I think there's value in praying with words that Christians have been praying together for over a thousand years. Some of the collects that seem a bit stiff to modern worshippers date from as early as the fifth century, and many of them predate the first millennium. Much of the content of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer is an inheritance like this. Imagine these things like a gift from the past. Imagine the traditions of your culture or region, which have lived long before you were born, and will continue long after our entire generation is gone. But the way we ended up talking about it is like this: imagine something you've inherited from a great-grandparent, or that was left to you by a dear friend who has died. "Why," she asked, "do we use collects that sound so stilted? Why don't congregations just write their own collects each week?" It's a tricky question, because it's a question of values more than of facts. A conversation with a parishioner recently helped my clarify some things about my love for traditional liturgies, as well as my perspective on liturgical revision and how it should be understood.
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