Saying – and singing – the office daily has been regularly maintained by the cathedrals over the years; but sadly not so much, I fear, among the clergy generally. It seems to have become a diminishing practice. But something is happening. The availability of the office on smart phones together with the rigours of the pandemic and the possibility of joining with others, the cathedrals especially, through YouTube, Zoom or Skype – a change seems to be happening. Two collections of prayers witness to this, both published in 2021: the Canterbury Book of New Parish Prayers (Canterbury Press) compiled by the Precentor of Canterbury Cathedral and now this second book, a collection of prayers gathered by a retired Canon of Durham Cathedral. They come some fifty years after the Frank Colquhoun Parish Prayer collections have become to feel rather dated. How wonderful that such prayers are once again needed.
Rosalind Brown was a residentiary Canon in Durham for 13 years. One of her prayers (391) refers, I would guess, to her observation of stonemasons at work in the Cathedral repair yard and seeing them working on ‘lumps of stone’ – like hardened persons, she reflects, who need to realize their creative possibilities. Enlarge us, she prays, that the Lord might ‘chip away, bit by bit, the things in our own lives that need to go’.
Canon Brown has composed 500 prayers. She was encouraged to collate them when someone told her that her prayers ‘put into words what I want to say to God’. The prayers are largely for public worship, but she envisages them also being used privately. Like all who write about intercession for use in public worship, she urges brevity; that they should occupy no more than five minutes of a service, three or four prayers at the most. She recommends the Common Worship Eucharist intercessions order; praying for the Church first, then for the world and finally for people in need. She allows for one more prayer on some chosen theme. Interestingly, the book itself is actually arranged the other way about; prayer for the Church put last. It illustrates the tension between the two approaches. If the Church comes first, it is because as Christ’s body we pray with him for the coming of the kingdom, which does not always seem to be the case. If last, it at least recognizes that our prayer should primarily be for the world God loves.
Inevitably, prayers in such a collection cannot include personal references or current concerns. Canon Brown wisely refrains from suggesting what such petitions might be, apart from allowing space for them in some of the prayers. Petitions need some local and contemporary reference if they are to engage the congregation, she says, and advises referring to the ‘News’ as a way of doing this. There is a danger, which I think she avoids, of the prayer then becoming merely reactive, almost too late for God to act, lacking a prophetic strength.
In the introduction, Canon Brown counsels herself to tread a careful path between exercising a prophetic function and advancing her political opinions. This does not prevent her from expressing some gospel views. ‘Deliver us, O God, as a nation and world from the obsession with instant results, the search for someone to blame’ (8). In prayer 16, she asks that we be delivered ‘from the desire for revenge and from the rage and blame-laying that underlies so much of international relations’. On immigration (88) the prayer is for guidance, that God might ‘unsettle and inspire us with insights from the scriptures and from our history’. A prayer about inequality (27) is unequivocal in its knowledge that God ‘will lead the nations into the risky give-and-take of equality for the well-being of all’. At Evening Prayer we would, after all, have just had such a thought as we sang the Magnificat. She sometimes includes a period of silence within a prayer, as a way of holding a concern in stillness before God. Prayer 350 continues this theme in a reflection on many different types of silence, urging us at the completion of the catalogue, to listen ‘to our own silence’. I liked prayer 243, praying that persons searching for God and finding themselves ‘entering a maze, with no way forward and no way back’ should ask God to turn their ‘maze into a labyrinth’.
A valuable resource for our prayer then, both individual and corporate! A sign too that the Church is recovering its central vocation as a community called to pray with and to the Lord.
