"Vain Repetitions"?

"For we cannot but all find by our own experience how difficult it is to fasten anything that is truly good, either upon ourselves or others; and that it is rarely, if ever, effected without frequent repetitions of it. Whatsoever good things we hear only once, or now and then, though, perhaps, upon the hearing of them, they may swim for awhile in our brains, yet they seldom sink down into our hearts, so as to move and sway the affections, as it is necessary they should do, in order to our being edified by them."  
-- William Beveridge, from A Sermon on the Excellency and Usefulness of the Common Prayer (1681)


As a neophyte Anglican whose formation was thoroughly Anabaptist and Evangelical, I have found myself wrestling with the fact that my recitation of the morning office (and other services from the Prayer Book) is sometimes just that--a recitation of words in which neither my mind nor my heart are engaged.  I do not want to become the sort of person who deceives himself into thinking that external piety is equivalent to a vital relationship with the risen and present Christ.  So when I recite the Benedictus or the Lord's Prayer with scarcely a thought attached to the words, I fear that I am becoming precisely that sort of person.  At the same time, I have decided to set down roots in the Anglican tradition, with which Prayer Book spirituality is intimately connected.  This commitment and this fear raises the question of the value of set forms of prayer.

Happily others have faced this same question before.  The Rev. William Beveridge is one such person, who along with other seventeenth century Anglican divines thought through this precise question in response to criticisms raised by Puritans.  The quote from a sermon he gave at St. Peter's, Cornhill (where he was vicar), with which I began this post is perhaps the best answer I have found.  Beveridge's answer is valuable because he recognizes the necessity that prayer affect the state of the heart, and maintains the value of set prayer precisely in contributing to the change of affections it has the potential to render.  Set prayers are valuable because through repetition of "good things," they are able to "move and sway the affections."  That the prayers in the Prayer Book are almost entirely composed of strings of scriptural references and allusions provides assurance that they are "good things', that is, that they are edifying to my faith and the faith of the Church (cf. 1 Cor 14:26, the text on which Beveridge's sermon was based).  Thus, the value of praying set forms is like that of regularly performing the same physical exercises; the latter forming muscles through repetition, the former serving "to raise up my desires to those good things which are prayed for, to fix my mind wholly upon God."

Of course, Beveridge and others understood set forms of prayer as properly belonging to what they called "public devotions."  They did not think of set forms of prayer as a panacea for a robust life of prayer, but also emphasized the necessity of private, extemporaneous prayer.  In speaking of this they emphasize strongly mastery of one's desires.  For example, Richard Baxter wrote in 1647,

"Keep [thy heart] close to the business [of prayer] until thou have obtained thine end...Call in assistance also from God; mix ejaculations with thy cogitations and soliloquies, till having seriously pleaded the case with thy heart, and reverently pleaded the case with God, thou hast pleaded thyself from a clod to a flame, from a forgetful sinner to a mindful lover; from a lover of the world to a thirster after God, from a fearful coward to a resolved Christian, from an unfruitful sadness to a joyful life."

 And Joseph Hall in 1643 exhorted us to take the smallest occasion as a "holy hint of raising our hearts up to our God."  For example, he suggests praying "Wash Thou me, O Lord, and I shall be whiter than snow" (Psalm 51:7b) when washing one's hands.  Through such exercises, he hopes to encourage "a continual acknowledgment" of God

These Anglican divines understood that we humans are literally creatures of habit, and that formation of the habits of loving God and neighbor with our whole self requires diligent training.

[NB: Rt. Rev. Anthony Burton, the rector at Church of the Incarnation, where I am an intern this summer through Duke Divinity School's Field Education program, gave me the book from which the quotations are taken:  Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illustrated from the religious literature of the seventeenth century, eds. Paul Elmer More and Frank Leslie Cross (London: S.P.C.K., 1962).]