Lucy DENYER

Igrew up in a tiny village in North Yorkshire where, every Sunday, my sisters and I would put on our best dresses, eat sausages for breakfast and trundle off to one of the four churches in our parish. There we would sit, shoes kicked off, daydreaming as the sunshine filtered through the stained glass windows and warming our stockinged feet on the dusty heating pipes below the pews while, around us, the adults, similarly arrayed in their Sunday finest, intoned the words of the liturgy.

For a child it was deathly dull, of course – the highlight of the service would be the chance to show off my Sunday frock while going up to get blessed during communion. But over the years the words, so often repeated, with their comforting, timeless rhythms, seeped into my soul until I could intone them with no need for reference to the prayer book. As an adult, whenever I attend a more traditional church service that uses the Book of Common Prayer, there is deep consolation in being able to close my eyes and recite, allowing the beauty of the language to wash up and over me.

So I am not surprised that congregations for traditional liturgy services online have risen fivefold over the course of the pandemic. In a time when the daily structure of life has all but evaporated, there is solace to be found in worshipping, even from our sofas at home, via a form of service that has been in existence since 1549. When we join in the words of the liturgy, we are adding our voice to a great torrent of voices that have echoed through the centuries, professing the same faith, in almost the same words, that have been spoken for hundreds of years.

It is the closest thing we Anglicans have to the Catholic mass: an unchanging profession of faith that speaks of life, and death, and an eternal communion with God which we, humble sinners here on Earth, have the privilege of being part of by His grace. In a time of turbulence, when life is turned upside down and all our fixed points uprooted, there is great comfort to be had in knowing that this, too, shall pass, and, if you are a person of faith, that God is unchanging over all.

Even if you are not a believer, even in our secular, pluralist society, the words – some of the most beautiful and most dignified in the English language – cannot fail to move those who hear them. To confess that “we have left undone those things that we ought to have done” is a sentiment that anyone can buy into. And to acknowledge that “we do not presume, to come to this thy table, oh merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness”, reminds us of just how inconsequential we are in the great scheme of things.

We may not be able to join together in person to worship right now. We cannot raise our voices in song. We can’t even press a hand in the sign of peace. But we can revel in the beauty of the liturgy. God does, indeed, work in mysterious ways.