Welcome to my new blog. I've been thinking for a long while about doing a weekly spiritual discipline based on the Church Year and have recently found a lot of meaning in the weekly collects of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. With today as the start of Lent it seemed to make sense to add this to my observance this year. So this is one Episcopal layperson's attempt to meditate and wrestle with these beautiful legacies of Anglican heritage.
The Collects are traditional prayers used in Anglican worship since the time of Thomas Cranmer. Along with the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare they are glories of high Tudor English. The collects most traditionally have three or four distinct moments in them.
1. The salutation to god, often followed by a listing of a particular divine attribute.
2. A particular petition to God.
3. The benefit hoped to be derived from the granting of the petition.
4. A closing formula which includes one or more members of the Trinity.
As an example, every Sunday Eucharist in the Episcopal Church begins with the Collect for Purity, a beautiful and haunting prayer which illustrates a perfect four part structure:
1. Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid:
2. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit,
3. that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name;
4. through Christ our Lord. Amen
This simple succinct structure is repeated in almost all prayer in the Anglican church, to surprising variety and often quite beautiful poetry. Though there are certainly longer prayer forms such as litanies and the beautiful and complicated Eucharistic Prayers, the vast majority of prayer in Sunday services and the Daily Office is created in the form of Collects.
Though there can be collects for any petition, and indeed there is nothing stopping any individual from composing original collects for particular needs, there is a special set of collects which are dear to the hearts of many worshipers and these are the Collects for the Church Year. Each Sunday a different collect is prayed, and usually is read for the entire Daily Office of the next week. Together with the Lectionary Readings, these collects announce the theme of each Sunday. Thus each of the four collects of Advent shine with the increasing excitement the anticipation of Christmas, as well as the second Advent which Christians proclaim and which is one of the major themes of the season. The collects of Epiphany are filled with divine light, as it shines in the season through the Star of Bethlehem, the Baptism of Christ and the final Sunday of the season with it's commemoration of the Tranfiguration. The Lenten collects are a veritable treatise on repentance, climaxing with the Solemn collects of Good Friday. Each collect of the Sundays after Easter commemorate the appearances of Jesus after his Resurrection, culminating in the gift of the Holy Spirit in Pentacoast. And the long season of Ordinary Time explores all the facets of our common Christian life, week by week, culminating in the beautiful meditations on our earthly death and Christ's eternal Kingship which round out the Church year.
A little bit about me. I've had a long and pretty circuitous spiritual journey. My dad was a minister in the United Church of Christ (often lovingly teased as Unitarians Considering Christ). Church was a very important part of my young life and I was lucky to have parents who were sensitive to my spiritual development and allowed me a lot of freedom to explore. So for much of my life I tried a lot of spiritual paths and religions: Sufism, nine years in the Gurdjieff work, a short lived flirtation with Wicca, a longer flirtation with Buddhism, both Zen and Tibetan. I love and honor all the paths I tried because I know I learned valuable things from each of them. But I read a quote from the Dalai Lama that got me thinking. He said something to this effect: that if you could go back to your earliest religious tradition, if you weren't too scarred by it, that you should because it would speak to you more deeply. I thought about it and realized that I had no damage from my brand of Christianity, and even more, that I was still deeply attached to it.
Soon after that I discovered the Centering Prayer group at a small Episcopal Church in Washington DC. Contemplative prayer, along with meditative reading of scripture and the beauties of the Eucharist nourished my spirit in very deep ways and I was received into the Episcopal Church. I have been a pretty regular church goer for the last twelve years, with some lapses here and there due to my own petulance...(I had a pretty ridiculous fight with God for a few years...luckily He was patient with me.) For me, the trappings of Anglicanism are both deeply moving and often kind of funny. Mostly I thank God every day that I've been able to find something that nourishes my soul so deeply and provides me with what I've pretty much spent my life looking for.
I claim no great liturgical or Christian knowledge in this blog. Undoubtedly many people will disagree with things I write here. I pray that people can disagree in the spirit of Christian Love and Charity...or even better...just plain Human Love and Charity. I don't have all the answers...not by half. But these are my best attempts at making sense of my continuing journey in the faith and if they spark thought or lively debate in anyone then I am happy I did this.
A note on the texts:
I will probably use more of the Contemporary Collects from the 1979 BCP, though if the traditional language of a collect is particularly beautiful I may use those at times too. I love both forms, the old collects for their poetry and the new ones for their comprehensibility. To me all Prayer Books are beautiful. I can be moved by some of the most High Churchy prayers from the 1928 book and by some of the most poetic passages from the New Zealand Prayer Book. Nor do I think the Anglican Church has a corner on the prayer market. All traditions have their riches. But this is my blog and I reserve the right to respond to the texts as they move me. Others may feel differently, but I do urge people to remember, beautiful as it all is...it's only language and worship style. (Ok Ok...that's the UCC in me coming out.)
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