IN A Prayer Book of Days: With saints through the ages, (Canterbury Press £12.99 (£11.69); 978-1-78622-595-5), the Bishop of St Asaph, Gregory Cameron, once again provides a series of informative and thoughtful daily reflections based on figures from the Christian tradition. Previous collections were seasonal and biblical. This one, however, is a month’s worth of characters linked to the Church’s history of prayer.
We begin with David and Jesus, and end with Reinhold Niebuhr and Leonella Sgorbati, and have such assorted companions along the way as Augustine of Hippo and Rabanus Maurus, Cranmer and Thomas Ken, Christina Rossetti and Edith Stein. The pre-Reformation centuries are generously represented.
The author is also an artist, and illustrates each daily section with an attractive icon-style portrait, followed by straightforward historical context and biographical information, and the occasional surprise: we learn, for example, that the venerated Prayer of St Francis seems to have originated in French in 1910.
© gregory cameron 2024© gregory cameron 2024
Cameron draws out themes for devotional use, and ends each section with a prayer associated with that day’s individual subject — “a month’s supply of some of the most cherished prayers of the Christian family”. It is an approach that underlines that “sacred tradition is an important part of the history of Christian prayer,” and, by the end of the chronological series, the reader has incidentally absorbed a good deal of basic church history.
A Prayer Book of Days is a pleasingly old-fashioned combination of the didactic and the devotional. Its insights are always wise and rarely startling, in a way that seems to reflect the author’s comment that “it is the task of the iconographer to replicate tradition, and not to innovate.”
The Bishop does, though, find room for a wonderfully bracing comment of John Chrysostom: “The road to Hell is paved with the bones of priests and monks, and the skulls of bishops are the lamp posts that light the path.”
The Revd Philip Welsh is a retired priest in the diocese of London.