+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Despite loving reading, I often avoid reading collections of writers’ correspondence, and sometimes I avoid looking too much into their biographies, lest I be prejudiced when it comes to their novels and stories. That said, occasionally I do come upon a letter which illuminates a literary figure, and I have an all-time favorite. It was written by W.H. Auden to his priest, the Rector of St. Mark’s in the Bowery in New York. The letter opens thusly:
Dear Father Allen,
Have you gone stark raving mad?
Having been a Rector for over a decade-and-a-half I have received some correspondence which might be deemed confrontational, but never anything quite that forceful.
Auden was writing sometime in the early 1970s, a time of liturgical experimentation, prompted in large part by both the desire to conform the worship of the church more closely to ancient texts which had been rediscovered within the preceding century and the desire to translate the words and ideas of church services into a more contemporary English. The Roman Catholics were first to the party, as they had the furthest to go since in the West the Mass had been said exclusively in Latin up until the 1960s, but our own “flavor” of Christianity was close behind.
Auden was reacting to what are known as “trial use” liturgies, meant to test forms and language during the process of Prayer Book revision–in this case, the process which eventually replaced the 1928 Book of Common Prayer with our current, 1979 edition. Needless to say, Auden was against this, admittedly for aesthetic rather than theological reasons. The best line in the letter reads as follows: “I implore you by the bowels of Christ to stick to Cranmer and King James!” (Cranmer was the primary author of the first two editions of the Book of Common Prayer, those of 1549 and 1552, and, of course by “King James” he means the Authorized Version of the Bible.) Even old Auden eventually moderated on this point; he was instrumental in the translation of the Psalms which we still use, and–in my humble opinion–helped them maintain a degree of sonority despite being in a more “accessible” idiom.
It will not surprise those who know me, that my feeling hew rather closer to Auden’s than to the proponents (or perpetrators) of “liturgical renewal.” In my private daily prayers I do personally “stick to Cranmer and King James”, using either the 1928 or 1662 prayer book and invariably reading from the Authorized Version. You may be grateful, perhaps, that I at least recognize that while the rubrics of our current book allow for this in public prayer, I should not impose my idiosyncratic liturgical preferences on you for most of the year. Trinity being the only Episcopal parish covering several counties, I think it’s most important to keep to the middle of the road.
There is one element of our worship that I remain forever grateful that the more radical of the Twentieth Century liturgiologists didn’t get their way on. You may have noticed this before. Open up your prayerbooks to page 364. Notice that we have competing versions of the Lord’s Prayer. I suspect that some of the more “advanced” of the reformers would have preferred to only have the one on the right (the one we never use), just as they are known to have attempted to exclude the traditional idiom (what we now call “Rite I”) entirely from our current book.
Show of hands of anybody here who has actually experienced the version of the Lord’s Prayer on the right side of the page actually used. We would trot it out at seminary, because our liturgics professor was a bit of an iconoclast, and I occasionally see it used at diocesan or national church functions, probably because whoever put the service together is trying to make a point (what that point is I couldn’t tell you).
At one of the recent monthly meetings we have of our deanery clergy up in Toledo, I asked if anybody had experienced this version used “in the wild” (by which I mean, on a Sunday morning in a parish church) and only one of the roughly dozen of us raised his hand. I know of a committed layman (and lest you think this is an “old person problem”, he is younger than I) who moved, and the interim Rector of the parish he began attending instituted the use of the “contemporary” version of the Lord’s Prayer at all of that church’s services, and so difficult was it to get his head and heart around this that he ended up attending a different Episcopal Church (he was fortunate enough to be in a place with more options than we have here). I can’t say I entirely blame him.
There may be only one prayer which all Christians everywhere know by heart. In the West, it is one of the three things, along with the Apostles’ Creed and the Ten Commandments, that we teach all children first (I do this with kids when they prepare to make their First Communion). Yes, we all say it in our own languages. Yes, even among Anglophones there are slight variations. Roman Catholics tend to omit the prayer’s doxology when recited in the Mass. Presbyterians say “debts” instead of “trespasses”. Some, like us put a conjunction before “the power” and say “forever and ever” instead of just “forever.” Yes, the version we use is a blend of the different versions found in the Gospels. Yes, it may not even actually be the most accurate translation. If we were to be extra-scrupulous about that, I’d argue, we’d have to meet halfway between the Anglican and the Presbyterian version: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive our debtors. All that said, we’re saying more or less the same thing, and it binds us together across the gulfs created by the unhappy divisions within the church militant here on earth.
I’ve had frequent occasions in my pastoral ministry to visit folks suffering the later stages of dementia–men and women who have lost all ability to participate in a conversation or recall even the most basic facts about the world and even about themselves. Those who’ve gone through this with loved ones know how great a sadness this can be. But over and over again, even near furthest extreme of that horrible disease’s progression I can say “Our Father” and that man or woman will invariably join in with all the right words, praying from the heart. If that’s not enough to leave well enough alone with at least that one prayer, then I don’t know what is.
And, you know what? This prayer which Jesus gave us is all we need to pray aright. We acknowledge God’s holiness, his righteousness, his perfection. We recognize that our world is not as it should be, and that God will eventually put it to rights. We remember that we don’t need fancy cars, and big investment portfolios, and caviar and champagne for dinner–just some sustenance (physical and spiritual) to get us through today. We know we need forgiveness and that we’ve got to extend grace to those who have wronged us. And we beg God to protect us from that evil which may trip us up on the pilgrim road of life. We may want more than those things, but that’s all we need. And, as Jesus reminds us in the parable of the neighbor at midnight, if we just ask for those things, God will give us his Spirit to accomplish even more in our souls.
So, lest you were worried when I pointed it out a few minutes ago, we’re not going to get cute and switch up the version of the Lord’s Prayer this week. But we will be joining with them, too, and with those praying in thousands of different languages, even with those who say “debts” instead of trespasses. We’ll be joining with over two billion sisters and brothers, in praying for the few things which are needful in this life as we prepare for the next. And that, my friends, is a miracle in itself.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.