Formulary Friday: Taking to heart

CS Lewis has a great passage on this from his Letters to Malcolm, where he’s describing the faithful members of a congregation:

And they don’t go to church to be entertained. They go to use the service, or, if you prefer, to enact it. Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best – if you like, it works best – when, through long familiarity, we don’t have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.

The more we take certain prayers into ourselves, the more we are familiar with their words and their rhythms, their emphases and their phrasing, the more we can concentrate on actually praying them, rather than repeatedly looking at our service sheet or projector screen, or struggling to remember which bit comes next. The more I know the dance steps, to use Lewis’ analogy, the more I’m free to dance.

The Prayer Book provides a single, almost entirely unalterable, liturgy for each of its main services – Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Holy Communion. Cranmer intended that we say the same words, week in, week out, precisely so that they can get ‘under our skin’ and provide us with a resource not just for the service itself, but for all kinds of unforeseen situations. I was incredibly glad, lying helpless in a dentist’s chair a few months’ back, whilst all kinds of horrible things were going on, that I could recall – and be comforted by – the Comfortable Words!

So, taking our cue from the Prayer Book, why not make it your plan to memorise, to take to heart, a few of those great prayers, especially if you say them each week in church. The Prayer of Confession, the Prayer of Humble Access, or the Collects for Morning and Evening Prayer are always good places to start.