I remember growing-up going regularly to Sunday school at the church of my childhood. As the pastor’s eldest child I took it as my inheritance not only to know the right answers to my teachers’ questions, but to able to go further; expounding, correcting, and clarifying those parts of the lesson which I had, in my privileged position of presumed erudition, felt were lacking.
Of all of those many Sundays in which I was an authoritative voice I remember little. One Sunday, however, remains fixed in my memory with a kind of gelid and shivering clarity. Looking back now, I consider it among the most important of my Sunday school lessons.
It was, moreover, a Sunday on which I had little to offer in the way of authority.
(I’ll make a small parenthetical note to comment on how most the memories which are for me most blest and gladsome are, without exception, those days on which I’ve had little to offer in the way of authority: holidays, marriage, birth of my children, ordination, sad goodbyes, baptisms, births of other people’s children, and other miracles).
On this particular Sunday my teacher (whose name and face I can still brightly recall), lugged-in some shinny stereo, asked us to close our eyes and “just listen… listen really really well”. She then played Rich Mullins’ song “Creed” from the A Liturgy, a Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band album. (If you’ve never heard it, you should. Go listen to one of the many youtube presentations of it, then come back and finish reading).
Now, of course the historic Creeds are powerful in and of themselves. And while the salience of the apostolic declarations has and continues to impact my life (and about which I can write in greater length at another time), what stood-out for me on that day was Mullins’ constant refrain: “And I believe what I believe / is what makes me what I am / I did not make it, no it is making me / it is the very truth of God / and not the invention of any man.”
This countered, and has continued to counter, the dominant dictum of our culture: that self expression, self-actualization, and self-autonomy are the ultimate vision of human flourishing.
What if, the young me wondered, what if life was not primarily about “finding myself” as much as “being found in and formed by” this Faith?
Many years later, as an Anglican priest, I find that this truth gives hope to many who are burnt out on the modern and/or postmodern injunctions to “find yourself”. And while I hope to write more on this later as well, let me simply say in short that one of the most life-giving practices of the church that people coming into Anglicanism discover is the use of “set” or pre-written prayers. Many of them have their origins very early in the Church’s history. Like the Lord’s Prayer, these are prayers which are used and reused, sung and said, and recited by myself, my little family, our greater church ‘ohana, and by the whole Anglican communion, verbatim.
And while this practice of “formed prayer” is ancient and has the witness of the majority of our saints and heroes throughout history, it is regarded by many in the (post)modern West with more than a little suspicion. And we regard it this way primarily because we have bought-in (even if in some small measure) to the vision of life detailed by the authors of our modern ethos. A set prayer, it would seem, limit self-expression; and limiting self-expression dares to suggest that there are things more important and more glorious than the self-constructed self. And admitting that terrorizes us, and threatens to shake the very pillars of the age.
But if what matters is not “finding myself” as much as “being found and formed”, then prayer is the very place (perhaps with the exception of the Sacraments and the Word of God), in which that Finding and that Forming are of most importance.
Charles the martyr-king explains that, “the manner of using set and prescribed Forms” (for prayer and common worship) is most desirable. For, as he argues, “wholesome words being known and fitted to men’s understanding, are soonest received into their own hearts, and aptest [sic] to excite & carry along with them judicious and fervent affections.”
Just as a concert pianist is a master of the music and the instrument, having played it over and over and over again, going through those seasons where one doesn’t feel it anymore, where one tires of the same old list of songs and the warm-up exercises, until the songs becomes reborn and the very notes of the music flow within them, until they are formed by the music, because now it is no longer accurate to say that the music lives in them but it is more true to say they have come to dwell in the music, because they’ve mastered it and could “do it with their eyes closed” and thus we laud them and pay good money to hear them; so also it is with the practice of prayer.
This does not mean that there is no room for the spontaneous and the unwritten kinds of prayers. I often pray many of those throughout my day. Rather, that the Form of these historic prayers helps to form us and fashion the nature of our prayer life. These prescribed Forms in fact give rise to those many spontaneous prayers. Just as the ‘spontaneous’ moments of a great musician’s performance are laid upon a foundation and begotten of those preformed and prescribed songs and melodies they’ve practiced for countless hours.
Moreover, prescribed prayers, the ones trusted and utilized by the whole Church, work to unite the Body even as we encounter seemingly different trials and adversities. Charles reasoning is compelling in this area: “I could never see any reason why any Christian should abhor […] the same Forms of prayer, since he prays to the same God, believes in the same Savior, professes the same Truths, reads the same Scriptures, hath the same duties upon him, and feels the same daily wants for the most part, both inward and outward, which are common to the whole Church.”
As I am formed by and found in this Faith, in which I am not alone, but stand together with al of the gathered saints throughout the ages, these prayers both aid and comfort me. I am not alone when I suffer; neither am I alone when I give thanks. I am not the first to kneel and say the confession, not the last to pray the prayer for purity. I am not unique when I pray the collect asking for God’s grace to keep me from sin, knowing all the while how much of a hypocrite I am: I stand with generations of miserable hypocrites (like Noah and Sarah and Peter) who believe that this Faith is true and strong. We did not make it. We were called to it. It is making us.
Maybe as a last thought, there is an irony in the (post)modern command to “find yourself!” The irony is that even as we follow this command, unquestioningly, we are already surrendering ourselves to the will of others (like those people who told us to find ourselves). We are already asking for someone else to tell us what to do. And in a society such as ours, this almost always turns into consumerism. We fashion an identity for ourselves out of the sundry identities on sale in clothes, social groups, neighborhoods, possessions, hobbies, and gyms. It’s not at all unlike that miserable mall scene early in season 3 of Strangers Things where Eleven, on a quest to “find herself”, expresses herself by purchasing one of about a dozen hideous rompers; “this is me” she thinks… but it’s not, somebody else made that… and there’s potentially like 3000 other people in the US who are wearing that too. In doing so we already admit that we are something less than authors of our own story. Maybe even something less than co-authors.
Far from being troubled by this news, Christians should find great joy in it. Be free! Be glad! That onerous weight you’ve for so long been sacked with, the ball-and-chain of having to “find yourself”, isn’t yours to carry. (And I think that the larger narrative of season 3 of Stranger Things actually stands as a testament to this fact). Here, here is a God who has found you, and He calls you by name. Not a name that you had to choose or fashion from the rubble of commercial possibilities; but one that really suits you, because it is you. This is the Faith “once and for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1.3). And I didn’t make it. It is making me. It is the very Truth of God not the invention of any man. And I commend the practices and forms of this Faith. Trusting that the God who said he’d never leave us or forsake us is True and is faithful to those promises.