I remained in England for two years.

When I came back to America, I took up graduate studies at the University of Illinois. There was a small chapel across the street from the library, and I began going there daily for the service, or “Office” as it was called, of Evening Prayer.

The chapel looks something like a very tiny cathedral that has never been finished. There is no spire and no towers on the west front and no transept or apse. But the structure is tall and slender and graceful, made of gray stone in the “gothic” tradition. Like the church I had visited with my friend many years before, it spoke clearly, simply, and eloquently of the gospel mysteries in all of its design and its furnishings. Here was no “plant,” built primarily for meetings and activities, announcing to the world that the great doctor so-and-so was a vastly successful money-raiser and that here was a powerhouse of activity. The building was a sort of icon. It drew one’s attention to the gospel.

All buildings are icons. They all bespeak something. The spare simplicity of a clapboard New England church speaks of the demure austerity and purity that should mark the Christian’s heart and, hence, the Christian’s mode of life. The World Trade Center speaks of power and commerce and money. The Taj Mahal evinces the delicate, almost weightless, grace of a beautiful woman and of a man’s love for her. A Cape Cod cottage with its gray shingles and white trim conjures a world that is neat, civilized, salty, and well-weathered. We cannot put a roof on four walls without making a statement.

Although I myself had always loved the great cathedrals of Europe, as most tourists try to do, I looked on them as enormous monuments to misunderstanding. Awesome and sublime as they were, they represented an effort put into the wrong place, I felt. Those people should have been building with gold, silver, and precious stones in their hearts, not in their cities. It should have been their hearts, not the ribbed vaulting, rising to God.

What I had missed was that one does not cancel the other. Faith, at least as I had conceived of it, was so exclusively a matter of the inner man that it could not possibly be given a shape in the physical world except perhaps by acts of charity, although I greatly distrusted any talk of good works since that seemed somehow to controvert the doctrine of grace. All was to be unseen.

Once more, my outlook was unwittingly Buddhist or Manichaean. If reality lay in the unseen realm, then the physical realm ought to be forsworn or at least de-emphasized. Although I believed the doctrine of the Incarnation, I had not done much mulling over what it might mean. To anyone who was swept away by the great cathedrals I would have pointed out crisply that Jesus built no such edifices. In so doing, I would have ignored the overwhelming fact that, while He built no such edifices, He spoke words of such power and glory that they burned into the hearts of men and kindled all the skill and creativeness that was in them. His words did not spread a frost over human potential. They roused and vivified us and set us free to do all of our work for the glory of God, whether that work meant cups of cold water, prayers, building, baking, or typing. The Word became flesh. The word always becomes flesh. What is true in a man’s heart will take on the mantle of good works, or of stone, or of gilded illuminating around the border of a manuscript, or of well-baked bread.

The distrust of beauty that lay near the sources of my vision and piety betrayed a flaw. To pit beauty against faith, or beauty against good works, or beauty against humility and simplicity was to erect false distinctions. It was to imagine that the cathedrals, for example, were monuments to overweening pride, whereas many of them were dedicated to the Virgin, who is the very image of humility. Anyone who genuinely honors the Virgin is going to have simplicity and purity always before his eyes. She is no Amazon or strumpet or harridan. She will never encourage cruelty and self-assertion and hauteur. Her obedience was her exaltation; the mystery of grace always transfigures things this way, taking the things that are nothing and calling them into glorious being. Any kings and bishops who sought their own glory under the guise of honoring the Virgin in building great cathedrals were like the rest of us, happy enough to use “the Lord’s work” itself to write our names large across history.

Every day at five in the afternoon I closed my books in the English graduate reading room in the library and crossed the street to the chapel for Evening Prayer. The service took about twenty minutes. The Epistle and Gospel were read, psalms and scriptural canticles were recited, and prayers were said. It was spare in the extreme. Sometimes there were only two of us in the congregation besides the reader. There was nothing at all to appeal to any wish for pomp and ceremony. There was not even any music. There was certainly no variety. Every day followed the same pattern. Variety, apparently, was entirely irrelevant.

To someone not accustomed to disciplines like this, the picture might appear bleak. How can we go on, day after day, year after year, with the same routines? Does it not all dry up and die?

Yes, indeed it does dry up and die, if there is no taproot of life irrigating it. Just as the utter sameness of marriage dries up and dies if love departs, so will any routine. To the libertine accustomed to woman after woman, the man who returns day after day, year after year, to the same spouse, with no variety, appears unfortunate in the extreme. We must ask the man himself how things are.

He will tell us that routine is the very diagram of peace and freedom: breakfast, lunch, dinner; dawn, noonday, twilight; work, play, rest. If we can ever arrange our schedules to follow this pattern, we feel ourselves fortunate. Any Christian who prays daily will tell us that in order for the exercise to become a daily one, he had to find a time for it first of all, and then he had to order that time itself into a more or less unvarying routine. Variety is the last thing he wants here. When variety asserts itself, steadfastness flies.

My own evangelicalism, stressing as it did the “spiritual” nature of the devotional life, had lodged in me a certain distrust for repetition. Even though daily private prayers were vigorously encouraged, and even though I knew that my father pursued a most austere and unvarying routine in his own daily prayers, the notion of Christians’ gathering daily to repeat set prayers and canticles, with only the scriptural texts themselves supplying any variety, would have made me uneasy. I might have had the idea that a certain earnestness, and perhaps even fervor, ought to mark such gatherings and that people should be given a chance to share their concerns and to pray spontaneously.

Sharing and spontaneous prayer are salutary, but to assert this is to say nothing to the point. What about sheer routine? What about plain habit? What about prayer that does not look to earnestness and fervor for its validity?

The feet that the Church has been pursuing disciplines like this for many centuries, and that before that the Jews had done so, and that Jesus Himself and Mary and Joseph and the disciples were accustomed to such routines, would not have carried the day, in my mind. Judaism has been supplanted for one thing; the gospel brings us out of the droning of the synagogue into liberty. As for the Church, it very early lost its Pentecostal zeal, I thought. Naturally it settled down into routines.

Evangelicalism, encouraging a spirit of individual responsibility before the Bible, had made it possible for me to discount centuries of Christian practice. If I could not find a passage of Scripture spelling the matter out, then I felt I could abjure it. It did not occur to me that others before me—tens of thousands and millions of them—had been trying to pray and that their experience might help me. It did not occur to me that the book of Acts and the Epistles never pretend to give a picture of the Church as it settled into the long vigil of history. Once again, the notion of sola scriptura fostered a pert attitude in me. I took my cues from my own Bible reading; there was no such thing as “the wisdom of the Church.” It did not matter that this divine Word had been read and pondered by sage and holy men and women for two thousand years before my arrival.

What I was missing was that this “wisdom of the Church” came to nothing more than common sense and Christian obedience in learning some elementary things about prolonged Christian living. The Bible does not exist in a vacuum. It is profitable, I knew, “for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.”[10] I had memorized this text in Sunday school. But the sense in which all that doctrine and correction and instruction will take root in the Church and bear fruit in wise disciplines did not present itself to me. It was as though the Church had never really existed. It was as though the Bible had been written yesterday and I were the first man to open it.

Evangelicalism had never actually claimed this, of course. But somehow the general set of assumptions at work in its handling of the Bible left me with an impression like this.

I discovered, after months of being present at Evening Prayer, hearing the Scripture, and repeating the Magnificat and Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis, that, far from going dry, these texts were there, as it were, awaiting my bustling arrival at five o’clock. Like gracious tutors or wise old sages, they spoke gravely and magisterially to me, settling me, reordering my topsy-turvy priorities, and leading me once more back to the center where the human soul is at home.

“My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.” One wants to learn to say this, but the tussle of modern life, or of life in any century for that matter, does its best to crowd this out. “For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden. For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath magnified me: and holy is his Name.” So. This is what God our Savior does with our poor mortality. He exalts it. He magnifies it so that we may magnify Him. We sing this together with Mary.

Vistas like this awaited me at Evening Prayer. The Office did not so much stand apart from the crabbed responsibilities of my work in the library as gather them up and transfigure them. To come here was not to retreat into a shelter so much as to step into clarity. This was what life was about.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that once a day, far from being too often for devotion, was not enough. The monastic day, punctuated every three hours with the Office, came to make great sense to me. We in the world outside the cloister could not possibly order our lives thus, but God be thanked that there were Christians who, in behalf of all busy Christian people, did give themselves to this discipline. I had never thought of the monastic life as being vicarious in this way. I had thought that monks and nuns were in hot flight from the world. No one had ever told me anything at all about what Saint Benedict had in mind for these communities.

The Office of daily Evening Prayer taught me something that I could never have learned theoretically. I would have been able to argue down anyone who tried to tell me that the Office was a good thing. I was like all the people who know what is wrong with things like that: I knew nothing about it. The Office presented a discipline that was remote from anything I had hitherto known. If the Office itself could have replied to my burbling sureties as to what was wrong with it, or how dull it was in its repetitiousness, I think it would have said, quietly, “I have been here for many centuries. There are multitudes of holy souls who will testify in my behalf.”

During my graduate studies I came upon the works of a man named Lancelot Andrewes. He was bishop successively of Ely, Chichester, and Winchester during the reign of James I in England and was James’s favorite preacher. His sermons are to preaching what filet mignon is to food.

Andrewes worked out for himself a system of private prayer, which he entitled Preces Privatae (Private Prayers). He wrote it all down for himself in Greek and then in Latin. Somewhere I came into possession of an English translation.[11]

There are many forms of prayer in the book. The part that attracted my attention was the section called “Morning Prayers for a Week.” Eventually I pulled these pages carefully from the paperback edition that I owned and set them into a small black leather snap-ring notebook. I wanted to use them for my own prayers.

That was perhaps fifteen years ago. I still use them daily. What I had found to be true of the prayers at St. Andrew’s Church, and then of the Office of Evening Prayer, I have found to be true here: the discipline enables; the structure frees.

For many years I had tried, intermittently, to gird up my loins and settle into a faithful manner of daily prayer. But two difficulties always ran my efforts onto the shoals. First, sooner or later I found that I was neglecting them because I did not feel in the mood to pray. And second, when I did address myself to prayer, I found that I ran out of things to say.

I cannot pretend that Andrewes’s order for private morning prayers has kept me steady from the moment I adopted it. But at least it has steered me away from those two sets of shoals. Like the worship at St. Andrew’s Church and Evening Prayer at the university chapel, it has taught me that one’s coming to God has nothing to do with how one feels. One simply makes the act of prayer. It is analogous to the Jews’ bringing their alms and sacrifices to the temple: you do it because that is what the people of God do.

Moreover, in so doing, you discover that, far from being mere drab duty, it orders your life and undergirds it and gives it a rhythm. Any honest man will admit that prayer is indeed drab duty often, and if his inclinations are the only recourse he has to help him surmount the drabness, then things are bound to be sporadic; whereas, if he has learned to look on prayer as a plain habit, he will find that it is not so much of a struggle. He may have to struggle with the state of his soul often enough, but this will not bring his prayers to a halt since these are as objective a matter as were the turtle doves that Joseph and Mary brought to the Temple.

Of course, we do not have to have a set form of prayer in order to get into the steady habit of praying. As far as I know, my father’s early morning prayers were offered extemporaneously, daily, for fifty and more years. But he was an extraordinary man. I myself found, early in the game, that I could not depend on my own resources in the matter. I have had enthusiastic friends who have urged that the Holy Ghost can keep us always fresh and eager. I daresay He can, but I know very few Christians who are kept unflaggingly fresh and eager by the Holy Ghost. What we know of Him would give us reason to suppose that He is the architect of order, and that props and helps and disciplines are His ordinary methods, just as natural processes are the forms under which He continually brings new life out of the earth from seeds.

Evangelicalism had taught me the importance of prayer and had indeed taught me to pray. It had encouraged me to pray daily. But the impression I had formed was that one was more or less on one’s own here. The Holy Ghost would inspire me, and I would be able to pray. Eventually I came to learn that this general line of teaching has, fairly or unfairly, been called “enthusiasm” in the Church. The general tendency is to look for direct, personal experiences from heaven and to discount external structures and aids. Christian history has been marked by many vigorous examples of enthusiasm: the Montanists, and the Quakers, and even the Wesleyans have all been called enthusiasts, not because they were especially tumultuous, but because their teaching stressed the notion of direct communication from God to the soul, sometimes to the exclusion of more plodding and indirect techniques. If the testimony of nearly everyone I have known in evangelicalism may be at all credited, then I am not alone in having found the practice of daily prayer excessively difficult to maintain over long periods without any help.

Lancelot Andrewes supplied help to me here.

In his order for private prayers, each of the seven days of the week follows the same general sequence, but the actual words that constitute the parts of the prayer differ for each morning.

On Sunday, for example, he begins with “Through the tender compassions of our God, the Dayspring from on high hath visited us.” Friday has, simply, “Early shall my prayer come before Thee.” The overwhelming majority of what Andrewes includes in his order for prayer is drawn from Scripture, although he also draws on ancient Jewish texts, Greek texts from the early Church, and the writings of the Fathers. The simple opening statement for each day locates the prayer. It places it starkly before God, on a firmer footing than what is to be found in the bog of one’s own immediate concerns or feelings.

Then comes an act of commemoration. In this, following the seven days of Creation, one blesses God for His acts, which are recorded in Scripture as having occurred on that day On Sunday one blesses God for light, created on the first day-Glory be to thee, O Lord, glory be to thee, which didst create the light and lighten the world.” After enumerating a great number of the blessings that come to us by virtue of light including “the intellectual light, that which may be known of God, what is written of the law, oracles of the prophets, melody of psalms. . . ,” Andrewes includes another first-day event namely, the Resurrection. “By thy resurrection raise us up to newness of life. . . and, finally in this act of commemoration we find Pentecost, yet another first-day event: “Thou who on this day didst send down thy thrice holy Spirit on thy disciples-take It not withal from us, O Lord, but renew it day by day in us who supplicate thee.”

It may be seen already what this does to one’s prayers It sets them on a proper footing. One does not bustle into the Divine Presence with a frantic agenda of personal concerns. One takes one’s place with the morning stars who sang together with the archangelic host of heaven, and with all the company of the faithful, doing the thing that Adam was placed in the Garden also to do, namely, to bless God. The sheer horizons of one’s imagination are enlarged.

During the course of the week, still following the days of Creation, one finds oneself blessing God for the seraphim and for “waters above the heavens, vapours, exhalations, whereof rains, dew, hail, snow like wool, hoar frost as ashes . . . waters under the heavens for drinking, washing.” Who of us left to himself remembers to bless the Lord for wash water? Or for the seraphim? On Tuesday, when God brought forth the earth from the sea, one finds meadows, herbs and flowers wine oil, spices, stones, metals, and minerals in the list of things for which God is to be blessed. The mechanical view of nature which has dimmed man’s vision since the seventeenth century, makes it next to impossible to think that blessing God for such things is anything other than fanciful. Such difficulty here betrays how far the world has come since Genesis, the Psalms, and Revelation.

Following this act of commemoration there occurs an act of penitence. Here the words are almost exclusively those of Scripture, ranging from the Prophets to the Epistles. Then there follows an act of deprecation in which one is obliged to name things that one ought to deprecate: “Swelling and heedlessness . . . sloth and dishonesty . . . every evil conceit,” and so forth. On Wednesday the list is borrowed from Peter Lombard’s list of the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, envy, wrath, gluttony, lechery, avarice, sloth.

Then follows an act of “comprecation,” a word no longer used in English. Here one finds lists of things that one ought to put his mind to pursuing. “Grant unto me to adore thee and to worship thee in truth of spirit, in comeliness of body, in blessing of the mouth,” or “to win possession of my vessel in sanctification and honor.” Sometimes there is a stark list. Wednesday lists humility, mercy, patience, sobriety, purity, contentment, and the readiness of zeal.

An act of faith follows, and on most mornings this act takes the form of brief phrases that follow the order of the Nicene Creed. In other words, one is anchoring his imagination in those acts that stand as his Redemption, quite unshaken either by his own fugitive emotions or by the higgledy-piggledy nature of the circumstances in which, more often than not, one finds himself. I am almost sure that I myself would never have thought of “an act of faith” as constituting an unvarying part of my prayer life. This is followed by an act of hope, which on most mornings takes the form of a simple verse of Scripture. “My soul hath longed for thy salvation and I have a good hope because of thy word” is Friday’s.

Then come the intercessions. It is difficult not to quote the entire collection for all seven days.

O Thou that art the hope of all the ends of the earth: remember all thy creation for good; O visit the world with thy compassions . . . O succourer of the succourless, refuge in due time of trouble: remember all that are in necessity, and need thy succour. . . . remember, Lord, for good, all at whose hands I have received good offices. . . . have mercy on mine enemies, Lord, as on myself and bring them unto thy heavenly kingdom, even as myself. . . . remember, O Lord, for good, and grant mercy to all them that bear me in mind in their prayers . . . them that for reasonable causes give not themselves to prayer remember, Lord, as if they did pray unto Thee. . . have mercy on them that are in extreme necessity . . . as on me withal when I am in extremities . . . those in bitter thraldoms . . . for them that have none to intercede for them individually . . . for them that have any time been scandalized by me whether by deed or by word.

On and on it goes, covering the whole human race in all of its possible categories.

If one pauses over these categories and calls up a mental image of the people included, one finds oneself being led into paths of prayer quite unimaginable to his own unassisted resources. “Those in bitter thraldoms:” who is praying for men and women languishing in Cambodian, Cuban, or Siberian cells? “Them that have none to intercede for them individually:” who prays for the friendless old women with paper bags, muttering up and down derelict staircases in the West Forties?

Then, in Andrewes’s order, one prays for the Church, with all of its bishops, priests, deacons, and others who bear responsibility. At this point I fill in the names of those who bear pastoral authority in my own church tradition, as I fill in the name of the president of the United States where Andrewes prays for the king. There is space provided, of course, for one’s own family and “all I have promised to bear in mind in my prayers.”

Then there is an act of blessing, in which one asks God’s blessing on himself; then commendation, in which the day’s work is commended to God, along with one’s whole life; and then praise.

Blessed, praised, celebrated, magnified, exalted, glorified, hallowed be thy holy Name. . . . Commemorated, lauded, extolled, honoured, uplifted, be my strong tower . . . It is very meet and right, fitting and our bounden duty in all things and for all things, at all times, in all places, every way, in every hour and country, alway, everywhere, altogether, to commemorate Thee, to worship Thee, to confess to Thee, to praise Thee, to bless, to hymn, to give thanks to Thee . . . whom the heavens hymn, and the heaven of heavens, the angels and all the heavenly hosts without ceasing crying one to another, and we lowly and unworthy under their feet, with them. Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth, The whole heaven and the whole earth are full of the majesty of thy glory. Blessed be the Glory of the Lord from his Place.

(All of that is only part of Sunday’s act of praise.) Saturday praises God, recalling

the all-honourable senate of the patriarchs, the ever-venerable quire of prophets, the all-illustrious company of twelve apostles and evangelists, the all-famous host of martyrs, the conclave of confessors, doctors, ascetics, the beauty of virgins [and the] sweetening of the world in infants.

Why include all of this at such unconscionable length? I think it is that this set of disciplines represented a watershed in my vision that is much higher than I yet know. I have used it for many years now, and not one line of it has begun to pall. It does not stand in the way of whatever immediate petitions or concerns I may have in my own mind on a given day that need to be brought to God. This discipline has taught me that the life of prayer, if it is to be anything more than sporadic for someone like me who cannot depend on fervor to keep going, must be as regulated and independent of ephemeral inclinations as eating and sleeping are in the physical life.

It has also taught me, or begun to teach me, that prayer is far from being a matter of just my own efforts. I stand with an innumerable company of intercessors before the Mercy Seat in behalf of all men everywhere. Prayer has gone up unceasingly from righteous men since the beginning of time, like the smoke of incense. If I cannot yet conceive of myself as being a very exemplary member of that company, I may at least aspire to be one of the men who prays daily for all men. The pictures in the Scripture of Abraham and Daniel and Joseph and Mary, bringing their sacrifices to the Lord, and of those who kept vigil like Simeon and Anna, present a company amongst which one would wish most earnestly to be found.

I owe a great debt to evangelicalism for having taught me to pray. I learned in that school that any man may pray, in any words, at any time, with anything that is on his heart. Prayer was not trapped inside of missals or precast forms. I learned something of the immediacy of prayer. I imbibed a keen sense of God’s moment-by-moment presence with me.

But I have wondered whether in its stress on earnestness, and even fervor, evangelicalism has not to some extent overestimated most of us. Men like George Mueller, Hudson Taylor, and Praying Hyde were held up to us as models of prayer. But this was like holding Sylvester Stallone up to a young boy and telling him to look like that. What is he to do next? Long years of discipline lie ahead. This part of the matter is not always made clear in evangelical piety.

The interior and “spiritual” nature of evangelical vision is well-placed insofar as it insists that, when all is said and done, nothing you do is worth anything if your heart is corrupt. But insofar as it leaves the impression that the interior excludes the exterior or that to be fully spiritual is to ignore routines and disciplines and crutches in favor of sheer fervor, then evangelicalism may be said to have missed at least something about the Incarnation. For in the Incarnation the immaterial became physical. God did not subject Himself merely in a masquerade to the conditions of mortal flesh; He took those very conditions and raised them and hallowed them and glorified them.

We mortals are not angels. We cannot gaze at reality directly and unblinkingly. Evangelical piety often appears to hold up before the faithful a vision of spirituality that would be available only to angels in its ceaseless fervor. Just as we must walk whereas the angels fly, so we must pray, putting one foot in front of the other, where they may soar. If, perchance, we are vouchsafed moments of exaltation, God be praised, but that is not the pattern. That is not the quotidian. That is not the school of prayer.

I am thankful to the ancient Church for its wise and earthy awareness that we Christians need all the help we can get and for supplying us with so much in its Office and in its other forms of set prayer.