Living the Gospel Story
A lay person’s memoir of the Book of Common Prayer offers a warm welcome into a tradition that reminds us of our part in the story of creation.
Review by Elise Tegegne
Though church attendance among Christians has been on a keen decline, liturgy–and liturgical texts like the Book of Common Prayer–have enjoyed a recent resurgence. Despite approaching 500 years of age, the prayer book is nevertheless gaining appeal for more and more young(ish) adults–including me. I was raised in the evangelical Protestant tradition, and while I still value many aspects of my childhood churches, I’ve found myself hungry for the history, embodied traditions, and attention to beauty of more liturgical denominations.
One day as I was browsing the shelves of my favorite used bookstore, the Book of Common Prayer caught my eye. Opening the cobalt cover of the small, thick-set book, I noticed the label of a local Episcopal congregation. My feet had never stepped inside an Episcopalian church nor had my hands ever held its prayer book, but I tucked the tome into my arm to explore further. Thumbing through its pages later, I was a bit overwhelmed. How to make sense of the reading schedule? What to do with the liturgy for the ordination of bishops? Was it acceptable to read the prayer book for individual devotions, or just church services? As an outsider to the Anglican and Episcopalian traditions, reading the book felt a little like trespassing.
Writer Julie Lane-Gay’s The Riches of Your Grace: Living in the Book of Common Prayer was written for people with just such questions. In her words, “May this book be a friendly welcome mat, an encouragement to venture into the prayer book’s pages, into its rhythms and prayers, into God’s abundant wisdom, love, and grace, into His amazing and trustworthy Story.”
A warm and relatable narrator, Lane-Gay is the perfect guide for outsiders trepidatious about delving into the prayer book. She is not a priest or historical scholar, but rather a living witness to the prayer book’s power to transform how one lives. Thus, The Riches of Your Grace is not a historical analysis of the Book of Common Prayer, a comprehensive how-to guide, or a sociological explanation of its newfound relevance, but a love-letter to a piece of sacred literature that continues to shape her daily life–and to astonish her. Couched in Lane-Gay’s absorbing personal narrative, each of the book’s ten chapters shows how one aspect of the Book of Common Prayer–from the Collects to Compline, from the Catechism to Holy Communion–has formed her life.
Several chapters center around church services. Lane-Gay offers us a seat next to her on the pew, as she describes the significance of each step in the liturgy. Anticipating the concerns of readers like me who come from evangelical backgrounds, she also sketches some reasoning for traditions that might feel strange. But more poignantly, she shows how the prayer book is relevant to all aspects of human existence, not just Sundays. The Book of Common Prayer has guided her morning rituals, work routines, engagement with current ideologies, moments by a friend’s hospital bed, and even the dark hours accompanying others through death.
While the Gregorian calendar focuses on what we do, the church calendar attends to how we are, weaving our daily lives into God’s story.
Over the course of The Riches of Your Grace, Lane-Gay shows that the Book of Common Prayer anchors us to the narrative of the Gospel. She writes, “The Christian story of the world is God creating, our rebelling, God redeeming in Christ and His coming back to restore all things as they were meant to be.” Practices like Morning and Evening Prayer, twice-daily reading of the Psalms, and regular partaking of Holy Communion rhythmically remind us forgetful, distracted readers of who we are and who God is. While the Gregorian calendar focuses on what we do, the church calendar attends to how we are, weaving our daily lives into God’s story. We remember how we form a miniscule part of a supernatural epic unfolding through a power far beyond us. Throughout the Liturgical Year, Christians are invited to embody, or as Lane-Gay puts it, to “reenact” this story through the seven seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and Ordinary Time. These seasons help us to live in “the miracle and riches of the incarnation and resurrection.” During Lenten fasting, we go into the wilderness with Christ, and on Easter Sunday, we celebrate His resurrection and look forward to “the eternal feast” with cake and Cadbury eggs.
The Book of Common Prayer also grounds readers within a global church, both past, present, and even future. Indeed, Lane-Gay writes that Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 16th century, compiled the prayer book to gather, strengthen, and unite the church with shared traditions and language. For example, Christians across the world read the same passages of the Lectionary each day, allowing faithful participants to read through the entire Bible in one to three years. As Lane-Gay writes, the Book of Common Prayer “holds us together not just with those praying in Rio, Rotterdam, and Reno, but also with those in Nairobi, New York, and Naples.” United in a common story, readers can grow together in Christ.
In a time when the (small “c”) catholic church is deeply divided, the Book of Common Prayer offers a foundation for unity through its daily practices of acknowledging our own brokenness, forgiving our enemies, and asking for God’s help in the face of temptations and trials. The prayer book offers a structure within which we can humbly place ourselves to receive grace and wisdom which we cannot conjure on our own. As many churches continue to seek flash and relevance to attract greater numbers to their congregations, it is refreshing to find a tradition where words that have survived generations of fads continue to be spoken faithfully.
After having read The Riches of Your Grace, I feel welcomed into the pages of the Book of Common Prayer. Though I am far from understanding how to navigate it, I’ve started incorporating little bits into my daily life. For example, reading the Psalms before bed instead of a mystery novel or unread emails has reoriented my heart at the end of each day, and I trust that the practice is doing deeper work I am still unaware of. Though I may not be converting to Anglicanism anytime soon, I am grateful for the invitation to join with saints from across time and space to worship God with ancient words that will continue to be spoken long after the brief flickers of our lives.
Elise Tegegne has written essays for Plough, Ekstasis, Fathom,
The Riches of Your Grace: Living in the Book of Common Prayer was published by InterVarsity Press on June 11, 2024. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
