Praying with Understanding: Explanations of Words and Passages in the Book of Common Prayer

This booklet, printed by the Latimer Trust, began as an address Roger T. Beckwith gave at the Prayer Book Society’s 1989 annual conference. Beckwith’s modest proposal to do some “invisible mending” in the language of The Book of Common Prayer to make it more intelligible has merit today, as it did when he gave the address to the Prayer Book Society. This kind of mending, as Beckwith draws to our attention, was done in 1662. The editors of the King James Version of the Bible have also done this kind of mending with each successive edition of the Authorized Version.

One of the reasons some language of the Prayer Book is unintelligible to modern congregations is that the English language has changed over time. Some words have vanished from the English language in present use while others have been given new meanings different from those of the Prayer Book. New words have also been added to the vernacular. Another reason is that many of the young people who are now graduating from high school and university have no acquaintance with the language and idioms used a generation or two ago, much less familiarity with the language of classical English literature. Rapid technological change in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has caused similar change in everyday language. While the English language may have become enriched by the addition of a plethora of technological terms, it has also become impoverished by discontinued use of a great number of formerly common words.

The Roman Catholic Church’s release of its new Sacramentary in advance of its introduction of a new liturgy in 2011 is likely to spark renewed interest in Prayer Book revision and the language and theology of the Prayer Book, as is the work of the Anglican Church in North America’s Prayer Book and Common Worship Task Force on a common liturgy for the ACNA.

Introduction
One of the greatest failures of the church in recent years has been the failure to teach. So much so, that lay people today are often crying out for teaching, but the clergy (whether through uncertainty, mistaken priorities or sheer overwork) are still not supplying the need. The services which are used every Sunday are an obvious subject for teaching, yet it has often been taken for granted that people know why they use them and fully understand what they mean. Much, of course, can be learned about them simply by thoughtful use of them, but certain things cannot. Then, when the church enters an era of revolution, as at present, it is possible for the revolutionaries to decry the traditional services as 'unintelligible', simply because they contain some things hard to understand, which nobody troubles to make clear.

If the Book of Common Prayer were unintelligible, its compiler Archbishop Cranmer would be the first to tell us not to use it. In his prefaces 'Concerning the Service of the Church' and 'Of Ceremonies, why some be abolished and some retained', he lays great stress on St Paul's teaching in 1 Corinthians 14 that all things in public worship ought to be done 'unto edifying', and explains that this is why he has substituted the English language for Latin, and has reformed obscure and misleading ceremonial. A hundred years after his work had been done, the 1662 revisers tell us in their 'Preface' that they had found certain words and phrases which had fallen out of use or changed their meaning in the meantime, and that they had therefore substituted others. Today, three hundred years later again, it is not surprising if the same situation has arisen once more; and, in any revision carried out on the modest principles of the 1662 revisers, a sprinkling of words and phrases might well need to be changed for the same reasons. But that is all. The number of such words and phrases is not great, and it would be no more necessary today, in the cause of intelligibility, to change the whole substance and style of the Prayer Book, than it was in the seventeenth century. The text, as the 1662 revisers left it, was essentially Cranmer's text, and a modern revision carried out on the same principles would again leave us with a text that was quite recognisably Cranmer's. The 'invisible mending' would hardly show. It would not be in everyday speech, and would include some harmless antiquarianisms like 'thou', 'thee' and 'thy'; but then the Prayer Book never was in everyday speech - rather, it was in a finer form of speech, which sometimes differed from everyday speech chiefly in being simpler and clearer. An unusual way of speaking is quite a different thing from an unintelligible way of speaking, though today they are so regularly supposed the same. To change words and phrases which have fallen out of use or altered their meaning would remove all trace of unintelligibility, while leaving a nobly unique text which was still unmistakably Cranmer's own.

In the meantime, such words and phrases can at least be explained. The clergy can, of course, explain them by word of mouth, and one of the aims of the present booklet is to show clergy how easily this teaching gap can be bridged. However, in parishes where this is not as yet being done, it may help to have the explanation available for laity also in brief written form.

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