After this post, I'll probably shut up about it.
This is the last week in Ordinary Time (an unfortunate designation,which is widely misunderstood and which is usually unexplained--it's not ordinary in the sense of banal, but in the sense of following an order, progression or procession of days.) The Collect for this week's daily masses reads:
Lord,
Increase our eagerness to do your will
and help us to know the saving power of your love.
OK, we've heard that, and I'll wager most of us didn't think about it, we just listened to the prayer and accepted that was what the Church was praying. But get a gander at the new, more accurate translation of the collect:
Stir up the will of your faithful, we pray, O Lord,
that striving more eagerly
to bring your divine work to fruitful completion
they may receive in greater measure
the healing remedies your kindness bestows.
The Latin text reads:
Excita, quasumus, Domine
tuorum fidelium voluntates,
ut divini operis, fructum propensius,exsequentes;
pietatis tuae remedia maiora percipiant.
Now my Latin isn't up to a translation--but I can see the difference in the text of the Missae Typica and the old ICEL translation. I'm not sure that "excita" means stir, but it has been for centuries termed that in the English speaking world in the context of this prayer. But that's not the big thing I see here. What I see is something else entirely.
There was a trend among "traddy" Catholics to be vocal about dissatisfaction with the Liturgies we were forced to participate in. Many felt that they were so poorly celebrated, and so irreverent that they amounted to being denied the chance for actual participation in the Mystery of the Holy* Sacrifice of the Mass. People felt they were starving, in a spiritual sense because of this. You could even buy a T-shirt that read "I'm not being fed!" to wear in protest. But this sort of Liturgical neglect is deeper than ignoring the rubrics, or even using every possible out and dodge to break up the flow of the Mass with "music ministers" announcing to the congregation things they already know--it's embedded in the language of the old ICEL translation. Look at the Collect.
The old ICEL text is entirely passive. There is no room in it for "full conscious and active--or actual" participation in the mystery of salvation. It renders the faithful entirely passive, in as much as the will of the faithful is entirely disregarded. This isn't just an issue of linguistics, but of theology. Faith is an act of will. Faith is the assent of the will to truth--one becomes faithful when one decides that the Gospel in it's broadest sense is true. One will not reach this point without grace, but one must respond to grace with an act of will.
Knowing the saving power of the Lord's love can be very passive, in which one accepts that God loves us, but does not respond--the type of thinking that is enabled by the approach of Sola Fide, which isn't in scripture. Paul, after all, says that we are to work out our salvation in fear and trembling, and in another place points out that he completes what is lacking in Christs work in his own body. What is lacking is the response on the part of the individual believer. Christ bridges the gulf between God and Man, he enables the salvation of the Soul--but the believer must respond to grace, with works, or he is turning his back on Grace.
Each of us brings his or her own experience to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. This is part of the human condition. The phrase "...saving power of your love...", while innocuous in itself is amorphous, and doesn't address our condition. We are all the Walking Wounded, scarred with defects and injuries, each of us infected with spiritual malaise of various sorts and degrees. We need medicine--remedies for our various injuries. The new translation, by being truer to the Latin of the Missae Typica, points out that we are indeed able to avail ourselves of remedies from the Divine Physician, yet points out that we must strive for spiritual health. Just as a person with a serious injury will not make a full recovery if they do not apply themselves to their physical therapy, we will not recover our spiritual health if we do not strive to fulfill Jesus' injunction to be holy, as our Father in heaven is holy. (I'm not going to go into what it means to be holy, but if you went to Mass Sunday, the Gospel, Mt 25: 31-46 should give you some idea, as well as scare the crap out of you!)
The old translation inhibits, in many ways the full active conscious and actual work of the liturgy, making it much less likely that we will, through the Sanctifying Grace of Holy communion and the participation in the Word--both a formally proclaimed and alluded to in word, imagery and exegesis by the liturgy--undergo our own transformation into the Saints we are all called to be. A phrase like "...saving power of your love..." lends itself to thinking , "Well, yeah, actually I worship my TV and my Favorite team, and fashion, and I don't pay any mind to all those homeless crazy people shivering in doorways, and I'm committing adultery with wombats, not to mention exploiting my employees or helping my boss to do so, but God's saving love will make all that OK." Instead of thinking, "With God's grace, I can strive to fix these things, and even the obscure drives, desires and wounds that trend toward empowering my own spiritual and social dysfunction." It turns us, all too often, into spiritual Couch potatoes.
*I just gotta mention the word "holy". In the old ICEL translation, where ever they could manage it and not get caught they simply omitted the word "sanctus", we will be hearing the word "Holy" much more now. I think that makes some people uncomfortable, because if there are things that are held up to us as holy, and we are called to holiness, then we just can't declare "I'm Holy", we have to change.
I need to acknowledge Fr. John Zuhlsdorf and his excellent blog "What Does The Prayer Really Say" for juxtaposing these versions of the Collect--neither my hand missal nor the missalettes in church have the collects for weekdays, and neither has both translations together for anything. Thanks Father. BTW--his blog is listed on the sidebar.
This is the last week in Ordinary Time (an unfortunate designation,which is widely misunderstood and which is usually unexplained--it's not ordinary in the sense of banal, but in the sense of following an order, progression or procession of days.) The Collect for this week's daily masses reads:
Lord,
Increase our eagerness to do your will
and help us to know the saving power of your love.
OK, we've heard that, and I'll wager most of us didn't think about it, we just listened to the prayer and accepted that was what the Church was praying. But get a gander at the new, more accurate translation of the collect:
Stir up the will of your faithful, we pray, O Lord,
that striving more eagerly
to bring your divine work to fruitful completion
they may receive in greater measure
the healing remedies your kindness bestows.
The Latin text reads:
Excita, quasumus, Domine
tuorum fidelium voluntates,
ut divini operis, fructum propensius,exsequentes;
pietatis tuae remedia maiora percipiant.
Now my Latin isn't up to a translation--but I can see the difference in the text of the Missae Typica and the old ICEL translation. I'm not sure that "excita" means stir, but it has been for centuries termed that in the English speaking world in the context of this prayer. But that's not the big thing I see here. What I see is something else entirely.
There was a trend among "traddy" Catholics to be vocal about dissatisfaction with the Liturgies we were forced to participate in. Many felt that they were so poorly celebrated, and so irreverent that they amounted to being denied the chance for actual participation in the Mystery of the Holy* Sacrifice of the Mass. People felt they were starving, in a spiritual sense because of this. You could even buy a T-shirt that read "I'm not being fed!" to wear in protest. But this sort of Liturgical neglect is deeper than ignoring the rubrics, or even using every possible out and dodge to break up the flow of the Mass with "music ministers" announcing to the congregation things they already know--it's embedded in the language of the old ICEL translation. Look at the Collect.
The old ICEL text is entirely passive. There is no room in it for "full conscious and active--or actual" participation in the mystery of salvation. It renders the faithful entirely passive, in as much as the will of the faithful is entirely disregarded. This isn't just an issue of linguistics, but of theology. Faith is an act of will. Faith is the assent of the will to truth--one becomes faithful when one decides that the Gospel in it's broadest sense is true. One will not reach this point without grace, but one must respond to grace with an act of will.
Knowing the saving power of the Lord's love can be very passive, in which one accepts that God loves us, but does not respond--the type of thinking that is enabled by the approach of Sola Fide, which isn't in scripture. Paul, after all, says that we are to work out our salvation in fear and trembling, and in another place points out that he completes what is lacking in Christs work in his own body. What is lacking is the response on the part of the individual believer. Christ bridges the gulf between God and Man, he enables the salvation of the Soul--but the believer must respond to grace, with works, or he is turning his back on Grace.
Each of us brings his or her own experience to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. This is part of the human condition. The phrase "...saving power of your love...", while innocuous in itself is amorphous, and doesn't address our condition. We are all the Walking Wounded, scarred with defects and injuries, each of us infected with spiritual malaise of various sorts and degrees. We need medicine--remedies for our various injuries. The new translation, by being truer to the Latin of the Missae Typica, points out that we are indeed able to avail ourselves of remedies from the Divine Physician, yet points out that we must strive for spiritual health. Just as a person with a serious injury will not make a full recovery if they do not apply themselves to their physical therapy, we will not recover our spiritual health if we do not strive to fulfill Jesus' injunction to be holy, as our Father in heaven is holy. (I'm not going to go into what it means to be holy, but if you went to Mass Sunday, the Gospel, Mt 25: 31-46 should give you some idea, as well as scare the crap out of you!)
The old translation inhibits, in many ways the full active conscious and actual work of the liturgy, making it much less likely that we will, through the Sanctifying Grace of Holy communion and the participation in the Word--both a formally proclaimed and alluded to in word, imagery and exegesis by the liturgy--undergo our own transformation into the Saints we are all called to be. A phrase like "...saving power of your love..." lends itself to thinking , "Well, yeah, actually I worship my TV and my Favorite team, and fashion, and I don't pay any mind to all those homeless crazy people shivering in doorways, and I'm committing adultery with wombats, not to mention exploiting my employees or helping my boss to do so, but God's saving love will make all that OK." Instead of thinking, "With God's grace, I can strive to fix these things, and even the obscure drives, desires and wounds that trend toward empowering my own spiritual and social dysfunction." It turns us, all too often, into spiritual Couch potatoes.
*I just gotta mention the word "holy". In the old ICEL translation, where ever they could manage it and not get caught they simply omitted the word "sanctus", we will be hearing the word "Holy" much more now. I think that makes some people uncomfortable, because if there are things that are held up to us as holy, and we are called to holiness, then we just can't declare "I'm Holy", we have to change.
I need to acknowledge Fr. John Zuhlsdorf and his excellent blog "What Does The Prayer Really Say" for juxtaposing these versions of the Collect--neither my hand missal nor the missalettes in church have the collects for weekdays, and neither has both translations together for anything. Thanks Father. BTW--his blog is listed on the sidebar.
5 comments:
Well, there's stuff in there that I dont' know where it came from (more eagerly, for example, ain't in the text) and 'will' is a pretty bad translation of 'voluntates'. But yeah, there's a grammar problem here, too: Who is praying for who here? And on whose behalf? Is the priest praying for the flock? In which case, why isn't he included? Is the congreagation praying? In which case, why aren't they praying for themselves? The latin is in the first person plural ('Stir us faithful up so that we may seek out...) but the translation is third person.
But I think the real problem is that it's translationese. You're right in that it's more active, which is good. But it's terribly hyoptactic. Which Latin is good at but English really shouldn't be in anything that is going to be oral.
The collect is prayed for the people, by the priest acting "in personna Christi"--ie, Christ is praying for the flock using the priest as his agent, as we participate in the heavenly Liturgy.
Your point about the original is why I sometimes wish we could have the Ordinary Form in Latin more often--it's not forbidden, but priests seem to think it's bad, despite the 2d Vat. Council saying it was to remain the norm.
Right, but the Latin makes it clear that the priest is ONE of the flock, while the English severs him from it entirely.
Ahhh---i see what you mean. I was wondering what you made of the old translation, as well.
Often, I'd rather we just went with the Latin.
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