A typically fine text by the Bishop of London

From A Prayer for All Seasons: The Collects of the Book of Common Prayer
(Lutterworth Press, 1999):

Afterword by the Bishop of London

The Collects assembled in the Book of Common Prayer offer departure at all gates into the mystery of the God ‘whose ways are not our ways and whose thoughts are not our thoughts’. Here is no godlet confected out of our own fantasies; no neighbourhood god jogging with us through life's way but here is the entry into the God ‘whom no man hath seen at any time’, who has been made known by ‘the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father’.
The spirit of these ancient prayers has little of the improper confidence of those who are pally with Sion. By contrast these prayers approach the divine mystery by way of a defamiliarizing ceremoniousness and a shocking reverence which for those with ears to bear can deliver us from the waking dream in which humanity and not God is the centre around which the whole universe revolves. We have begun to appreciate the cost of believing that we are licensed to exploit, without limit, all that exists. These are prayers for use in a day when it is vital once again to respect the distance between God and human beings. Such respect is an indispensable preparation for wisdom and for any profound appreciation of the work of Jesus Christ in reconciling us to God.
Those who have the privilege of leading the worship of the Church in these words will always know themselves as ‘the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries’ and not as the managers of some Spirit Shop catering for popular religious tastes and feelings. I hope and pray that this volume will introduce a new generation to this treasury of prayer and I commend the zeal and efforts of the Prayer Book Society in ensuring that, like Richard Hooker in a similar time of crisis, ‘Posterity may know that we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream’.

‘ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire, or deserve; Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen.’

+Richard Londin.