Introduction

Since I left the Episcopal Church after twenty-four years of being nurtured in that tradition, I have met many Christians who assumed I did so because I came to my senses about the emptiness of praying the same words from the Book of Common Prayer week after week. Some look on the liturgy from outside as just going through the motions or praying by rote. Others see receiving Communion every week as a mistake that makes the sacrament ordinary or routine. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, both about my own spiritual journey and about the liturgies celebrated throughout the Anglican Communion (and its daughter denomination, United Methodism, in which I hold ordination). I am a person of faith today precisely because the liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer gave me a language and a context for encountering God in my youth that continue to be essential vehicles for my own spiritual formation.

Christian spiritual formation is the process of allowing God to bring our "unruly wills and affections" (Book of Common Prayer, 219) into order with what is healthful to our spirits and to the spirits and lives of those around us. It is the process by which Christ's mind takes shape within us, so that he might indeed continue his work in the world through us. It involves learning to love what God commands and to desire what God promises, so that we will be stable in our commitment to live for him who died and lives for us. It is to come to the place where to do what God wishes is our pleasure and desire. That is what it means to be fully formed in Christ, the one whose will it was to do God's good pleasure.

For Christians who worship in the Anglican tradition of the Protestant Episcopal Church, the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), together with the Scripture readings that it prescribes, is the foundational resource for spiritual formation. The rites in this book shape encounters with God and guide interaction with God from the cradle to the grave, from baptism to burial. In the regular course of the year, celebrations of Holy Baptism and baptismal renewal keep the dynamics of spiritual growth fixed in our minds-dying to everything in ourselves, our world and the spiritual forces around us that opposes God's desire for us and for human community, and reaching out for all that God has for us and calls us to become. Week after week, worshipers are brought face-to-face with the Savior who gives his life to us in Holy Communion, filling us so that we are able to give our lives to others. Every liturgy for the Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage calls Christian couples to bring that commitment to other-centered living into their homes. And as we stare into the face of the mystery of death at funeral after funeral, the liturgies interpret that reality in light of God's good purposes for us and send us back into the world to continue to walk in the newness of life to which we were called at our baptism.

These rites put the words into the mouths of worshipers so that the intentions and commitments they express will sink down deep into the heart and come to expression in changed lives. They teach us what to desire and what to seek from the Lord, both trimming away what is self-serving and opening our minds and hearts to the full range of what God desires to work for us, in us and through us. They form in us the habits of the most significant spiritual disciplines valued by Christian disciples through the centuries-adoration, prayer, self-examination and confession, as well as listening to and being shaped by Scripture. By means of these disciplines, we draw closer to God and grow more attuned to the mind of Christ.

This book explores the rites of the Book of Common Prayer as devotional resources. These liturgies, prayers and Scripture readings

• shape our beliefs about God and our understanding of God's interventions in the world;

• facilitate our approach to, and encounter with, the Divine;

• identify the challenges to the life of faith, the spiritual and temporal dangers we face;

• train our desires and ambitions; and

• orient us to the people and systems around us.

The aim of this book is to help both those who worship regularly in liturgical traditions and those whose worship style is nonliturgical to engage more fully the spiritual disciplines nurtured by these liturgies and experience the spiritual direction that these liturgies provide.

The devotional exercises that punctuate this book are a key component to this engagement. These will help you apply what you have read, to practice spiritual disciplines and to begin at once to make progress in discipleship. Some invite you to self-examination and reflection on a particular question. Others provide symbolic acts by which you might grasp a particular gift of God or make a commitment to God more fully. Still others provide guidance for times of prayer or recommend acts of service and engagement with others. They provide, of course, only suggestions for how you might engage the material found in this book, but engaging them in some form is essential if reading this book is to be more than an intellectual exercise.

Some of these exercises are presented as most appropriate for individual use, some for use in a group or, especially in the section on marriage, as a couple, but most are easily adapted to a variety of contexts.

Why the Book of Common Prayer?

If we are to listen to liturgy as a vehicle for spiritual direction and formation, we need to seek out some particular liturgies to listen to. The liturgies found in the BCP recommend themselves for a number of reasons-beyond their peculiar importance in the spiritual journey of the author of this book!

The liturgies of the BCP particularly recommend themselves because of their inclusivity both in terms of time and denominational breadth. This inclusivity arises out of the process that led to the compilation of the very first Anglican prayer book in 1549. Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII and Edward VI, led the process of creating a new collection of liturgies and other resources to be used in the newly created Church of England. He brought together a simplified form of the Roman Catholic rites, liturgies from the Eastern Christian churches, as well as innovations introduced by the Reformers on Europe's mainland. A fruit of the reformation of worship on the Continent, Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer put the liturgy back in the language and in the hands of the common people, who were invited again to participate in all aspects of the service.

Mary Tudor restored Catholicism and initiated a brutal persecution of Protestants (which claimed the life of Cranmer himself ), but the Book of Common Prayer returned to use under Elizabeth I and was significantly revised in ways that would restore unity among those of Catholic and those of Protestant convictions throughout her realm. Christian unity and inclusiveness was again in evidence as an essential principle in the formation of the BCP.

In the modern edition of the BCP, which represents only the current step in a long and ongoing evolution of liturgy, this inclusiveness across time and across denominations is even more fully in evidence. One can still recognize behind the services of baptism and Communion the framework of liturgies from the time of Hippolytus in the third century. Two of the options for the Great Thanksgiving, the prayer offered at the time of Communion, are adaptations of Communion prayers attributed to Hippolytus himself and to Basil of Caesarea, the fourth-century theologian whose liturgy was deeply influential in the Eastern Orthodox churches.

The BCP is also a representative collection of liturgies. There are extensive parallels between the principal liturgies found therein and the services of baptism and Eucharist in the United Methodist Book of Worship, the Lutheran Book of Worship, and the rites of the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church. These similarities extend from common liturgical elements and order down to the wording of specific elements. As a result, what is said in this book on the basis of the BCP could, to a very large extent, have been derived as well from the liturgies of these other traditions.

In the end, however, Wisdom must be justified by her children. The choice of the BCP as a foundational text for spiritual formation is ultimately grounded in my conviction that its prayers and liturgies capture and communicate essential facets of our formation as disciples and that these insights are thoroughly consistent with the spiritual counsel of Scripture itself.

Many readers might not have a copy of the Book of Common Prayer on their bookshelves at home. The complete text is readily available online at <http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/bcp.htm> and can be downloaded in a variety of formats. Bound copies can also be ordered through any Internet bookseller or local bookstore, and are surprisingly affordable.

Why These Four Liturgies?

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