Cranmer’s Collects

The language of Thomas Cranmer’s Prayer Book is “not of an age but for all time.” It is sensitive to the profound human need for continuity and permanence. Words and phrases from this liturgy have become part of our English heritage by continuous repetition over the centuries.

One of the jewels of the Book of Common Prayer is the collects, whose words have given comfort and hope to so many in times of crisis and anxiety. Today’s collect, for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity, is truly a gem, and it provides an occasion to say something about the collects in general.

Whatever the origin of the word “collect,” it describes a very ancient form of liturgical prayer: 25 of the Prayer Book collects date from the 5th century. They are all characterized by brevity and concentration. They ask for one thing only, and that in the tersest language. Each collect is based on a significant scriptural source, and each follows a set pattern of construction.

A complete collect has five parts. First of all, there is the address to God. Today’s collect begins simply, “O God.” Then comes a description of some property or attribute of God. Today we call God “the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy.”

The third part of the collect is the petition itself. Today we ask, “Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy.” This petition is the heart of the prayer. The fourth element gives the reason or purpose behind the petition. Today the reason why we ask for God’s mercy is “that thou, being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal.”

The collect concludes, as does all Christian prayer, by an appeal to the one mediator between God and man: “Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake our Lord.”

Considering the emphasis which Christianity places on “the Word,” it is surprising that so little attention has been given to language and its essential role in our approach to God. Perhaps the main reason why the King James Version of the Bible continues to be used, despite the scholarly defects of this translation, is because its language has never been equaled. Frederick Faber declares, “It lives on the ear like a music that can never be forgotten. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words.”

The same could equally well be said of Cranmer’s collects. They have a musical form and inevitibility about them. We anticipate the pattern of the syntax as if we were listing to a Bach fugue turned into words.

The collects exemplify what Evelyn Underhill has written about religious language in general: “It enchants and informs, addressing its rhythmic and symbolic speech to regions of the mind which are inaccessible to argument, and evoking moments of awe and love which no exhortation can obtain. Religious language has meaning at many levels, and welds together all those who use it, overriding their personal moods, and subduing them to its grave loveliness.”

Today in our culture we are experiencing an unparalled debasement of language, and if we are not on our guard, this debasement will not halt at the church door. Let us treasure our heritage of Common Prayer, which today, paradoxically, seems to be more appreciated outside the Anglican Communion than within it.

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July 5, 2009