It is a worthwhile exercise to search for the best opening sentence in English literature. Worthwhile, because if it is flabby or indifferent, it may also be the last as far as a reader is concerned. Hooker, for instance, starts his masterpiece with the ringing words: ‘He that goeth about to persuade a multitude, that they are not so well governed as they ought to be, shall never want attentive and favourable hearers.’
Newman began his Apology (though in his second opening paragraph) with the words: ‘I was brought up from a child to take great delight in reading the Bible; but I had no formed religious convictions till I was fifteen.’ Milton started his extraordinary epic poem with: ‘Of man’s first disobedience…’ I’m not sure that Pascal started his ‘Pensées’ with a sentence at all: ‘The difference between the mathematical and the intuitive mind.’ But it is an illuminating distinction.
True to form, the preface to the Book of Common Prayer starts with an elegant declaration that – predictably, and equably – aims to ‘keep the mean’.
And unobtrusively, without any great fanfare, there comes in the BCP a pearl of great price – the General Thanksgiving. It is a succession of verbal jewels so memorable that we hardly dare measure our own attempts at prayer against it. We treasure it for the education it gives us in our praying. It expresses our gratitude for ‘thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men’ and for ‘the means of grace, and for the hope of glory’. Having ‘that due sense of all thy mercies’, we ‘show forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives’.
To compose such a prayer must surely be a life’s work. It is the fruit of experience and it exhibits exact fitness for purpose. It has ordered priorities, economical phrases and a humility that is an acknowledgment of our lowly place in the scheme of things, thanks to ‘the Father of all mercies’.
As we join in our classic General Thanksgiving, we renew our understanding of prayer. It is temperate in its expression, and boundless in its scope. It lifts us beyond our petty concerns and our flawed instincts to the part we play in our Creator’s design and the redemption in Christ which allows us to do so.
‘Nobody every wished it longer,’ said Samuel Johnson of ‘Paradise Lost’, and the brevity of this thanksgiving is as remarkable as anything else about it. In a few words it opens vistas. This is a virtue that the General Thanksgiving shares with the BCP collects. Just as it takes an accomplished poet to write a sonnet of worth in a mere 14 lines, so it takes prolonged consideration to produce one of the best elements of our English forms of prayer.
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