the Anglican tradition, manages to be restrained and evocative, powerful and self-effacing, and beautiful but never pretty, all at the same time.
Yet despite the love it evokes, the Prayer of Humble Access attracts frustration and even anger in equal measure. A literary critic I know objects that it clearly references the story of the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7:24-30) while reversing its message: the point of the Gospel story is that the woman is worthy of the crumbs off the Lord’s table, but the supplicant says that they are not worthy. Others object to the foreignness of the language, couched as it is in the Elizabethan norms of Rite I (the prayer does not appear in Rite II liturgies).
But by far the most common frustration with the prayer is its excessive focus on our unworthiness: “We do not presume to come…trusting in our own righteousness…we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table.” It is especially striking that the communicants pray this after having confessed their sins and received absolution. Even after we have our unworthiness absolved, this prayer forces us to remember it! The Prayer of Humble Access seems to its detractors yet another instance of the self-flagellating spirituality that has destroyed many a Christian’s self-esteem by telling them they are worms barely tolerated by God rather than beloved bearers of the divine image. In its focus upon our unworthiness rather than our dignity, many Episcopal converts hear echoes of the theologies of self-hatred they believed they had escaped when they joined Anglicanism.
But what if the Prayer of Humble Access isn’t so obsessed with human unworthiness? What if the harm that it has caused – and I certainly don’t deny it can be interpreted harmfully – results not from its inherent theology, but from a misunderstanding of the relationship between sin and grace? This is the point of view I wish to argue for in this essay. I believe this partly because my own experience of the Prayer of Humble Access has been so different from the way it is commonly portrayed. I love the Prayer of Humble Access precisely because it has encouraged me to stop thinking about my own worthiness or lack thereof, and to focus instead on God’s unchanging benevolence toward me – a benevolence that, the more I think about it, precedes all possible worries about my own righteousness.
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness…
If we are to rethink our relationship to righteousness, it helps to start with the fact that the prayer specifies we are not to trust in it. Cranmer is concerned that we will think that communion is something we are owed, a kind of compensation paid out in exchange for living our ordinary Christian lives in ordinary ways. But the Eucharist is not a wage. It’s a gift, and like all true gifts, there is no way in which God could be obligated to give it to us. In fact, the most notable feature of the Last Supper is the way in which Jesus gives his body and blood regardless of the past and future merits of the disciples. Judas has already betrayed Jesus. Peter is soon to deny him. The beloved disciple will remain at Jesus’ side even unto his death. Yet all three partake equally. The point is not that all the disciples are just as terrible as any other; the point is that all of them, from the seemingly worthy to the clearly unworthy, are invited to partake. For a God who self-identifies as holy and righteous, Jesus just doesn’t care very much about the recipients’ righteousness when he dispenses his graces.
In fact, the more we think about our “worthiness,” the less relevant the concept seems to the spiritual life at all. I’d wager that most of the time, when worried about our own worthiness, are worried about societal expectations of us that have nothing to do with God’s commandments: are we dressed appropriately, have we complimented our superiors without seeming obsequious, have we waited for another person to finish speaking before we speak, are we well-groomed, have we polished our resumes and accomplishments to catch an employer’s eye, are our dating profiles witty and attractive without looking like too much work went into them, do our children’s behaviors represent us well, and on and on and on the list of obligations goes until it has created a burden so heavy that no human being could ever hope to carry alone. As if that was not enough, then we are told we must also evaluate everyone else’s etiquette and then praise or shame them as society’s unwritten rules dictate. Even for people of faith, this societal “righteousness” usually takes up the bulk of our attention. Humans are tribal creatures, after all, and righteousness is often little more than a shibboleth for social acceptability.
How liberating it can be to realize that God simply does not care about any of this! Our access to the body and blood of our Lord is not conditioned on our ability to follow byzantine rules of etiquette. The sort of righteousness in which I am inclined to trust simply doesn’t apply here – and hence I need not fear that I will be rejected for breaking it.
But, of course, some of us have genuinely moral concerns when approaching the table. Even if God doesn’t care about the quality of our grooming or the wittiness of our dating profiles, God does very much care about our character. God has, after all, given us a Law to follow, and woe to us when we break it. If we look closely, however, we soon realize that before the Law could be a source of righteousness, it was an act of grace.
After all, God was under no obligation to make a covenant with any people, to provide us with any set of rules that might guide our conduct and improve our souls. God could have chosen to simply be the intelligent watchmaker of Deism, designing and intricate and beautiful universe and then withdrawing from it at the moment of creation, leaving it to grow and develop unattended. And yet, God chose to offer us the guidance of the Law so that we could become holy.
So while it may seem paradoxical at first, the very opportunity to please or disappoint God is itself an act of grace! For all the terror that the laws of God can (and should) evoke, they only exist because God has freely chosen to destine us for the greatest gift of all: union with the Trinity. Without grace, God wouldn’t even bother to get angry with us for failing to keep the commandments. We would simply be ignored. The fact that this does not happen is a testament to just how manifold and great God’s mercies are.
Well, almost those words. Cranmer’s original version included one additional petition at the end: “that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his Body, and our souls washed through his most precious Blood.” The authors of the 1979 Prayer Book omit this clause due to worries that it could be interpreted as too dualistic – as if the body did one thing for us and the blood another. I follow the current version of the prayer in this article, but my arguments could just as easily apply to the original, since I am concerned about grace and not the particulars of the Eucharistic elements.
Hatchett, Marion J. Commentary on the American Prayer Book. HarperOne, 1995, p. 382.
