2000 Years of Classic Christian Prayers. - Review - book review

Commonweal, Sept 8, 2000 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

2000 Years of Classic Christian Prayers
Edited by Owen Collins
Orbis, $20, 341 pp.

Classic prayers offer profound resources for theological reflection. The doctrines they express, the variety of images they use to describe the reality of God, makes them a rich well of inquiry and wisdom. Rowan Williams, one of the most perceptive theologians writing today, once remarked that doctrines are a "set of instructions for performance." One way in which those instructions are performed is through prayer.

Owen Collins's new anthology of classic Christian prayers divides into standard categories: prayers of praise; prayers for the church; for the world; in the family, etc. He ranges from the biblical tradition to prayers written in our own time. The selections derive mainly from the Western tradition (he missed the chance to include wonderful prayers from Orthodox sources, especially the liturgy).

There is a particularly lovely selection of what Collins, borrowing a phrase from Augustine's letter to Proba, calls "arrow prayers." These are short one-sentence or single-phrase prayers which lend themselves to repetition and meditation. The five pages of blessings are also welcome. He concludes with a section on famous prayers and another of prayers by the famous.

This volume is not as comprehensive as The Oxford Book of Prayer, The HarperCollins Book of Prayers, or The Doubleday Prayer Collection, all of which have appeared within the last decade. Nor is it as full as Tony Castle's 1986 volume, The New Book of Christian Prayer. Still, for the assiduous browser there are real gems (Sir Walter Raleigh's poem written before his execution was a revelation), so it stands as a good addendum to those more capacious volumes. The Collins anthology also has the virtue of being user-friendly, having four different indices: of first lines; authors; subjects; and, best of all, scriptural sources.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.