I accepted the invitation to be Patron of the Thomas Cranmer Schools Prize simply because I mind about what may loosely be referred to as our heritage. Some may say it is an exaggerated concern and, indeed, as I have discovered only too plainly, if you actually stand up and talk about the importance of our heritage and the lessons to be learned from our forebears, you are at once accused of having a quaint nostalgia for a picturesque, irrelevant past. It has forced me to reflect on why there is such a fierce obsession about being 'modern'. Possibly there are more people today who read less well than people in the past, although I doubt it. Most people then couldn't read at all.
Poetry is for everybody, even if it's only a few phrases.
But banality is for nobody. It might be accessible for all, but so is a desert. For the Book of Common Prayer has been the spiritual resource of English and English-speaking people for four centuries. It is a book of prayer for the whole community, devised and composed so that it might satisfy everyone. To some of his contemporaries it seemed too conservative, to others too radical, but it has survived changes in Church and State that would have destroyed a liturgy less sensitive to the profound human need for continuity and permanence.