Reflections of a Canadian Churchman

During our Lenten series last year, we explored our liturgies of confession and absolution as a way of understanding God’s grace in the midst of human brokenness.   We recognized that each of the prayers of confession and pronouncements of absolution found in the Book of Common Prayer and Book of Alternative Services offer slightly different nuances as to how we understand our human frailty, brokenness and sinfulness, and slightly different expressions of God’s forgiving, healing and restoring grace.   One of the points discussed in our time together is that Anglican theology has typically been expressed in the shared prayers of the church, in “common prayer,” as it were.   Common prayer is not simply the name of a time-honoured prayer book, but an evolving tradition of praying together, across time and space. We pray the prayers of our fathers and mothers who have gone before us, and in doing so join with them in worship and praise. At the same time, though, new prayer...