Session 5 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 5 

Understanding the Book of Common Prayer (BCP)

With just a cursory glance at the index in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) one can note a unifying theme, the theme of Time.  One can find a calendar of seasons and days and reference to time of day, e.g. morning noon, and evening.  The Psalmist wrote, “Our time is in God’s hand.”  The BCP is a prayer strategy for us to remember that our time is in God’s hand.  The BCP can and is used both for corporate prayer and private devotions.  It belongs to everyone and even when we pray the prayers in private we are expressing our corporate agreement.  Some people object to the reading of “written prayers” as not being spontaneously heartfelt and therefore “vain repetition.”  It is not up to anyone to judge anyone about how our hearts are engaged with the prayers that we share together.  A prayer such as the “Our Father” could be judged as vain repetition by the same criterion.  Use of the BCP is not intended to discourage extemporaneous and privately composed prayer.  The BCP provides an order for people to join together to pray.

First, the BCP is a companion to the Bible.  In fact one could say that the BCP is the words of the Bible rearranged into an organized prayer format.  Since the BCP includes a lectionary (appointed lessons from the Bible), the use of the BCP requires a commitment to reading the Bible.

The BCP is a prayer strategy to invoke the presence of God on the times of our lives.  A way to understand the prayer strategy of the BCP is to see how the prayers therein conform to the different ways in which human beings experience time.  There is the experience of cyclical time with light and darkness being the most evident sign of a natural clock.  The daily offices of the BCP, such as Morning and Evening Prayer conform to this notion of cyclical time.  Changes in weather and length of daylight mark the seasons of our calendar of months.  The BCP includes a calendar of seasons, special feast days, holy days and fast days.  Each day is the same for having a morning and a night, but every child knows that some days like birthdays and Christmas are tinged with such social and cultural meaning as to create an entirely different experience and mood of time.  I would call this the experience of "special time."  There is still a further experience of time that I would call crisis time, or “rite of passage time” or “eventful time” using the Greek notion of time referred to as kairos.  The BCP has the prayer forms for what we call the sacraments which conform to this other human experience or mood of time.

In the next sessions we are going to look at these human experiences of time and how the BCP provides a mode of prayer to conform to these human experiences of time.  

My contention will be this:  These prayers not designed to force us into conformity church rules; they are gifts to help us be honest in becoming fully human in very practical and anthropologically sound ways.

Exercise:

Look at the index in the BCP. ( Book of Common Prayer online)  Notice all of the references to time.  Reflect upon your own experience of time.  Why does time seem to go slow when one is young and fast when one is old?  Why the phrase “time flies when you’re having fun?”  What is it that causes the experience of time to seem fast or slow, or boring, or timeless, or déjà vu or sublime?

Father Phil