Nouslife: Call and Response: Litanies for Congregational Prayer

02 August 2019

Call and Response: Litanies for Congregational Prayer — recommend?

Okay, so I have to admit that I'm a bit of a liturgy buff, I have a particular interest in liturgies for daily prayer and I'm also drawn to litanies and preces. I had to consciously rein myself back from overusing the latter in Book of Our Common Prayer. The scope of this book, then, grabbed my attention. Especially so because it promised, "Written with attention to beauty, theological resonance, and justice-mindedness," All good and often the first is ignored. So the question I approach it with is whether it does those things. I think this book fulfils that brief.

To be sure, it's hard to review a prayer or collection of them without a reasonable amount of time to actually pray them. So having 30 days means that what I am doing is more like first impressions and whether there are things that at first view I think will be enticing me into prayer or not and also whether I think I can mind's-eye them in congregational settings I'm familiar with. Actually praying them with a congregation in a substantial enough amount of usage is a different question. I'll do my best.

So what about contents? Well, I was impressed and excited by the introduction 'How liturgy saved my life'. A succinct and human-centred in-life rationale for using what she calls 'intentional liturgy'. Probably I tend to call it 'pre-written liturgy' nowadays, but I know what she means and it is difficult to find a term which also implies 'those of you who think you don't use liturgy are kidding yourselves -it's just that you don't write it down'. But this chapter in the book is one I think I shall try to encourage some people I'm in conversation with to read to help them to 'get' what I'm on about.

Then the "litanies". They're pretty varied and the contents pages breaks them into different section and there really is a wide selection of topics: humility; stillness; government; midwives; lament; 'terrorized city'! ; doing hard things; ordination; death; Advent; Lent and all sorts of other things. So I decided I would sample various ones that caught my interest.

Something to say was that I realised that my working definition of a litany is different to Fran's. I was expecting less variation on the response parts; for me that's the essential difference between a litany and preces; that in the former the responses tend to be more constant so the congregation can often respond without seeing the words. However, I do recognise that this is not necessarily how the dictionary puts it over. And I do like preces -my own work is full of them. And, in fact, as I read them in this book, several times I felt that chunks would fit well with some of the prayer forms in Book of Our Common Prayer. For example much of the Meekness litany would work in the last phase of the Lord's prayer pattern. I did wonder whether an assemblage of Fran's litanies could be constructed in the Lord's prayer pattern, maybe I'll give that a go

The litanies in Fran's book are often quite concept-dense in the ideas and reflections embedded in them. I would commend them for a meditative (slow) reading rather than racing through them. I also suspect that one-off usage will not do right by them: I suspect that using them several times in a period of days or weeks would enable the richness of the imagery and insight woven through them to unfurl within a soul.

Some of the forms had large sections of litanies in the sense of my normal working definition, and these were nice, though I suspect that with a congregation I might seek to expand on them a bit to get a sense of exploring meaning and of rhythm.

One use I imagined for them was in a prayer room or chapel where there are prayers posted to help. I also felt that this is one of the few e-books I have read that I might want to get as a hard copy; the easier to refer to when assembling acts of worship to lead.

Definitely worth getting as a resource for worship.

Call and Response: Litanies for Congregational Prayer — Fran Pratt: contemporary liturgy for the post-modern church.