Read Online And Then There Were Nuns by Jane Christmas - Free Book Online Page A

drives me crazy!”
    The argument is also made that non-gender–specific language for God prevents us from putting God in a box. “God is so much more than ‘Him,’ than ‘Father,’” Sister Sue told me later on. “God transcends all, and that includes masculine, feminine, neutral language. God never self-identified as male or female; we assigned God’s gender.”
    Lorraine and I shared a strong affection for The Book of Common Prayer , the four-hundred-year-old Anglican prayer book, and often our rants about the tinkering and politically correct fastidiousness going on in the present-day church would invariably cycle back to the BCP , as it is known colloquially.
    Much more than a collection of liturgies for morning prayer, evening prayer, Holy Communion, funerals, weddings, and baptisms, the BCP contains some of the most soulful and intimate language you could find. There is not a pedestrian prayer in the entire book, and its elegant wording makes you strive to be something better than you are.
    Some thirty years ago, The Book of Common Prayer was relegated to the sidelines when The Book of Alternative Services was introduced in Canada. (Revised versions also appeared in the United States as The New American Prayer Book and in Great Britain as Common Worship .) It was done to make the prayer book more accessible, which was ecclesiastical code for “modernizing it so that we can get more bums in pews and by extension more cash in the collection plate.” But the tinkerers missed the point of the BCP and of religion itself: dumbing down a prayer book doesn’t make it more accessible; it insults the reader by assuming she or he is too stupid to understand the prayers in their Elizabethan form. For who cannot comprehend these lines from the General Confession?
    Almighty and most merciful father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep; we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.
    While younger people may indeed have trouble making sense of some of the ancient wording in the BCP —though, really, they just need someone to read it with them a few times—it is a prayer book of beautiful and comforting language for adults, for people who have lived a bit and are grappling with life’s often overwhelming passages.
    I never understood why the church was so anxious to bring out a new book. You don’t rewrite Shakespeare’s sonnets to make them more understandable; you grow in understanding with the words. Prayers are not portals to instant gratification; they are meditations. The prayers I read when I was sixteen have taken on new meaning and relevance as I moved through the decades and through pivotal experiences.
    â€œThere was a prayer we said at the Eucharist today,” I said. “Did you catch it? I’d never heard it before; it had all sorts of space imagery.”
    â€œOh God,” Lorraine groaned. “It’s officially known as Eucharistic Prayer number four, but I call it the Star Wars prayer. All that language referring to interstellar space and galaxies; you half expect Darth Vader to pop up.”
    The sisters were firm adopters of The Book of Alternative Services, and they frequently added prayers from different Anglican sources to the offices. I had a grudging admiration for their desire to pray outside the book; though some of the language in the new prayers did not evoke the holiest of images. Whenever they said the doxology in its modern, androgynous version—“Glory to God, Source of all Being, eternal Word and Holy Spirit”—I felt as if I had been thrown into a scene from Children of the Corn.
    ( 2:ix )
    IT HAD to happen, didn’t it? A few things about convent life started to niggle, as my Colin-or-the-convent dilemma bore down on me.
    Before I arrived at St. John’s, someone had mentioned that it would not be the chastity vow I would struggle with but the