At our recent bishops' conference, a distinguished foreign visitor naughtily questioned what he supposed to be an irrational attachment on the part of his North American coreligionists to the outmoded style of language found in the traditional Book of Common Prayer. It seems that the modern Church of England, in producing this literary gem in honor of the upcoming General Election, has demonstrated once again why so many of our people cling so tenaciously to Cranmer's English!
Loving God
Thank you for caring about how our country is run, and that we have the right to vote for our politicians and government.
But in the run-up to this general election there are so many policies to understand, and so many different points of view to consider -
sometimes I wonder whether there's any point in voting, whether anyone cares what I think.
As I choose who I am going to vote for,
help me not to be cynical about politics and politicians,
help me to remember that my vote can make a difference,
and help me vote for those people who will protect the poor and vulnerable, and do all they can to make our nation a place of fairness and peace.
Because you call us to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with you, our God.
Amen.
Related posts:
I know that I have come to the wrong place to say this, and I know I won't make any friends here for what I will say:
There is a place for vernacular language, and even though I suspect many C of E scholars appreciate 1662-ish English, it is obvious that they are trying to communicate in a way understandable across the entire society in the era they say it ("time and place"), i.e. using the language of 21st century England when speaking to 21st century Englanders. Just like how hundreds of years ago the Anglican prayer book would have been nothing more than straight, plain, unambiguous English.
On the contrary, the English of the Book of Common Prayer was never the language of the man on the street; even in its day, it represented an hieratic, or sacral, form of language. It was clearly "understanded of the people," but it was not the people's common speech.
Thanks for clearing up a misunderstanding. Nonetheless, the separation between the language of the priests vs that of society at large would have been a lot narrower during those times.
I have not as a scholar (good Greek and Latin, some Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac) discovered that there ever was an ordinary language liturgy in the early Church. Almost always, when one has been subsequently attempted, it rapidly becomes distanced from ordinary language (and indeed valued as such). This does not prove that an ordinary language liturgy must be heretical or impossible. It does not prove that we must for ever persist with the strange and highly artificial late Latin which Rome adopted when it abandoned Greek. Nor does it prove that we must for ever persist with the artificial English of Cranmer and his followers. But it is a serious caution. There is a case for a less archaic artificial English for liturgical purposes, but nobody has yet received the gift to invent it. The attempts of the last forty years are not encouraging.
Fr. Gray's caution accords closely with what T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, and W.H. Auden, great masters of English literature in the last century, had to say on the subject of "updating" liturgical language.
I can no longer tell the difference between modern church-speak and its parody.
No, it can be done.
QED
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fINh4SsOyBw
I agree with Rich. There IS a place for vernacular language. It is called "The coffee hour after Mass".
I tend to believe that language can be modern AND elevated — for example, what is being done in the new translation of the Roman missal is pretty elegant — so I'm not a big fan of the archaisms in the Anglican liturgy.
However, I'd far rather listen to even the poorest example of archaic elevated English than the pure drivel that the above prayer exhibits.
The person composing it apparently couldn't even be bothered to be consistent in following "help" with the infinitive particle "to": "help me not to be cynical," "help me to remember", "help me vote".
When something as basic as simple rhetorical parallelism proves to be too cumbersome to deal with when composing a prayer, how can I believe that the person writing it feels the need to be bothered with any of the infinitely more trying aspects of the Christian faith?
Liturgical English, while not simply reducible to Elizabethan English, proceeds from that idiom. This is due in part to the intrinsic excellency of both the Cranmerian BCP and the Authorized Version, and in part to historical circumstance. Translations which proceed along merely synchronic lines are palpable fakes. Updating this liturgical English, e.g., in translations of Mass, Office and Scripture, ought not be done as though none have gone before us. Rather, updating should proceed diachronically, in continuity with the tradition (as in RSV not NAB). David Norton's New Cambridge Bible is an excellent example of the sort of updating that I have in mind.
Thanks for that "prayer" bit from the C of E (could fill in nicely for some NO stuff). Good God. Revulsion for that kind of thing has nothing to do with snobbishness–I refuse to eat some things in consideration of my health more than my palate. It boggles the mind to imagine what sort of evil, nature-hating, soul-destroying, mind-numbingly literalist, New Speakish ideology underlies that pedantic piece of foolishness. That prayer is, in a nutshell, what is wrong with the world.