Session 7 Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Introduction to the Episcopal Church

Session 7 

Understanding the Book of Common Prayer (BCP)

Part 3

The Book of Common Prayer is a strategy of prayer to invoke God upon the times of our life.  It provides for the experience of what can be called “special time.”   Special time is how a community celebrates its identity through the remembrance of an initiating event.  Unique events don’t recur; they happen and they make an impact and the memory coupled with the imagination is exerted to retain something of the impact and power of the event.  Too theoretical?  What about celebration of birthdays, anniversaries or commemoration of telling events?  Why do we do it?  We can’t make a birth happen again a year later, or we don’t get remarried on our anniversaries but how is it that the memorial traces of an event are retained within a community of celebrants?  Why does it happen?  Why do we want to do it?  Special time happens within the life of a community.  Special time happened in the originating events and persons of the community that we call the church and in those events and persons we are given our community identity and story.  We are imprinted with the story and we become co-celebrants of the events of the story.

The BCP  is a prayer record, a perpetuation of prayer, a book to teach prayer based the values of our community that arose in the originating persons and events of our Christian identity.  We mark special time broadly with seasons that frame the broad curriculum of our annual cycle to inculcate the values of our faith community.  The seasons give us teaching topics that receive their value from the events in the life of Jesus Christ and the community. Events on the calendar derived from the life of Jesus, the Holy Spirit and events in the lives of the saints of the church.   The Book of Common Prayer provides a format for us to anchor our identity upon the originating events of our community.

The BCP deals with special time by providing prayer texts and ceremonial prescriptions/suggestions for Church Seasons, Major Feast Days of our Lord, Holy Days, Fast Days, Holy Days, Days of remembering heroes who became remembered because of exemplary living.

In our lives time gets differentiated in how it is valued or remembered.  I do not commemorate brushing my teeth at 10:30 p.m. on July 12, 1980, but on September 11, my memory can be jolted by the fact of the event that is forever associated with that day in our country.  Special time is about differentiated time marked by liturgy and by the power of remembrance.  Even though we may believe that God is omnipresent, somehow that presence becomes more memorial in the unique occasions when God’s presence became a happening that changed life in a way that gave birth to new community meaning.  The BCP through the liturgies of Special Time express our hope to access the power of these originating people and events.

Exercise:

Think about why as a child your birthday or Christmas was different.  Why was there such anticipation for the day and a sort of pinch myself with excitement over these special days?  How is it that your family and community were able to create such powerful awe-struck events for you?  Now think about the originating events of the church.  How is it that the liturgy of the church is both a result of those events but also a means of propelling the memory of the event into the future?  One can be cynical about all manner of sentimentality but one must acknowledge the rather profound power of the memory and its durability as we use the BCP as a sort of musical score to experience something of the mind of the composer of the great events of our faith.

Father Phil