O Lord, deliver us from evil - the petitionary prayer

And while you're up - can you tidy up my house and build me some more book shelves?

I’m reading a couple of books with varying degrees of attentiveness: Andrew Linzey’s Animal Rites, Liturgies of Animal Care and Theodore Klauser’s A Short History of Western Liturgy. I will unlikely pass either of these excellent books on to friends - mostly because my friends tend to have genuinely interesting lives and are excited by subjects less arcane than the liturgies of the Christian Churches and the niceties of worship. BadMark, for instance, is gripping his beer stein a little more tightly as we approach the NFL play-offs. His team can be checked out here.

Andrew Linzey is an Anglican priest and a member of the faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford; he is the author of several books related to Christianity and animals, specifically examining the scriptures as they guide us to care for animals in our faith. His two most famous works are Animal Theology (1994) and Animal Gospel (1998).

A quick summary of Animal Rites can be read in this paragraph from the introduction (entitled When a Sparrow Falls: Reclaiming Animal-Friendly Spirituality). Linzey writes:

Our prayers - or lack of them - say something about ourselves: our hopes, our concerns, our dreams for a better world, and most obviously the things we really care about. Do Christians then not really care about animals? Have they not seen the world of God’s creation all around them teeming with millions of different forms of life?

We are not the first Christians to be concerned for animals and all of life's teeming millions. In Luke 12.6 Jesus says, "Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God's sight". Many of our Saints (St. John Chrysostom, St Basil the Great, and, famously St. Francis of Assisi) wrote and preached compassion for animals as an integral part of the teaching of Jesus Christ. Andrew Linzey culls, from the hundreds of years of church writings, their prayers and forms from them elements of a liturgy that says something of our concerns for better world for all of God's creation. Or at least acknowledges our lack of compassion, our lack of repentance and the hardness of our hearts.

Klauser's Short History is one hundred fifty pages of tightly worded prose. Klauser quickly herds the elements of the current liturgy (which means 'form or formulary according to which public religious worship is conducted', or basically: 'first you say this and then you do that and then you pray here'), separates the different elements according to their origins, and takes a moment to reflect here and there on different meanings. The Christian Liturgy is far from being static but it is rooted in religious services that are several thousand years old. As the early Church grew different practices and prayers were codified and standardized and 'rogue' elements were eliminated from worship. Prayers were no longer extempore, freeing the Bishops and priests from having to be inventive while maintaining high standards and staying 'on message'.

Klauser's book is interesting in pulling apart the history of each element of worship and allowing the reader to understand more clearly why our Church worship is as it is and to read meaning into its form. It also frees us to think about adding and subtracting different elements, to find the form of worship in our daily lives outside of limited Church schedules.

And if the Seahawks do make it to the Superbowl this year it will certainly be because of BadMark's incessant petitions to Our Creator.

xoxo

M