Throwing Prayer Books Against the Wall

I am not a very dexterous individual with my hands.  I am the prototypical kid who is tagged as the "super-smart" kid but couldn’t cut or fold his way out of an arts and crafts project to save his life.  My wife can attest to this.  I can’t open jars.  I rip open mail.  I have her fold letters because mine will never, ever be straight.  I gave up guitar because I couldn’t get my fingers onto the right spot on the fret board.  The only thing I can do with my fingers well is type.  And that is why I blog…

And this is why I almost threw the prayer book against the wall.  I have always used the Book of Common Prayer online, picking and choosing—being a BCP consumerist.  I needed to get over this, and in order to review The Sacramental Life in a meaningful way, I needed to get my hands on the book version.  So I bought a nice leatherette copy with gilded edges.  And the edges stick like you wouldn’t believe!  I need to break this book in.  The only thing is that it is so hard for an undexterous person like myself to pry the pages apart so I was sitting there this morning taking a minute or so for each page.  It took me 15 minutes to go through morning prayer this morning because I had to fiddle with the pages.  It really vexed me and I thought about throwing it, my favorite action when I’ve lost it and cannot control my anger any longer.  Alas, I finished prayer and got all the pages for Morning Prayer Rite 1 undone.

Is this some type of initiation process for the BCP?  Was I a newbie who was appropriately hazed this morning by the generations of Episcopalians and Anglicans who pass their prayer books down from generation to generation so that this never happens to them?

I am just not looking forward to the day twenty years or so from now when I give my copy of Common Prayer to my eldest child and have to go through this process all over again!