STEPHEN COTTRELL’s latest mission is to teach the Lord’s Prayer to everyone in the north of England, and with this book he provides material so that reciting the Lord’s Prayer becomes more than a memory exercise: he wants people to let the prayer feed into their hearts and transform their lives.

In the book, each of the Lord’s Prayer’s verses is allotted a chapter, in which Cottrell digs deeper for meaning. The book could be read alone, but there is an appendix about how it could be used as the basis of discussion groups over five weeks.

At his best, Cottrell has a rare gift, namely that of writing in a way that both makes profound points about God and yet is also simple enough to be accessible to everyone. In this, he is a sort of counterpoint to Rowan Williams, that other archiepiscopal author, who at his best also does both. For Williams, where it goes wrong, it is because he becomes too opaque to be understood; for Cottrell, where it goes wrong, it is not because he is being opaque: rather, he becomes laboured; and some of the chapters in this book read as though they were a struggle to write.

There are parts of this book, though, which hit the sweet spot. His chapter on “Your will be done” is magnificent: it begins with the image of the tuning fork that he uses to tune his guitar, and then takes that as a metaphor for the way in which, by saying “your will be done,” we allow ourselves to live our lives in harmony with the will of God. His writing here is lyrical, beautiful, and compelling.

Other parts, though, lack clarity. For example, in the chapter on “Give us today our daily bread,” he includes various digressions (for example, about the way in which epiousios, translated as “daily”, may hint at holy communion itself) that individually are interesting enough, but dilute his bigger point that the bread is only enough for today.

The Church Times has interviewed him about the book in a recent podcast; his two minutes there talking about the same verse are brilliantly lucid and, actually, better than what he has written in the chapter. All power to the Church Times podcast, but you would have hoped that the book, fully digested, would come out better than an off-the-cuff interview.

So this book is good, often very good, but it could have been even better.
 

The Revd Robert Stanier is Vicar of St Andrew and St Mark, Surbiton, in the diocese of Southwark.

Praying by Heart: The Lord’s Prayer for everyone
Stephen Cottrell
Hodder & Stoughton £14.99
(978-1-3998-0530-8)
Church Times Bookshop £11.99

Listen to an interview with Stephen Cottrell about the book here.