Christianity in sum

I’ve mentioned in my newsletter how deeply I have been touched and healed in recent months by the Church of England’s Daily Prayer. This morning as I was listening to Morning Prayer — that is, the service for the fourth of February (that link should take you directly to the recorded service plus the text) — and it occurred to me that this one service contains almost everything you would need to understand the ancient Christian faith in all its beauty and all its strangeness: gorgeous music crying out to God; the précis of revelation (general and special alike) in that greatest of ancient lyric poems, Psalm 19; the scandal and offense of the Binding of Isaac; the hope beyond hope of the Resurrection narrative; and the sparely beautiful liturgical structure in which they are all embedded. It’s all there, in little more than 20 minutes: a summation of the whole story in which we Christians participate.