A prayer worth repeating
Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent: create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission, and forgiveness, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Each day in Lent, Anglicans repeat this prayer. It has an interesting provenance. In the Latin service that Thomas Cranmer inherited, the Collect for Ash Wednesday roughly translated into English, reads:
Grant, O Lord, that thy faithful people may enter on this solemn fast with suitable piety, and go through it with unmolested devotion.
But Cranmer preferred something different. As John Dowden writes in The Workmanship of the Prayer Book:
there are indications that Cranmer and his fellows were conscious of a certain baldness or undue severity, and of a certain deficiency of warmth that detracted from the acknowledged merits of some of the Latin Collects.
Warmth is an aspect of the Prayer Book that I think is under-appreciated nowadays. The frequency with which it mentions the heart, the manner in which its prayers and confessions acknowledge our sin yet avoid sounding self-indulgent, the directness yet respect with which it addresses the Divine, the preference it has for speaking in the first-person plural—all of these aspects of the Prayer Book mean that its prayers can be said with great feeling. Cranmer’s collect for Lent is a perfect example. How did he find his words?
Earlier in the inherited Ash Wednesday service, when the ashes that would be used in the ceremony were blessed, the priest began by saying:
Almighty and everlasting God, who hath compassion upon all men, and hateth nothing that thou hast made, passing over the sins of men because of their repentence; who also succourest them that labour in necessity, vouchsafe to bless and sanctify these ashes…
Already in this rough translation of the Latin, one might notice a familiar phrase or two. The opening, ‘Almighty and everlasting God,’ appears elsewhere in the Prayer Book. Two examples come to mind: the collect for the monarch in the service of Holy Communion (Almighty and everlasting God, we are taught by thy holy word that the hearts of kings are in thy rule and governance…). Also in the baptism service (Almighty and everlasting God, heavenly father, we give thee humble thanks for that thou has vouchsafed to call us to the knowledge of thy grace and faith in thee…). Cranmer kept this opening address in his prayer for Lent.
Cranmer also kept the appeal to our God—a God who ‘hateth nothing that thou hast made.’ As the Tutorial Prayer Book notes, this phrase is ‘a rare instance of the use of the devotional Apocrypha in the Book of Common Prayer.’ It’s a quotation from the Book of Wisdom, a Greek Jewish text that is believed to have been composed in Alexandria, Egypt and which appears in the Septuagint. Chapter 11, verses 24-26, reads:
For you love all things that exist,
and detest none of the things that you have made,
for you would not have made anything if you had hated it.
How would anything have endured if you had not willed it?
Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved?
You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living.
Cranmer kept this reference and, characteristically, added more scripture to it. The petition which follows is likely a quotation from Psalm 51, the psalm appointed for Ash Wednesday. Here are verses 1, 10, and 17.
Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness:
according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions…
Create in me a clean heart, O God;
and renew a right spirit within me…
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit:
a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
Cranmer distilled this into a twin petition. Instead of ‘create and renew’, he paired Latin (create from creare, to produce) with Old English (make from macian, of West Germanic origin, from a base meaning ‘fitting’). Create and make in us new and contrite hearts.
Finally, in the prayer’s aspiration, he concluded with what I believe is a reference to the Apostles’ Creed. In one of the final lines of the Creed, we declare our faith in ‘remissionem peccatorum,’ that is, the forgiveness of sins. Cranmer, perhaps wanting to emphasise Christ’s authority in this regard, repeats his pairing of the Latin and the Old English—remission and forgiveness—and names Our Lord directly.
In this manner, we have our Collect, said first on Ash Wednesday, and again each day of Lent. It maintains the merits of our Latin inheritance, that is the prayer which notes the solemnity of Lent and our need for Divine protection, but it also adds a warmth and depth of feeling, repeating both our petition to God and our desired result.
It is a prayer worth repeating.
Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent: create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission, and forgiveness, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.