the Anglican Book of Common Prayer drew me with its poetry and its vigorous description of the vexing human condition. “We have done those things we ought not to have done,” Thomas Cranmer penned for King Henry VIII, who was as vivid an embodiment of the vexed human condition as ever walked the earth. “And we have left undone those things which we ought to have done”—naming the ordinary, everyday failure to join inner aspiration with outer reality. A failure to take in beauty and let it put things in their place. A failure to be grateful, as a habit. A failure to take the time to attend to the
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