Fr Ben Garren

Dear Siblings in Christ,

“Eternal Spirit, Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver” is the opening to a meditation on The Lord’s Prayer that most of us first encountered in the New Zealand Prayer Book. The author of this rendering was Fr Jim Cotter and he first published it in his book Out of Silence. This text, along with most of Cotter’s work, were meditations and variations on liturgies found within the Book of Common Prayer. The goal of his work was never to supplant the Book of Common Prayer but to help others deepen their prayers life with the text by sharing how the text had deepened his life as a poet and servant of God.

The uniqueness of Cotter’s work is that his skill as a wordsmith allowed him to readily get his work published, and then included occasionally in revisions of the Book of Common Prayer occurring across the Anglican Communion. The process, of slowly annotating the Book of Common Prayer one uses for personal devotion, of journaling out renderings of prayers and psalms that become particularly meaningful, of simply meditating on how ways to expand or simplify certain traditional prayers is a common expectation of the Anglican tradition.

Our commemoration today is Lancelot Andrewes. He is perhaps best known as a principal translator and editor of the King James Version of the Bible and for this reason the entirety of his manuscripts, including personal notebooks and journals, was preserved. Amidst this was his journal of Private Prayers, the bulk of the text is ways to expand the Daily Office with long sections of silent meditation on its words. This is inclusive of his variation on the Lord’s Prayer, which he expanded to several pages and interwove sections from the letters of Paul that he felt best expanded a section of the prayer.

His invocation reads “O Lord, I Have neither known thee as I ought & might have done, neither as I have known thee, have I gloryfied thy name, or been thankful unto thee; and woe is me that I have not.” Which in a different way but just as Cotton does centuries later, asks us to look deeper into the words than we may initially, to go beyond how we are accustomed to encounter them.

My suggestion to you this day is to try out this practice of letting ourselves paraphrase, annotate, and reimagine the prayers we are accustomed to saying. Not with the goal of rendering something better but with the longing to be able to pray them more deeply.

Pax,

—Ben