To borrow a phrase from faux fashion icon Mugatu in Ben Stiller's film Zoolander, liturgy is so hot right now. A minister at an evangelical Congregational church in Massachusetts uses the Book of Common Prayer at every baptism. In Texas, at an Emergent congregation with Baptist roots, the praise music ends and they celebrate the Eucharist with actual wine. Up on the screen, the skinny-jeans-clad pastor is called "Celebrant." A former megachurch member says of her joining the Episcopal Church: "I was looking for a connection with the ancient church; you know, something that doesn't change every week." It's no wonder then, that in our live-tweeting-everything world, the seemingly unchanging liturgy draws people. But as Alan Jacob's ode The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography teaches us, liturgy in general and Anglican liturgy in particular is surprisingly contingent, fluctuating, and malleable.
The Book of Common Prayer is the Church of England's liturgical text. It contains rites for Morning and Evening Prayer, Holy Communion, baptism, marriage, and burial. Its rich and sonorous language has shaped how Anglicans think, pray, and believe. Its unique phrases pepper the English language. Published slightly more than thirty years after the launch of the Reformation, the BCP reached its final form in 1662. Its architect was Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer.
In his book, Jacobs walks us briskly through the BCP's history. We see Cranmer replace a perplexing constellation of Roman rites (in Latin, of course) with one in English, uniting the realm (whether they liked it or not). Cranmer's liturgy hummed with Scripture and was infused with the doctrine of justification by faith. At the same time, Cranmer sought to maintain the catholicity and sacramental worship of the English church. There was some compromise baked in from the beginning. In spite of this, and not without plenty of controversy (Cranmer was martyred), the prayer book took hold. Ultimately, as England's empire grew, so spread its form of worship. The 1662 BCP is the ancestor of prayer books used from Malawi to Singapore to that other former colony, the United States.
As an introduction to the BCP, Jacobs' accomplishment is without parallel. Brief BCP histories are out there, but they are either too preachy or too boring or both. Likewise, longer, denser tomes of prayer book history exist’which tend to sit impressive and unread. But Jacobs writes an engaging story with wit and warmth. He refuses to bog down in minutiae, and as a result, we get a highly accessible text. Yet he does not over summarize. You get what you came for: the main figures and events are all here. Still, Jacobs means to move quickly with tight, concise prose. And thankfully, he means to have fun doing it. His quick pace, however, in no way sacrifices the color, pathos, or humanity that makes up the story of the Book of Common Prayer.
We read how Cranmer (a married man) added the then novel and very touching phrase "to love and to cherish" to the wedding vows. We read how in the Edinburgh cathedral in 1637, Jenny Geddes hurled a stool at the minister when he began the Communion prayers. His crime: using a version Geddes deplored. (The next minister kept two loaded pistols on his prayer desk.) We read of the great controversy over kneeling and how evangelicals ripped out and burned the altar rails. We hear of nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic priests flaunting rubrics with extra candles on the altar’for which they willingly went to jail. And in one of the book's many laugh-out-loud moments, we read of W. H. Auden, who after learning of his rector's liturgical innovations, wrote to ask the clergyman if he had gone "stark raving mad."
Such stories demonstrate the deep and opposing convictions Christians hold regarding matters of faith and worship. Any observer of the Anglican landscape over the last decade (especially in the Episcopal Church) knows that tempers still run hot over worship, texts, and rites. In this climate, Jacobs adopts a refreshingly nonpolemical tone. He has opinions, certainly, and makes persuasive arguments’but always with charity. And he casts a forgiving eye on those ugly battles waged over the prayer book. He rightly gives voice to both the faults and faithfulness among evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, traditionalists and modernizers. Would that such a spirit be evidenced in today's churches and blogs.
Jacobs writes as one who loves books and words (no surprise to anyone who knows Jacobs' previous work on texts). He delights in showing off Cranmer's intentional literary and poetic devices in the prayer book. But as importantly, Jacobs writes as one who knows and loves the prayer book from within the tradition, not as a casual observer. A reader who ventures into the endnotes (a rewarding exercise in itself) will find Jacobs' personal admission to using one of the Church of England's contemporary derivations of the BCP's form of Morning and Evening Prayer every day. As a hands-on practitioner, Jacobs sees why the BCP matters’not just for its incalculable historical import and literary grandeur, but also for how it gives its readers such a hearty and trustworthy way of being a Christian.
In Jacobs' hands, we see the BCP as a text that has weathered "the sundry and manifold changes of the world" (Collect for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, the Book of Common Prayer). It has been edited, revised, authorized but not printed, printed but not authorized, burned, banned, and neglected. Much of its original form came from the life and mind of one man, but the convictions and circumstances of men and women since have shaped the book's fate and form. It is a human book bearing the stamp of many a human life.
Ultimately, the BCP reflects an incarnational reality. With the word "incarnation," Christians name that aspect of God's character in which God is pleased to intimately involve himself with us volatile beings of highly diluted virtue. In fact, it pleased him so much that he was "born of the Virgin Mary and made man."
What a fitting thing, then, for such a faith to have produced the Book of Common Prayer’a book so venerated and revered, so malleable and bent; smudged with the fingerprints of the countless sinners and saints who have found such comfort in its pages. And we are indebted to Jacobs for bringing to light again this treasure for the next generation of men and women who need the book's Comfortable Words.
