Author: CCW

This is the first of two Advent Meditations on the Book of Common Prayer Prefaces. The second meditation will be delivered on Wednesday, 13 December.

“Blessed are those servants,
whom their lord when he cometh shall find watching”

Advent is the season of our watching and waiting upon the motions of God’s Word coming towards us. That emphasis upon the Word of God is a distinctive feature of the Christian Faith and a defining feature of the Common Prayer tradition. Tucked away in the back pages of our Canadian Book of Common Prayer (1962), on pages 715-721 are three important historical documents about which it may be of benefit to ponder and consider. They are, first, The Original Preface (1549) altered in 1552 and 1662: Concerning the Service of the Church; second, Of Ceremonies: Why Some Be Abolished and Some Retained (1549), and; and third, The Preface of 1662. They provide, in short, a kind of apology in the sense of an explanation about the whole enterprise of Common Prayer.

Unlike the Athanasian Creed and the Thirty-nine Articles which some of you may have thumbed over during a particularly boring or trying sermon, these documents are probably completely unknown, if for no other reason than the extremely small print in which they are written. But they speak to the form of God’s Word coming to us and to our watching and waiting upon that Word through the pattern of doctrine in devotion that comprises the Book(s) of Common Prayer. They assist us in understanding something of the nature of an Anglican witness to the Christian Faith.

The Original Preface (1549) Concerning The Service of the Church, slightly altered in 1552 and again in 1662, and Of Ceremonies: Why Some be Abolished and Some Retained (1549) were written by Thomas Cranmer and help to locate some of the motivating factors that contributed to the creation of the Book(s) of Common Prayer. The third document along with the slight alterations made in 1662 to the Original Preface: Concerning the Service of the Church were written by Robert Sanderson, Bishop of Lincoln. The reason for two prefaces has to do with the English Civil War and its disruptions in the seventeenth century including the abolition of bishops and the Book of Common Prayer for fifteen years between 1645 and 1660. The restoration of the Stuart monarchy after the Cromwellian Inter-regnum brought with it the return of bishops and the Prayer Book but in new circumstances requiring some modest but significant revisions. The changes were in many ways quite few; the most notable being the adoption of the King James version of the Bible for the Epistles and Gospels appointed in the Eucharistic lectionary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, itself the great mother book of the Common Prayer tradition for the next three and half centuries. Once again, it suggests an emphasis on the Word of God and the way it is read. There was also the provision for The Ministration of Holy Baptism to such as are of Riper Years, to use the rather quaint sounding expression, And Able to Answer for Themselves, since infant baptism had been largely proscribed during the Inter-regnum period. A reasonable and understandable provision.

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“The night is far spent, the day is at hand”

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, Proverbs (1.7) reminds us. It is a recurring feature of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding. At first glance, it may seem a troubling phrase and yet it complements Aristotle’s idea that philosophy begins with wonder. The fear of the Lord is really our awe and wonder at the majesty and truth of God, the God, to be sure, who as Truth calls us to account. Others in our contemporary world, such as Simon Critchley, have argued that philosophy begins with disappointment but, perhaps, such a view can be redeemed and turned to wonder if we realize that our disappointments have entirely to do with our own nihilisms and the ways in which we close ourselves off from God and from one another. Advent, in that sense, should be a welcome wake-up call for our souls, for our churches, and even for our world.

We live in apocalyptic times, times of fears and anxieties about impending doom. There is the fear of nuclear holocaust as the result of decades of arrogant indifference to the ambitions of North Korea. There is the fear of catastrophic changes to the climate and the environment resulting in the deaths of millions through famine and flood. There are the on-going spectacles of genocide and war and the recurring acts of terrorism throughout our world and day. The doomsday preachers are the secularists; even the optimists among them can only naively advocate the notion that technology, especially AI, artificial intelligence, might save us even as, at the same time, they deny any reality to our humanity and to human personality. In Yuval Noah Harari’s view we are only organic algorithms. There is no you. That, too, is a feature of the secular apocalyptic in its essential nihilism. There is really only despair; a kind of emptiness. The night is more than far spent. It’s gone and we’re done for.

In complete contrast to these secular forms of Apocalypticism, the sense of the catastrophic ending of all life, human and natural, there is the long, long tradition of reflection on the last things, known as eschatology, in our religious traditions. Advent is apocalyptic.

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