So, I just recently got a 1979 BCP and NRSV Bible combination book using some of my COVID-19 stimulus money that Rep. Pelosi and Senator Romney won for me. It’s a very, very nice looking Book. It’s perfect for praying the Daily Office, with almost the convenience of an app, but with the look and feel of a high end book. Also, I like not praying with the same device I use for “profane” internet browsing! The books was fairly expensive, and I feel a bit guilty about buying it, but what’s done is done, and I like using it. And unlike a phone, this book will last me for a lifetime.
I make no apologies for the use of the 1979 Prayer Book. I was born in the 80s and grew up with the United Methodist Hymnal in the pews, and orders of service based on the United Methodist Book of Worship. I read and still read the NRSV Bible. The RSV was supplanted while I was in elementry school, and I only discovered the KJV Bible and the old liturgies when I was a young adult. I think the old liturgies are beautiful, and I make a point of watching 1662 Evensong from Trinity College in Cambridge (UK not MA), and I went out of my way to attend a midweek Holy Communion from the 1928 BCP. But “thee and thou” are not natural words that come to me when I talk to God. And for everyday use I find 1979 Rite II serves me best. (Though I do prefer the traditional 23rd Psalm and Lord’s Prayer.) However, having become familiar with the old BCP, I wound up taping four prayers from the old American 1928 BCP into the rear cover of my fancy new BCP and Bible combination. These are the prayers “In Time of Great Sickness and Mortality”, “In Time of Dearth and Famine”, “In Time of Calamity”, and “For Fair Weather”. I did so because no equivalent prayers are found in the equivalent section of the 1979 BCP. I first used the prayer for fair weather several years ago (I think in 2018) after it rained for nearly 3 weeks straight and Buckeye Lake surrounded my back porch. I should have also used it again at the beginning of April when the floods washed out half of Licking County. I’ve been using the prayers in time of great sickness and in time of calamity since the shelter in place orders hit. I haven’t had to use the prayer for famines yet, but give it time and I’m sure I will.
In general, the revisers of the 1979 BCP did a good job of updating the language of the prayer book and recovering the most ancient forms of the liturgy. But they were baby boomers, shaped by America’s mid-20th-century ease and prosperity, and they neglected to include many of the prayers of a desperate people who are crying to God for deliverance.
The Vietnam war was traumatic, but it was also overseas, and it affected most Americans indirectly rather than directly. I don’t know if any of the principal authors of the 1979 BCP were veterans of WWI, II, Korea or Vietnam. That’s worth finding out.
By contrast the authors of the 1928 BCP had the memory of what the 1917-18 Influenza Pandemic fresh in their minds – they’d all survived, many of their friends had not. They would go on to survive the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression (or not, as the case may be). There were also the two World Wars, but of course, those were indirect rather than direct traumas for the USA.
