THIS reviewer is writing these words quite near to Christmas Day, and the author of this book has inadvertently reawakened a childhood trauma in him: the memory of being forced to sit down at the dining table on Boxing Day and write all my thank-you letters. The joy of receiving all my Christmas bits and pieces was thus, albeit briefly, extinguished.
Many Christians are not really that good at, or interested in, giving thanks. We are extremely good at asking for things and at demanding stuff that we know is God’s will. We are good at demanding what will be. We are perhaps not so good at being thankful for what is and what has been.
It was different 360 years ago — even in a period of English history at least as turbulent as our own. In the Book of Common Prayer of 1662, after the order for morning and evening prayer and the litany comes a section of prayers to be used with them. After a series of petitionary prayers, we have the thanksgivings (plural!), at the beginning of which is the General Thanksgiving, a much-loved prayer among many of us of a certain vintage, but now unknown to many.
Philip Plyming is the Dean of Durham, and so is well used to the daily use of the BCP. His book is a lovely introduction to both the history and authorship of the prayer (it very nearly did not make it to the final version of the Prayer Book), and the theology and spirituality behind its content. The book is a devotional exegesis of a wonderful prayer that deserves much wider use. The focus is not on me and what I need, but, rather, on God and what God has done and does.
Many years ago, in an address to the Prayer Book Society in Blackburn Cathedral, the playwright Alan Bennett exhorted his listeners not to defend the BCP as an incomparable example of beautiful English literature from the past, but, rather, as speaking of the good news of Jesus Christ now. This book should help us to see how right he was.
The General Thanksgiving is not there to be pretty, but to be true.
The Revd Peter McGeary is the Vicar of St Mary’s, Cable Street, in east London.
Giving Thanks: Rediscovering the heart of gratitude
Philip Plyming
Canterbury Press £13.99
(978-1-78622-643-3)
Church Times Bookshop £11.19