New Poll

You know the drill.

THANKSGIVING DAY!

Well, the poll for who intended to attend Thanksgiving Day Services--Mass or other services, or other denominations, presumably--give a 60-40 split, with 60% intending to go to Church and 40% not intending to do so.  That's not too bad, really, since  Thanksgiving Day isn't a Holy Day of Obligation, and in many parishes--to include mine, far less than 60% of the people will attend Mass on Thanksgiving Day.

The majority of us will be having Thanksgiving Dinner with family and friends.  Some of us, the poorest, will be having Thanksgiving Dinner in soup kitchens and shelters, it is my earnest hope that these services have been able to get a good Feast together for these people--they deserve it, and even if it's just a token, at least they will know that somebody cares enough to feed them on this Holiday.  The rest of us will be surrounded by family and friends, and with any luck and grace at all enmity and friction will kept at a minimum in the interest of a common meal which by its' nature and title will lead to a little reflection on what we have received in the last year, and a sense of our blessings, even in a year of hardship and uncertainty.  Our family has its' share of drama, difficulty and uncertainty this year, yet we are showered with blessings.

I personally have much to be grateful for this year, so many Blessings that I doubt I can count them all.  I am first and foremost grateful for--always--the Mercy of God that allows me to have the love and company of my family, and the ineffable privilege of attending the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and receiving My Lord Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist.  This year I have been graced and blessed with a Grandson, Aaron Able Isaiah Ransdell.  My Oldest Granddaughter is doing quite well in school, and is a lovely and loving child.  My four year old granddaughters are my playmates and delight--who wear me out with play.  The queen of the house graces me with her love and loveliness of person and form, and my daughters likewise, so I am surrounded with the love of women, in a way of which I can be proud, and not cringe before St. Peter at the pearly gates when my time comes.

Materially, I have been fed all year, and my health is actually very good.  Middle age has it way with us, and I am fortunate that the minor failings of time are easily treated, with meds for my arthritis working fairly well, and the Thyroid pills working like a charm--I feel very, very good.  Even the visual disturbance I experienced this year has been traced to a variety of migraine that is easily treated with OTC meds.   On an even more material level, this yer I have coat that is useful over a wide variety of conditions, wind and waterproof and warm.  I have the blessing of toys even, having been able to obtain man toys that are suitable to my age and activities.

God has been very, very generous to me this year, and I have so much to be thankful for.  I hope to thank him not only today, but everyday, and to thank him in the coming year in the way he likes best--by keeping his commandments and helping others less fortunate than myself in his name and out of love of him and charity towards all.

Compare

Prayer over the Gifts, First Sunday in Advent, Old Translation:

Father,
From all you give us
we present this bread and wine.
As we serve you now,
accept our ofering
and sustain us with your promise of eternal life.

Prayer over the Gifts, First Sunday in Advent, New Translation:

Accept, we pray, O Lord
these offerings we make
gathered from among your gifts to us,
and may what you grant us to celebrate devoutly here below
gain for us the prize of eternal redemption.

Liturgy and Language

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.