The Book of Divine Worship (BDW) has seen more than its fair
share of criticism both on and off line.
While the BDW is far from perfect, is incomplete and was laid out
poorly, it still has much to recommend to it.
One of the things my Ordinariate group has come to
appreciate is the alternate forms of the Prayers of the People. While we mostly use Form I, which was the
only form in the 1928 BCP and the assumed version for Rite I of the 1979 BCP,
we have used Form III the past two Sundays and it has worked well. Form III is based on the first litany of the Liturgy
of St. John Chrysostom and it allows us to chant the prayers using the same
tones as the Eastern Churches.
While it could be argued that this is diluting the Anglican
Patrimony as it really stems from the 1979 BCP, it stems from the Cranmerian Anglican
ethos. Thomas Cranmer was aware of the Eastern
liturgies and it is supposed that he consulted them while drawing up the 1549
BCP. The Prayer of Humble Access is the
clearest example of this. While John
Henry Blunt’s The Annotated Book of
Common Prayer notes that this prayer had antecedents in the Sarum, Hereford
and York missals, Massey Shepherd Jr. tells us that this prayer really is an
original prayer by Cranmer, drawing on both Biblical texts and parts of the
Liturgy of St. Basil.
Right from the beginning, Anglican liturgy has been a mix of
the ancient forms of the Western Liturgy with an eye to the East. The Book of Divine Worship keeps this Eastern
influence alive and well in the Western Liturgy, which makes sense now even
more that our Anglican liturgy has taken its place in the Universal Church.
