Daily office: in defence of set prayers

I've just been writing some stuff on daily offices and set-prayer liturgies and I think that Tom Allen's thought on the daily office are well worth reading.I'd like to add a bit more:
here's a chunk of what I have been working on for my forthcoming book "Praying the Pattern. The Lord's Prayer as Framework for Prayer and Life."

Historical roots
For those less familiar with this way of regular prayer I add a few notes about 'offices' of prayer. Early on in the church's history Christians began to meet together to pray together. The is some evidence that one of the patterns was to pray three times a day -using the Lord's prayer. In time communities of monastics would meet together to pray, say, sing Psalms together.

There also arose the practice among the non-monastic Christians of meeting together for an evening prayer in which lighting lamps and songs to the glory and light of Christ was a spectacular part. These patterns gave rise, in various ways, to the regular, daily prayers that are a feature of 'liturgical' churches where there is a set order of service and usually sequential reading of scripture along with the use of Psalmody and scriptural and early songs called canticles.

The Lord's prayer was incorporated into the monastic and 'cathedral' offices. I wonder what might have happened though if the Lord's prayer had become the mainstay of praying rather than those other developments? Perhaps something like the offices following later in this section would have grown up. In a sense these offfices of the Lord's Prayer are an attempt to reach back beyond some corporate prayer developments to the Lord's prayer yet to do so in a way that takes up some of the good developments from the offices as they have generally developed.

Why pray set prayers?
Now it should be acknowledged that 'office' style -liturgical- praying suits some personalities better than others and fits some times of life better than others. However, I would like to point out some of the benefits of set-prayer liturgical praying for those less used to it. Some people denigrate using set prayers because it takes away the immediacy of relating to God and is suspected of being inauthentic, a sign that one is avoiding a real relationship with God and just babbling words which quickly become rote and meaningless.

Notice that I am using the term 'set-prayers' in preference to 'liturgy'. Liturgy is a patterning of prayer together and can be formal or informal and it can use set prayers or be totally extempore. Quite a lot of prayer together has elements of both. When people talk about liturgy, very often they actually mean the use of set-prayers in an overall framework of a service. It is worth noticing that in practice having a framework is common even in groups or services where there are no set-prayers apparent. It is also noticible that set-prayers or responses often appear in such circumstances. It is not unusual for Anglican clergy to be invited to help lead and preach at a service in a "non-liturgical" church who will be told that the church in question doesn't have any liturgy so it would be quite okay to do anything they like. However, when specific requests begin to be made about the order of events, it quickly becomes apparent that there are certain unspoken rules for the order of events that have to be obeyed or the congregation will become restless or upset.

Similarly many a 'non-liturgical' assembly will have certain phrases that will be used regularly and often evoke particular responses. I have been in a Pentecostal church where the response "And bless his holy name" was regularly used in response to a certain cue phrase by the leader. I not infrequently find that if the leader of the moment says "And all God's people said,", the congregation will reply "Aymen" (even down to the Amercian pronunciation). In many churches "Allaluia" and "Amen" are said quite often and it becomes quite apparent that there are rules about when they should and should not be said. So the issue is not the use or non-use of set prayers and phrases, but the frequency and whether they are written down or just in people's heads.

How do we talk to God?
One of the objections to set-prayers is expressed in the analogy with human conversation: "You don't talk to your friends or relatives in formal set phrases, so why do it with God?" There are a number of things that are crying out to be said in response to this. One of them is to note that the analogy is incomplete in that it only refers to speaking. Quite often the people who would employ this analogy to dismiss set-prayers are very happy to sing to God. It might be noted that for a lot of people the analogy would actually rule out singing to God since they don't sing to their friends and relatives and the words of a song are nothing if not 'formal set phrases'. So if singing to God is okay then perhaps it isn't so big a step to drop the tune and simply speak chorally to God.

The analogy is also missing some dimensions of human verbal interaction that would be interesting to be included in the analogy.In actual fact we often do speak to others, even intimate others, in formal set phrases. We have set phrases for greetings, for showing appreciation, leave-taking, excusing and many of these phrases have proper set responses too. The function of these kinds of phrases is to enable us to interact at points where having to find new words to say each time migh be quite taxing. These phrases function to oil the wheels of communication, to keep channels open and maintain a sense of positive connection. That is without also counting in the times when we use set phrases or even whole paragraphs in order to accomplish certain ends. Promises in a wedding can be done informally, but it is better to have a set passage or to have written it down so that everything that should be said is said at the crucial moment. We might even resort to speaking poetry to one another or quoting passages from books or poems because the words say more eloquently what we want to say and the added value of their beauty or the cachet of their cultural resonance makes them more desirable to use in sometimes quite intimate situations.

What I am trying to get over here in these last few paragraphs is that set prayers can be very appropriate and have analogies in human-to-human interactions which we seem to forget. In addition we might recall that God is not another human being and the access God has to our inner thoughts and the ability to read our hearts does mean that we should be wary of applying too literally standards drawn from human interpersonal communication. The real issues is what helps us to relate to God?

People have often found set-prayer liturgies helpful in various circum­stances where the alternatives are much less so. In the same way as some people "don't do breakfast", that is to say that they are not very good at conversation while they are still effectively coming round after sleep, so some people (perhaps the same ones) find that trying to be bright and breezy in prayer is beyond them. At such times a set-prayer office can be a godsend in helping to to keep open channels of communication with God and maintain that sense of positive relating even while feeling unable to contribute much by way of content and yet finding also that silence lapses into day dreaming.

Some people find they might go through extended periods when they find prayer to be harder than at other times, for them praying an office and joining with liturgical prayer can be a real help in maintaining a sense of positive connection with God and the things of God while they re-orientate themselves and their spiritual life.

Other people feel that they are not eloquent and that words that are well-honed by minds who are good with words and by usage and further reflection are very good at expressing their prayer, particularly with other people. In addition, they may further feel that by using such words in their prayers, they are learning to pray better from those who have written the prayers. Many of us learn to pray in part from those we pray with, written prayers simply extend the 'classroom' to include pray-ers not physically present.

Some would argue also that using tried and tested prayers rescues us from praying theologically inept prayers. I am not so happy with this reason as it seems to denigrate the halting prayers of those new to faith or without 'sufficient' instruction in Christian thinking.I think that God is more honoured by the attempt to pray than worried by the misunderstandings of the pray-er. And let's face it, all of us still have things to learn and it's likely that our ignorance will show up in our praying from time to time. Nvertheless, the positive side of this argument is supportable: set prayers can help us learn to pray.