Journeying through Life with the Book of Common Prayer

Date: 07 November 1998
Author: The Hon Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG Justice of the High Court of Australia
Type: Address during the Choral Eucharist
Event: Prayer Book Society, Church of St Mary the Virgin
Location: Sydney

PRAYER BOOK SOCIETY CHURCH OF ST MARY THE VIRGIN
WAVERLEY, SYDNEY
ADDRESS DURING THE CHORAL EUCHARIST
SATURDAY 7 NOVEMBER 1998
JOURNEYING THROUGH LIFE WITH THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
The Hon Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG^*

BEGINNINGS

I have it on the authority of my father - whom I have never known to tell a lie - that I owe my existence to the Book of Common Prayer. At the age of 15, on a Sunday morning, he had arranged to meet his latest flame on Coogee Beach. However, somehow his footsteps that morning took him past St Martin's Anglican Church, Kensington. Morning Prayer was underway. The allures of the beach gave way to the irresistible attractions of the familiar liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer. He entered the Church, met my mother and the rest followed. Later, when St Martin's was burnt to the ground, he accused my mother, I hope in jest, of a serious prevarication.

I suppose the point at which he entered, mid-way in the service, was during the beautiful responses:

Answer:

Priest:

Answer:

Priest:

Answer:

My mother's family had come to Australia from Ulster. They were rather relieved to find that my father was an Anglican for the 1930s were days of fierce sectarianism. My parents were married at St John's Church, Darlinghurst. The celebrant was Canon Lucas. The service was conducted according to the Form of Solemnisation of Matrimony provided in the Book of Common Prayer. My mother often told me that, in her day, there was no new fangled notion of equal promises between the spouses. Those which she gave were in the old form:

My mother so answered and she kept her promises for more than sixty-one years. After the service, the small family group of modest means walked to a cafe in Kings Cross for a limited celebration, for these were Depression days.

When a suspected bout with influenza seemed to afflict my mother two years later she went to the doctor and discovered that the influenza was me. I was expected to come into this world at the War Memorial Hospital not far from this Church. But as usual, I made a dramatic entry. I had to be rushed to Crown Street Women's Hospital for my birth. I was baptised at St John's Church, Darlinghurst. On my behalf, my godfather, rather bravely I think, made the renunciations required by the provisions in the Book of Common Prayer for the Ministration of Public Baptism of Infants:

Answer:

After steadfastly pronouncing his belief in the Creed, my godfather, on my behalf, expressed his desire that I be baptised in this Faith:

I was not immediately conscious of these solemn promises. But I soon became aware of the Book of Common Prayer, growing up as I did in the Anglican tradition of the Christian faith. As a small child I was sent first to Wesley Methodist Church on Concord Road, Concord. I am still inclined to sing hymns with a Methodist pace and fervour. There is no doubt that my Wesleyan interlude left its mark on my attitudes as we are told, it did on the Prime Minister. But when I was old enough, at say age 10 years, to cross the Parramatta Road at Concord, I transferred my allegiance to St Andrew's Anglican Church at Strathfield. There began my conscious journey with the Book of Common Prayer.

I sang in the St Andrew's Church choir and became something of a nuisance because of a proneness to faint during the services. It was probably low blood pressure; but I have been known to claim it as a kind of childhood saintly rapture. Certainly I learned to love the order of service for Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. I can still hear the Reverend C W Dillon intoning the opening words:

The familiar course of the service would then unfold. I would listen attentively to the second Collect for Peace:

Amen

In my naive childhood perceptions, I believed for a long time that God must have a special love of Concord, New South Wales, where I was on my knees. Certainly, in those days of simplicity, everything in life seemed specially blessed.

The Collects were quickly followed by the Prayer for the King's Majesty:

As these prayers were said, followed by the Prayer for the Royal Family, I would look to the altar with the cross of the risen Christ. Above it hung the Union flag and the Australian flag, prominence being given to the former whose gaudy bunting fell on the right.

At school, the Anglican classes were always far the biggest, for ours was then the largest Christian denomination in Australia. "C of E" as we called it. At Fort Street High School, scripture classes were given by the new Dean of Sydney, the Very Reverend Dr Stuart Barton Babbage. Eventually, he organised a group of students to be confirmed in St Andrew's Cathedral before Bishop Hilliard, with his shock of white hair. I was one of them. The Order of Confirmation followed The Book of Common Prayer. I was required to give an audible and affirmative answer to the Bishop's question:

Satisfied by my affirmation, the Bishop prayed:

At about this time, my father gave me, at successive Christmases, two sets of recordings that were profoundly to affect my life. I played them often. The one was a recording of the soundtrack of a Shakespearian film with Olivier, Gielgood and other masters of spoken English. The other was a set of records produced by the BBC The Sounds of Time. Here were the voices of Hitler, Churchill and many actors of the then recent War. The series finished with the magnificent voice of Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher, who was later to preside at the Coronation, solemnising the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. The Book of Common Prayer was written with the voices of clerics like Fisher in mind:

Amen

In those day we were unembarrassed to refer to the third element that rounded the Trinity as a "ghost". In university days, I had a friend who would only permit himself one exclamation akin to swearing. It was "Ghost!". In my Protestant youth I regarded it as mildly shocking.

ADULTHOOD

In the course of my adult life the Anglican Church, like the Roman Catholic Church, has undergone remarkable changes to its liturgy. Dr Barry Spurr in his book The Word in the Desert describes how the changes have been radical in each Church; but more so in the Roman rite, as the services were translated into the vernacular tongues, just as Luther had demanded.

The alterations to the Anglican form of service have involved "the replacement of the Cranmerian idiom with services in modern English". According to Dr Spurr these changes have led to "vociferous protest, especially from the laity, and accompanied by an acceleration of the declining Church attendance they were supposed to assist in arresting".

Many times, in many fields of endeavour, I have returned to The Book of Common Prayer for inspiration. Being of the age I am, I would not resort to the new Prayerbook but to the tried and trusted edition of my childhood at St Andrew's Concord with its comfortable and familiar language and the cadences of the English of the first Elizabeth. Having to address an international AIDS conference in Vancouver a few years back, I looked to the Order of Service for the Visitation of the Sick. The language is beautiful and comforting:

And later in that service the priest may say:

Recently, I was invited to address the St Thomas More Society in Auckland. I did so in the presence of the Roman Catholic Archbishop and Catholic members of the legal profession of New Zealand. I chose as my theme Thomas More and Martin Luther. They were, as you know, contemporaries - both stubborn, principled, difficult men of the Universal Church. I took the occasion to consider the lessons of Luther and the other reformers within the Church. This took me back to the thirty-nine Articles of Religion agreed by the English clergy in 1562 "for the avoiding of diversities of opinion and for the establishing of consent touching true religion". These Articles are found at the back of The Book of Common Prayer. So many of the Articles, hotly contested at their time of making, would now be commonly accepted. Take for example, the 24th "Of speaking in the Congregation in such a Tongue as the People understandeth". Or take Article 30:

Almost certainly, other Articles will be embraced in time by the Roman Church, including the 32nd "Of the Marriage of Priests". For it is for priests "at their own discretion, as they shall judge the same to serve better to godliness" to decide whether they should or should not marry. I am not sure whether I convinced my Auckland audience. But I certainly convinced myself of the truth of these things, for the Articles of Religion speak to me with logic and still contemporary persuasiveness.

ENDINGS

The Book of Common Prayer is a true companion throughout life. When, in August, my mother died, I returned to Stuart Barton Babbage and he conducted her funeral service. We composed the Order of Service as a happy mixture of the old Book of Common Prayer and the new Prayerbook with its simpler and more modern, less ornate language.

In hospital, on my mother's last days, the Roman Catholic Chaplain, Father Brendan Quirk, visited her room. He went through the Catholic service for the Visitation of the Sick. I was nervous lest this would upset my mother, the daughter of a loyal Orangeman. But she signified her consent by putting her hands in the position of prayer. It was a lovely service and what it lacked in the beauty of Cranmer's language, it more than made up in the youthful enthusiasm of Father Brendan. It taught once again, by the priest's words and my mother's action, the overwhelming unity of Christian people - indeed all people searching for meaning to life in godliness and in the Scriptures.

And then, at last, at the funeral, came the ominous words:

It is strange but true that the orderly form of service and the well laid out liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer can take you through life, literally, from baptism to committal. The very familiarity of the language is a re-assurance that, amongst life's chaos, there is a certain order. I, at least, have found this comforting in recent days.

Dr Spurr quotes John Donne's words:

How we can be sure of this, I am not certain. A few weeks ago, when in Apia, Samoa, I attended the service at All Saint's Church. It was White Sunday. A tradition borrowed from the Congregationalists has taken over all the churches of Samoa and Tonga: Catholic, Anglican and Protestant alike. All the children come dressed in white. They sing "action hymns". There is no sermon; but little dramas acted by the children to illustrate themes from Scripture. There were no Collects; no prayers for the Queen's Majesty; not even readings from Scripture. But it was, I knew, a profoundly spiritual occasion.

Glancing through the Prayerbook in use in Anglican churches in Polynesia, I noticed the changes that had been brought to the service as first designed by Cramner and the Church Fathers. The Collects were gone altogether . No longer was the Lord the "lover of concord". The rounded phrases which must be so obscure to people whose first language is not English have all but disappeared. Yet let there be no doubt that the conviction, faith and passion of the people seems stronger and deeper than we ordinarily witness in Australia or other Western countries. Perhaps, I thought, as I witnessed the White Sunday service, the beautiful language of The Book of Common Prayer is comfortable for me because it was the form of service I learned when I too was a child dressed in white. I did not need action hymns. My imagination could spring into action with the beautiful words of the service. Those words have been rattling away in my brain ever since. Like the Third Collect for Grace which I said in my mother's ear on the morning she died:

Amen

Churches must have settled orders of service. But ultimately each individual must find the means comfortable to him or her to find spiritual peace and meaning to life. Whilst I love The Book of Common Prayer, I do not insist upon it for others. I acknowledge that modern research shows that the new generations are impatient of wordy expositions. Brought up with electronic media, in an utterly different social environment and often in circumstances of family breakdown, they feel a need of more direct and simple speech. Their imaginations have not been nurtured to play upon words, to savour and love them, deriving from them beauty and subtlety. Hence the growth of Evangelical churches and the introduction of action hymns which seem so strange to older Anglicans. The Australian poet Les Murray once wrote that worship:

That may be true of us of a certain generation. It may yet be true again of future generations or of some of them. But we cannot ignore the evidence of changing modes of communication. The ultimate logic of insisting upon speaking in the tongue of the people, as our Church Fathers did, is that, as such speech alters, so must the Church's services. But there should always be a place for those questing for stillness, familiar words and phrases and prayers lovingly repeated over all the decades of life and over the centuries since the Book of Common Prayer was first written.

REFORM AND CONTINUITY

I have always seen it as a strength of the Anglican Church that it is a place of many mansions. There is somewhere in the Church for everyone; and that is how it should be. Years ago, I joined the Movement for the Ordination of Women and I had to disqualify myself from sitting in a case that unexpectedly came to court to challenge the lawfulness of such ordinations. The case was then decided by a court comprising two Catholics and a Jew. However, at least the Anglican Church is struggling with the issues of whether women can be ordained to the priesthood and whether the Church should not, in the light of greater knowledge, "review" (as Archbishop Rayner recently said) "the received tradition [on homosexuality] to see whether further light is to be shed on it".

Our Church is now encouraging the serious examination of these themes as befits a church of the Reformation. And it is here that we see still at work the wonderful mixture of tradition and continuity (on the one hand) and reform and renewal (on the other) that is the Anglican Church. We are not so hidebound that we refuse discussion of change, and change itself, for that would be out of harmony with the Reformation origins of the Church. Yet we seek to place change in the context of a continuous Church tradition in which we strive to find a place for all believers. As the Preface to The Book of Common Prayer says of liturgy:

England

A Church of the mean, avoiding too much stiffness and too much alteration, is the Anglican Church of Australia. In the matter of liturgy it will surely keep a place and occasions for the old forms of service that are so much part of the spiritualism of people brought up in their use. But it will move, as well, with the times to welcome new ideas comfortable to the tongues and thoughts of new people and new generations. And they will not be turned away but welcomed in a changing Church. That tends to be the genius of English-speaking people in their civil institutions. It tends to be the genius of the Anglican church in matters religious and liturgical. And that is how most of us like it to be out of our respect for the diversity of Australian people. Diversity is the badge of freedom.

Let me finish with part of the Prayer of St Chrysostom said at the end of the Services of Morning and Evening Prayer:

Amen