THE ROYAL 'WE'

As an English teacher who yearly leads students through Shakespearean drama, one of the quirks of language we always have to cover with Hamlet’s King Claudius is the use of the royal ‘we,’ the use of the third-person plural by a single speaker to indicate that they stand vicariously for the whole of the governing body and the people. This is confusing for students: how, they ask, can another person speak for me? 

As a pastor who works in the overlap of the catholic and the evangelical worlds, I sometimes get asked about the benefits of liturgical prayer by those who grew up knowing mostly extemporaneous prayer (excepting the Lord’s Prayer). What, they ask, is the value of prayers that aren’t mine, and doesn’t that take away from my personal relationship with God? 

What do these two things share? 

Pronouns are a good place to start. When it comes to prayer, one of the first mistakes we can make is to think that it’s my prayer. ‘My’ implies possession of the thing, comprehension of the thing. But this is only superficially true when it comes to prayer. Prayer is only ‘mine’ in the sense that I am participating in it and experiencing it as me. But possessiveness must end there, for prayer is an intensely communal activity. 

Prayer is union. It is fellowship with God the Father through God the Son by God the Holy Spirit. Prayer is participation in the life of God, made possible only by the love and movement of God. The praying person is never alone, they are communing with the Divine Persons of God the Trinity. But the community of prayer moves outward. Because prayer is union with God, it is also union with all those who are also united with God. The same Holy Spirit that draws us into fellowship with the Godhead also draws us into fellowship with all other praying Christians. 

But prayer gets even more astonishing. Prayer is union with God and other praying Christians, but this does not end with those Christians who are alive. Those faithful departed, who have fallen asleep in Christ, experience the union of prayer more completely than we can imagine. And we share in fellowship with them, too. Prayer unites all Christians, those sojourning in the world and those who have already entered the undiscovered country. 

Liturgical prayer is prayer in what is called the frozen register of language--language that like ice is very, very slow to move. The Lord’s Prayer, for instance, is still recited in the King’s English even though English has evolved a great deal. The value of such frozen speech is that, unlike the dialect of any given time, it gives unity among the generations. Common prayers are those prayers that the young and old, even the living and the dead can pray together.

When I pray, even in the darkness of my deepest isolation, I am never alone. I am part of God’s family through all time--I pray with brethren, saints, angels, and God Himself. This is the privilege of the Christian, this is what we are and what we do. We are ‘in Christ’ together, and together with Him in His work as Priest and King. As St. John writes: “...who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and has made us kings and priests to His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” 

Our offering of prayer, though spoken in distinct voices, is always ‘our’ prayer. It is the offering of the priestly people whose vocation is to offer the whole of life and creation in our prayer continually with and to our God. It is the testimony of the kingly people who call all of creation to worship before the face of God and enter into His peace. Our prayer is a proclamation: it declares always that the Kingdom of God is at hand in and through the people who have been made, by God’s grace, co-heirs with King Jesus. 

Our prayer is always the prayer of the royal ‘we.’