Though my dear wife is still convalescing, I managed to pop off yesterday morning for an early “said mass” at the Church of the Advent in Boston. The service followed, more or less, the order for Holy Communion from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, with which I’m not terribly familiar.

I was struck, in particular, by the prayer of confession:

ALMIGHTY God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all men; We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, Which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, By thought, word, and deed, Against thy Divine Majesty, Provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, And are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable. Have mercy upon us, Have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; For thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, Forgive us all that is past; And grant that we may ever hereafter Serve and please thee In newness of life, To the honour and glory of thy Name; Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The interesting thing about this is that if I’m honest, when praying this prayer I don’t actually feel the weight of my manifold sins and wickedness against the Divine Majesty, nor do I in fact, in an immediate and visceral way, find the burdern of them intolerable.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m completely callous and complacent about my own misdeeds. I have keenly felt sorrow and guilt when I’ve wronged others, especially those close to me. And I can get up a fairly good head of repentance when I think about the ways, large and small, that I’ve been unjust, or selfish, or uncharitable. But I have a hard time experiencing myself as having wronged God.

I think many of us find it difficult to grasp what it might mean to offend against the Divine Majesty. We can see how we harm other people by our sins, but how can God be wronged? It’s hard to bewail wronging someone who seems, on a deep, metaphysical level, incapable of being harmed!

Philosophers talk about justice as giving to each person what was due them. But it seems to me that I don’t have a strong sense that God has things due him. And that when I don’t render to God what is his due, I’ve committed an injustice. The reflexive idea of God that I carry around in my head just doesn’t have room for that notion. Or at least, I don’t seem to have internalized it to such an extent that I actually experience my sinful acts, habits, dispositions, etc. as failing to render justice to God and for that reason occasion for repentance.

But maybe that offers a clue to why it’s important to pray prayers like the one above. Maybe the point of those prayers isn’t necessarily to express a feeling or thought that’s already present in us, but rather to teach us, or form us in such a way, so that we learn to see our actions not just as transgressions of an impersonal moral law, but as sins. That is, as failure not only to render our neighbor what she is due, but also God.

This way of looking at it would underline the importance of a relatively fixed liturgy as a way of incorporating us into the Body of Christ. As Paul says, we don’t know how to pray as we ought, or as Bonhoeffer put it, “the richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.” Prayer is not primarily about each of us expressing our own unique self, but of joining our prayer to that of Jesus and his church. In doing so, one hopes, we are gradually enabled to see ourselves clearly and speak truthfully about ourselves, including our “manifold sins and wickedness.” We need to learn how to praise God, give thanks, and confess our sins — in our fallen state it’s not something that necessarily comes naturally.

What do you think? Is there something to be said for “insincere” prayer when looked at this way?