The Effect of Familiar Words

Last year as my long holiday wore on I reflected how easy it would be to cease religious observance entirely, but this year it felt different; I felt quite excited at the prospect of returning to saying the Office properly and getting back into the full rhythm of prayer as opposed to the etiolated version I observe when not at work. Of course, that wore off. But it was different, anyway.

Being away from Swanvale Halt church for two Sundays found me first at an Episcopal church in the Borders - the only one for miles around that seemed to have an early service that day - and then at Guildford Cathedral for their 8am. In the Scottish church the very elderly priest made his way over to me before the service began with some effort and apologised a) for the fact that there weren't going to be many people there and b) that because he hadn't been expecting to take the service until very recently it would be 'a bit chaotic'. How chaotic could a said Scottish Prayer Book service get, I wondered? In the event I was unable to observe anything I could describe as 'chaos', although the priest did update the text at various points, which made me wonder what the point of using the old liturgy was. Conversely, I know you need to crack through the Book of Common Prayer at some pace or it runs the risk of getting bogged down, but at the Cathedral I did get the slight sense the celebrant would rather have been somewhere else, or perhaps saying something else.

The order in which the Prayer Book arranges the Eucharistic action puts the confession and absolution immediately before the Communion itself, with the intention of keeping sin and redemption firmly in the worshipper's mind before they approach the holy table, rather than at the beginning of the service where it is now. And it does so in intense and dramatic language: 'We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, in thought, word, and deed, against thy divine majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us'. We say those self-accusing words in the full knowledge that we are about to have forgiveness pronounced, and what are called the Comfortable Words spoken to us, assuring us of God's mercy. What's happening here is a rehearsal of the process of conversion. But whereas conversion is an extended business, as conviction of sin leads into the experience of forgiveness, in this liturgy the apparent jaggedness of the conflicting emotion is contained within a single action, moving in moments from one extreme to another, and the effect is a curious one: the sensations meld into one, a strangely detached state in which we hand both sin and forgiveness over to God in the knowledge that he knows more than we do. And that, I suppose, is joy.