1855 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4402 USA
On the campus of Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary
© 2024 Calvin Institute of Christian Worship
You’ve probably heard that we should take all of ourselves to God in prayer. But does God really care about doing laundry, aging rapidly, fighting traffic, or spending time with friends? God does care, according to W. David O. Taylor. His Prayers for the Pilgrimage: A Book of Collects for All of Life offers prayers about mundane sorrows and joys.
W. David O. Taylor teaches theology and worship at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is also an ordained Anglican priest and resident clergy at Church of the Cross in Austin, Tex. His most recent books are A Body of Praise: Understanding the Role of Our Physical Bodies in Worship (Baker Academic, 2023) and Prayers for the Pilgrimage: A Book of Collects for All of Life (IVP, 2024). In this edited conversation, he discusses how the collect (caw-lect) prayer form helps us meet God in our life circumstances.
The one thing common to liturgies and collects is that both are forms of prayer. Both fundamentally aim at helping Christians to pray. Two things, however, distinguish a collect. The first is its form; the second is its length.
First, unlike a collect, a liturgy involves a range of forms. We can find good examples in Douglas McKelvey’s Every Moment Holy series, Kayla Craig’s To Light Their Way: A Collection of Prayers and Liturgies for Parents, or Cole Arthur Riley’s Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human. A collect, however, hews to a strict form (which I talk about below).
The second thing that distinguishes a collect is its length. While covering a good deal of theological ground, the peculiar genius of a collect is its economy. It’s a blessedly short prayer that typically asks for one thing only. In a few places in Prayers for the Pilgrimage, I break the form to include a handful of Celtic prayers and prayers for children. Both types aim to be memorable by being musical to the ear.
It’s a blessedly short prayer that typically asks for one thing only.
In my first years at Fuller Seminary, I taught a course titled “The Practices of Worship.” In it, I introduced my students to the collect and gave them an opportunity to write a collect a week throughout the whole term. The vast majority of my students come from nondenominational backgrounds, so they were largely unfamiliar with the collect form. Still, they quickly took to it and even began using it in their own ministries.
As I explained to my students then and again in the appendix to Prayers for the Pilgrimage, the collect typically involves a four- or five-fold structure. I chose to go with the latter:
Begin by naming God.
Remember God’s activities or attributes.
Express your request of God.
State your desired hope for such a request.
End by naming God again.
As I mention in the introduction to Prayers for the Pilgrimage, the collect is most fundamentally a commemorative prayer. By this I mean that the collect intends to bring to mind what God has done in the past and invites us to remember who God will continue to be in the present in the prayers that we pray. Hence the “You who” pattern of this particular form of prayer.
Doing this well, of course, requires that we immerse ourselves in the stories and details of the Bible. By invoking the name of God in light of a particular activity of God that we witness in Scripture, we protect ourselves from abstract or idiosyncratic ideas of divine justice, for example, or divine love. Instead, we root such ideas in the concrete expression of how the Holy Trinity does justice, love, and the rest.
No. One of the best parts of the collect, I find, is that, while prescriptive in form, it lends itself easily to extemporaneous expression. There is no circumstance in life where this prayer cannot become immediately useful.
Anybody, in the end, can write and benefit from a collect: individuals, small groups, church staff, community leaders, teachers, coaches, even children if they’re given a chance. All that’s needed is to learn the basic form, to become familiar with the landscape and language of scripture, and to imagine circumstances or needs that are relevant to your life situation.
I’ve not yet received a grant to research church history’s use of the collect; I’ve simply acquired a stack of books that have helped me get a sense of the collect’s origin and use in both corporate worship and private prayer. The bulk of collects that show up in the Book of Common Prayer derive chiefly from the Medieval sacramentaries, or liturgical books that contained prayers used by the primary celebrant of eucharistic worship. The three most famous are attributed to Pope Leo I (d. 461), Pope Gelasius (d. 496), and Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604), all of which governed the peculiar worship of the church at Rome.
I started writing and sharing collects when the COVID-19 pandemic began. While I’ve not had a 
chance to systematically study their effect on people, I’ve received a number of encouraging notes over the years. I had a colleague at Fuller buy several copies of Prayers for the Pilgrimage for students graduating from the Marriage and Family Therapy master’s program at Fuller. All had experienced varying degrees of anxiety about their future. My colleague particularly appreciated the prayers that gave honest voice to our emotions in the face of things that cause us to fear or to become overwhelmed.
A friend at church told me that she’d given a copy of the book to her mother, who had Alzheimer’s. Although her mother couldn’t remember much, she found the musicality and simplicity of language comforting. She also, it seemed, enjoyed looking at the paintings that my wife, Phaedra Taylor, had created for each section of the book. The images communicated to her as much as the words did.
I have friends in Guatemala who, under other circumstances, might have rejected the “Catholic” feel to these prayers. But they fully embraced the collects’ biblical richness and wrote their own in Spanish. Strangers on social media have told me how much they appreciated the prayers that I wrote during the troubled year of 2020. Collects such as “Against the Pestilence that Stalks in the Dark,” “For Dashed Plans,” “For Grocers Managing Panic-Buying Shoppers,” and “For Untimely Deaths” can expand our awareness of God’s interest in our daily lives.
I’ve had teachers at Christian schools use my “Back to School” prayers in class, cancer patients take advantage of my prayers “For Sickness and Healing,” families moving across the country read my prayer “For Journeying to a New Home” in the car, therapists use my prayer “For Those Who Struggle with Mental Health,” and pastors pray my “Prayers for a Violent World” from the pulpit.
I do. I actually wrote all of my children’s prayers in conversation with my daughter, Blythe, now 13, and my son, Sebastian, now 7. In the early weeks of the pandemic, Blythe struggled with anxiety, so I sat down with her to write my prayer “For Anxious Children at Bedtime.” My friend Paul Zach then set the prayer to a melody that children could learn easily. Months later, I met a man who told me that his elementary-aged girls had memorized the song and sung it every night before bed.
I recommend simplifying sentences and, where possible, using rhyme. I did that in my Children’s Prayers and Celtic Prayers sections. I’ve purposely written my children’s prayers in rhyme so that they could learn them without much trouble. I think this principle holds true for people whose mother tongue isn’t English. One of my goals with Prayers for the Pilgrimage, in fact, was to retain the musicality of phrasing that characterizes the Book of Common Prayer, which owes a great deal to the translating work of Thomas Cranmer. Its musicality makes it easier to remember than prose-heavy prayers, I find.
I also give readers permission to rework my prayers in a way that suits their own contexts and purposes. I’m not too territorial about my prayers. I simply wish for them to help people to present their petitions to God with all of their heart, mind, soul and strength.
I have more than a dozen favorites:
“For a Miserably Hot Day” (which we have a lot of in Texas)
“For Waking Up on the Wrong Side of the Bed” (which happens to the best of us)
“For a Mid-Life Crisis” (which also happens to the best of us)
“For Being Stressed Out” (which often happens at the most inopportune time)
“For Knowing When to Say No to One More Thing That You Want to Do, Because It Will Probably Be Bad for Your Mental, Physical and Relational Health to Do It” (which happens to me far more often than I wish to admit)
“For Changing a Diaper at Night” (which I wrote for all parents on Planet Earth)
“To Be Said after Reading Bad News” (which appears to be much needed these days)
“For Grace Between Fellow Believers Across Political Lines” (ditto)
“For Those Who Do Not Feel at Home in Their Own Family” (ditto again)
“For Loving Your Neighbor When You Don’t Feel Like Loving Them” (ditto again and again)
“For Those Who Weary of Doing Justice” (which I wrote on behalf of dear friends at my church)
“For Being 100% Honest with God” (which is easier said than done)
“For Being a Hot Mess Before God” (which I approve of 100%)
“For Green Spaces” (which are always a gift)
“For Monday to Sunday,” “For Birth to Death,” and “For the Twelve Days of Christmas”
“For St. Nicholas Day” (which is such a fun day in our home!)
Read Prayers for the Pilgrimage: A Book of Collects for All of Life, by W. David O. Taylor. Listen to Taylor’s prayer “For Anxious Children at Bedtime,” set to music by Paul Zach. Read “Liturgy for Beginning the Study of God,” which he prays before teaching at Fuller Seminary. Browse art by Phaedra Taylor.
