Cranmer and the English prayer book

Thomas Cranmer is the Archbishop of Canterbury who survives Henry VIII — which requires considerable theological flexibility — and then under the young Protestant king Edward VI produces the document that will define Anglican Christianity for five centuries.

The Book of Common Prayer, first issued in 1549 and revised in 1552, is one of the great achievements of the English language and one of the most influential liturgical documents in history. Cranmer's genius is the genius of synthesis: he takes the medieval Latin liturgy, strips it of what the Reformation cannot accept, translates what remains into English of extraordinary beauty, and adds the Reformed theological content that the new church requires.

The result is a liturgy that sounds ancient and is genuinely new — that feels Catholic in its rhythm and is Protestant in its content, that can be followed by the barely literate and savored by scholars.

The collect for purity — Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid — is Cranmer's English rendering of a medieval Latin prayer. The general confession — We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep — is his. The comfortable words — Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden — are his arrangement.

These words will be said over the dying and the newly born, over the married and the mourning, in every corner of the English-speaking world, for the next five centuries.

Cranmer does not know this. He is managing a religious settlement that satisfies almost nobody completely, in a country that has changed its official religion three times in twenty years.

Cranmer's prayer is addressed to the God unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.

This is the starting point of authentic worship: the recognition that you are already fully known. There is no presentation to manage, no image to project, no version of yourself that will impress or deceive the one you are addressing.

The prayer does not ask God to see you. It acknowledges that he already does — completely, without remainder — and asks that what he sees be cleansed rather than hidden.

Most of our prayers, if we are honest, are addressed to a God we are trying to manage. Cranmer's collect cuts through that immediately: all desires known. No secrets hid. You cannot hide here. You do not need to.

What would it mean to come to prayer in that posture — not presenting a version of yourself but simply appearing, known, asking to be cleansed?