Liturgy
Alastair Roberts

Alastair Roberts writes:

The following is a quote from an interview with Garrison Keillor:

Having grown up in the Evangelical, sort of free-form fundamentalist church, I love the
liturgical church where we say words together that are not my words and not your words. That
really means a lot to me. I grew up listening to men stand up and invent prayers and the idea
was that the Spirit was leading them, but in fact they were composing them in their heads and
they were writing in a kind of faux King James style—big prayers and they were impressive, and
they were seeking to impress, there is just is no other way around it.

And in the name of Devotion they were doing these big set-piece prayers in which they were
bringing in stories from Scripture and admonishing people—that’s not prayer. But, when we
kneel down and go through a list, and we begin with prayers for leaders of our country and for
the nations of the world and then we come down to prayers for other churches and for bishops
and priests, and then we come down to those who are in need and those who are sick and we
think or we speak their names—to me this is prayer. This is prayer in which one throws oneself
before God without a heroic pose.

I believe that this insight is very significant. Liturgy is so important, precisely as borrowed
language. People complain about praying someone else’s words rather than their own in the
liturgy, but that is the precise point of liturgy. By ‘borrowing’ the language of the Church which
has been handed over to us (in tradition) we hand ourselves over to God and to each other (Peter
Candler explores this well in his latest book).

The ‘heroic pose’ that Keillor speaks of is one in which the speaker presents God with his own
words, deeming his own vocabulary to be sufficient. The reasoning behind such an approach is
that the most authentic way of being is that of spontaneity as opposed to imitation. Prayers of
spontaneity, no matter how rhetorically brilliant they are, will always fall short of truly public
speech. True public speech is shared language, where the words are not the speaker’s own.
Spontaneous speech always falls short, drawing attention to the speaker, who often has a desire
for people’s praise.

The language of liturgy is public language, precisely because it does not belong to any one
particular individual. It has been handed over to all of us and we are given to participate in it.
Such language has a pedagogical purpose. As Candler puts it: ‘To enter into this pedagogy is to
entrust oneself to a language which is not one’s own, yet which transforms one’s language and
orders it to God.’ Such language is a gift and not our own possession.

This is one of the reasons why the book of Psalms and things such as the Lord’s Prayer should be
central in our worship. The psalms and the Lord’s Prayer are words that God has given to us.
They are words that we ‘borrow’. As we ‘borrow’ these words we are participating in the
inspired speech of the Holy Spirit, which will serve to reform all of our language. Such

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