Author of Girl Meets God answers a question about the Prayer Book

Sue Careless: We were all struck by Girl Meets God because you were someone funky and cool who was espousing Christianity; you were espousing chastity and you were also espousing liturgy as a young person. So often in Anglican circles we thought that anyone who liked the Book of Common Prayer had to be eighty plus, not eighteen. And you’ve drawn on the whole liturgical tradition of Judaism. Could you talk about liturgy and how it needs to be explained but not dumbed down.

Lauren Winner: All Christian traditions have some sort of rhythm or liturgy. That said, the Prayer Book liturgy remains for me really the skeleton of my prayer life. To me it is crucial having that Prayer Book liturgy because my emotions are fallen and screwed up. And when I fall away from organizing my prayer around the Book of Common Prayer I wind up really quickly not really praying. I end up talking solipsistically [self-centredly] to God. Now God wants me to talk to him about myself but that is where it stops. Something is not happening that should be happening. The President of the United States needs my prayers but many times I don’t feel like praying–beyond the imprecatory psalms. And I really need to be confessing sin all the time or I can be out of touch with reality. I really don’t want to confess sin. And there are days when I don’t really want to pray to God. So having a liturgical framework that prompts me to do all this whether or not I feel like it is essential. I really need these prompts. It is hard for me to understand a prayer life that has no external shaping. The Holy Spirit doesn’t need the Book of Common Prayer but I do.

I landed in a liturgical church for a lot of reasons but one was that I grew up in a liturgical tradition. Judaism obviously is very much a prayer book tradition. So what that says to me is not that Anglicans need to dumb down liturgy to get the twenty-somethings. It’s that Anglicans need to do child formation well--which at least in the States we don’t do well--so that people are coming up formed. It’s a false generational stereotype to say that the young people need bongo drums and whatever and the blue-hair people need liturgy.

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Lauren F. Winner was being interviewed by Journalist Sue Careless at Wycliffe College's Refresh Conference. Ms. Winner is is the author of three books, Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, and, most recently, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity. She has appeared on PBS's Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, and Christianity Today. Her essays have been included in The Best Christian Writing 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006. Winner has degrees from Columbia and Cambridge universities and is currently at work on her doctorate in the history of American religion. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband, Griff Gatewood.

Sue Careless has written a user-friendly guide to the traditional Anglican Prayer Book called Discovering the Book of Common Prayer: A Hands on Approach. Volume One: Daily Prayer has been endorsed by J.I. Packer and P.D. James. Sue is a freelance journalist and photographer whose work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the National Post and the Toronto Star. The recipient of five Canadian Church Press Awards, she frequently contributes to The Anglican Journal, ChristianWeek and Faith Today. She loves pursuing hard news and then turning her hand to more reflective or humorous pieces.