Jim Cotter (1942-2014) was an English Anglican priest, poet, and writer of prayers.

When I first read his version of the Lord’s Prayer, I couldn’t believe that someone could write Christian prayer with such freshness and courage:

Eternal Spirit, Life-Giver, Pain-Bearer, Love-Maker,
Source of all that is and shall be,
Father and Mother of us all, Loving God, in whom is heaven:

The Hallowing of your name echo through the universe!
The way of your Justice be followed by the peoples of the world!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your Commonwealth of Peace and Freedom sustain our hope and come on earth!

With the bread that we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.

For you reign in the glory of the power that is love,
now and forever. Amen.

Before his death, Cotter wrote of himself:

I think I have been exploring, as a pilgrim soul, what it might mean to unfold afresh my spiritual and religious inheritance, and it has been both a personal and a public concern to try and connect that tradition with the experiences of being gay, undergoing two years of serious depression, and, more recently, living with leukaemia. In their time each of these has been a stigma, information that few people would wish to reveal when applying for a job. Hence much of my work has been as a free range writer, speaker, and publisher, sometimes precariously on the edge of organizations, though with much support and friendship from within them.

My hope is that the work will help those who are younger than I am both to renew their faith and to integrate it with their sexuality without getting depressed and without the stress which may well contribute to a cancer becoming symptomatic sooner than need be. (1)

Inspired, I sought out other books by Cotter. I found one in a small bookshop in Papanui, Christchurch, called Prayer in the Day: a Book of Mysteries.

In it, Jim’s prayers were accompanied by a selection of lively drawings by Peter Pelz, about whom I don’t know very much. His images were so striking, familiar (I was reminded of some of the poems and drawings of Blake), but certainly like nothing I’d seen before in the world of devotional literature.

Some of Pelz’s drawings are very dark and full of suffering, while others are joyous, lusty, and very sensual. Clothes are regularly discarded, and in a way that seems to be making both a sexual and a spiritual statement. I was reminded of the early Quaker practice of “going naked as a sign” - of being liberated from “sin”, of being restored to full Edenic humanity (including the capacity to consciously bear wounds).

The following selection is taken from Jim Cotter and Peter Pelz, Prayer in the Day: A Book of Mysteries (2), drawings by Peter, words by Jim (if you think this selection is too long, it pained me to leave other images out).

At the edge of where we exist

Is the signpost

To the New Jerusalem

Mysteries of the Names of Jesus: Christos - Anointed - Ointment

Mysteries of the Names of Jesus: Liberating Lover

Mysteries of the Names of Jesus: Pain-Bearer

A witness to an execution in a prisoner camp:

We asked

Where is God now?

I said,

He is there,

Hanging on that wall.

Mysteries of People: The woman with a haemorrhage

Who said:

In your new world

(after the revolution)

If there is no dancing

I want no part of it.

The cleanser

The clarifier

And light shines through all things

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We are a long way from Salisbury Cathedral and Coverdale’s Carol now. Or are we?

Perhaps Cotter’s Lord’s Prayer and Pelz’s Jesus as naked Embrace are no less innovative - and no less ‘traditionally Anglican’ - than Dedham Lock and Mill, or Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

And no less English?

With its emphasis on mystery, liturgical process, and use of lyric form, it’s hard to imagine Prayer in the Day being written and drawn by an American Presbyterian or an Australian Methodist, a German Lutheran or a British liberal Quaker.

In its situated exploration of industrial society and the natural world, and of the frank erotic energy of vulnerable, abundant life, it’s almost impossible to see Prayer being written or drawn by a Nigerian, Sydney, or Canterbury (NZ) Anglican.

And in its full-hearted embrace of the Beloved - of God as Pain-Bearer and Love-Maker, of Christ as truly dwelling in all things - it moves well beyond a point that both Constable and Vaughan Williams, in their own emotional and intellectual ways, were consciously willing to go. That many Anglicans are still unwilling to go beyond today.

Cotter’s Lord’s Prayer and Cotter and Pelz’s Book of Mysteries represent a high point of liberal Anglican spirituality - broad-minded, incarnational, mystical, integrative, ordinary and traditional, ‘pilgrim soul’. Jim Cotter wrote many other books - experimental common prayer and liturgy, contemporary translations of the Psalms, and even auto-biography and commentary on the church.

As a writer of prayers, he has a cult following, perhaps: most of his books were self-published, but can still be found in print and in bookshops around the world. His Lord’s Prayer was included in the Anglican Church in New Zealand, Aotearoa, and Polynesia’s revised prayerbook - A New Zealand Prayer Book/He Karakia Mihinare o Aoteroa - that is widely admired and used in the Anglican Communion. The NZ Prayerbook version, however, rather tellingly chose to omit God as “Love-Maker”. (3)

I would love to see Jim Cotter’s prayers and experimental prayer sequences used more often in church liturgy - say, as morning, midday, or night prayer. In my own diocese, however, there isn’t a church or congregation that is bold or interested enough, really. Which says something for the present state of the liberal Anglican ‘broad church’ tradition, locally and perhaps nationally, too.

References:

(1) Cotter’s version of the Lord’s Prayer and extract on himself, retrieved from https://liturgy.co.nz/god-our-love-maker. See also the obituary in the Church Times here.

(2) Jim Cotter and Peter Pelz, Prayer in the Day: A Book of Mysteries (1986).

(3) See footnote 1 above.

Image at top of the page: drawing by Peter Pelz from Prayer in the Day: A Book of Mysteries (1986).

Anglicanism as a way of beauty: Jim Cotter and Peter Pelz

Anglicanism as a way of beauty: Ralph Vaughan Williams