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There were a variety of individual efforts among members and clergy of the Episcopal Church in the USA to provide resources and aids to communicants who desired something more than was found in The Book of Common Prayer. One such effort was Miles Lowell Yates' Our Bounden Duty: A Manual of Devotion for Communicants. It was published by Oxford University Press in New York in 1951. This little book may be regarded as a restrained Anglo-Catholic volume. It includes quotations from The Imitation of Christ and many short prayers that one could learn by heart. It is for ordinary lay-folk.
Yates writes that his rationale for the small book had a twofold aim: "(1) to help communicants of the Episcopal Church to interpret the Holy Communion as the solemn Action by which they do their 'bounden duty' in the worship God; and (2) to suggest a method of praying the Liturgy that may help to stress, for each and every Churchman, its inner significance and unifying power."
I do not know if such devotional manuals are even on the radar of the Liturgical Commissions of the Episcopal Church (USA), the Anglican Church in North America, or the Ordinariates in the Roman Catholic Church which make selective use of the Anglican patrimony, but I would like to suggest that there may be some treasure worth considering in these manuals which stretch back to the Prymers, Lancelot Andrewes' Preces Privitae, and many other devotional works and manuals of prayer —some for the learnèd, some for the simple, some for ordinary lay people who desired something more to help them grow in faith and worship beyond what was found in the words of the various editions of The Book of Common Prayer.
In the little book by Yates that I am considering, the text from the Book of Common Prayer is arranged on the left-hand page, and the private devotions are to be found on the right facing page. On Page 77 there is appended to the Liturgy for Holy Communion a number of prayers that one could pray as one waits to go forward to receive the Lord in the Sacrament:
COMMUNION PRAYERS
While waiting to go to the altar, as there is time,
We wait for thy loving-kindness, O Lord, in the midst of thy temple.
God himself is with us,
Let us all adore him . . .
Now his own
Who have known
God, in worship lowly,
Yield their spirits wholly.
LORD, let me not make this Communion amiss,
But reverently and rightly, to my soul's health.
LORD, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak the word only, and my soul shall be healed.
COME, LORD JESUS, in thy compassion,
with light for my mind when it is dark,
with warmth for my heart when it is cold,
with strength for my will when it is weak,
and
be thou my Saviour.
COME, LORD JESUS, in thy power,
and bind us together for unselfish service
in the Church which is thy Body
and
in the world where thou hast walked.
77
Gloria in excelsis Deo +
