There are curiosities in this prayer, even controversial things, so to speak.
COLLECT
Converte nos, Deus, salutaris noster,
et, ut nobis opus quadragesimale proficiat,
mentes nostras caelestibus instrue disciplinis.
Today’s prayer comes from the Gelasian Sacramentary in the section for prayers from the 10th month, a time when there was a fast (think of the penitential character of Advent), but it was slightly different, saying ut nobis ieiunium proficiat. Ieiunium means "fast".
Redactors made changes to the prayer along the way. It was in the preconciliar Missal in the 1962 edition as ut nobis ieiunium quadragesimale. You can see what happened here. There was a conscious effort to reduce explicit reference to ieiunium, fast, and focus instead on opus. Opus is, of course, a work or a labor. It also has a military overtone as "a military work, either a defensive work, fortification, or a work of besiegers, a siege-engine, machine, etc." So, it is either offensive or defensive.
Disciplina is a techincal term, refering to "instruction, tuition, teaching in the widest sense of the word" which is sometimes used synonymously for ars and scientia. Scientia is the way to go here. EVen in Italian the word "disciplina" means the teaching of basic catechism. Converto is "to turn or whirl round, to wheel about, to cause to turn, to turn back, reverse; and with the designation of the terminus in quem, to turn or direct somewhere, to direct to or towards, to move or turn to". Instruo, which leads to forms such as instructus, means "to build in or into; to build,, erect, construct" and logically comes to mean also, "to set in order, draw up in battle array" and "to prepare, make ready, furnish, provide, to equip, fit out". You can see how instruo signifies "to provide with information, to teach, instruct".
In ecclesiastical use, opus is more specialized as "a work of superhuman power, a miracle" (cf. Vulgate John 5:36; 7:21; 14:10).
LITERAL TRANSLATION
Convert us, O God, our salvation,
and instruct our minds by means of heavenly teaching
so that the forty day operation may be advantageous for us.
I wanted to get a touch of the military unerlayer, and so I used "operation" for opus.
Two things stand out in my mind. First, there is a military underlayer to this prayer. We have seen this in our lenten prayers before. The people listening to this is the early Church in Rome would have automatically received this layer of meaning. Second, there is a touch of Neoplatonic theory of exit and return. The idea is this, things go forth from their source, turn about in a conversion, and return to their source. This is applicable to the eternal Word and the Father and also to the soul of man which in its search for wisdom, passes through scientia (knowledge) towards sapientia (wisdom). The vocabulary of the prayer strongly suggests this Neoplatonic paradigm. The instruction of God turns us about and brings us to our proper place.
Christ Himself is the one who disciplines us in this time of Lent. He teaches us by the example of His words and deeds which we learn from the pages of Holy Scripture. He teaches us by means of the Church which gives us the holy season of Lent. He instructs us by interior movements of the mind and heart under the operation of grace, especially in regard to our consciences which may need a basic kind of conversion. We must discipline our bodies through fasting and other motifications. We must discipline our minds through proper instruction and reflection on things that are true, particularly in the One who is the Truth.
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ICEL VERSION:
God our savior, bring us back to you
and fill our minds with your wisdom.
May we be enriched by our observance of Lent.
We assume that “observance” refers to our fasting and mortification. Yeah, sure. But why no reference to “heavenly” (caelestibus)?
Hmmm. My Benedictine mind went rather to “opus” as in “Opus Dei,” hence the translation as “celebration,” which also has is patristic pedigree, even if it has been misused and overused of late. I often preach on the Collect of the day. Below is a homily I preach on today’s Collect, a real jewel (the Collect, I mean!).
Convert us, O God our salvation,
and, so that we may profit by this celebration of forty days,
form our minds by your heavenly instruction.
I rendered the Prayer Over the People this way:
Bow your heads and pray for God’s blessing.
Enlighten our minds, we beseech you, O Lord,
by the brightness of your shining,
that we may able to see what we should do,
and have strength to do what is right.
Through Christ our Lord.
On the Collect:
Today’s collect is unusual in that it begins directly with a verse from Psalm 84: “Convert us, O God our salvation†(Ps 84:5). A dangerous request. One has to be bold and not a little foolish to make such a prayer, or distracted, or inattentive to what one is saying, or lulled by pious routine into thinking that words are just words and that the things we say to God are, in the final analysis, without any real effect on our lives. “Convert us, O God our salvation†(Ps 84:5). What if God were to take us seriously and do it?
Note that we do not say, “Help us to convert ourselvesâ€Â; that would be a safe little prayer. It would leave us free to turn to God and away from sin at our own pace, in our own way. It would leave us a margin of comfort and a way out of what Saint Benedict calls “the things that are hard and repugnant to nature in the way to God†(RB 53:8). But that is not what the psalm says nor is it what the Church makes us pray today. Instead, if we are obedient to the “givenness†of the liturgy, we are obliged willy-nilly to take a deep breath and say what, left to ourselves, we would not have the courage to say: “Convert us, O God our saviour†(Ps 84:5).
This prayer makes the old self in us tremble with fear. The old self senses that, by uttering such a prayer, its days are numbered and its very existence threatened. We are asking God to do in us the hard things that we dare not do. We are asking God to take away from us the very things from which we cannot bear to part. We are asking God to intervene, to step in, turn us around, and change us. There is nothing reassuring, nothing cozy, nothing safe about such a prayer. It makes us vulnerable. Who is to say what God will do once we have given him permission to convert us?
But there is something else in that one line. We pray, “Convert us, O God our salvation†– Converte nos, Deus salutaris noster. The God we ask to convert us is our healing, our wholeness, our restoration to well-being. We approach him then as one sick approaches a physician, saying, “Do whatever is necessary to make me well.†The remedy may be painful. It may involve a long therapy or a regime of medication with unpleasant side effects. It may require incision, surgical removal of the affected parts or even amputation. In giving God permission to treat us, to convert us, we focus not on the treatment but on its end result: health, wholeness, peace of mind and heart, holiness. A Lenten Office hymn puts it this way: “The hidden wound whence flow our sins, / Wash clean by bathing in the tide; / Remove the things that, of ourselves, / We cannot reach, or put aside.
Should God answer our prayer what sort of things might we expect? Hearts purged of the thorns of hatred and of the need to plot revenge. Revenge? Not in a monastery, you say! Alas, even in a monastery, one can find the sickening sweetness of revenge irresistible. I speak not of enormous, violent acts, but of the little act of vengeance, the barely perceptible act of revenge. “Aha! She got what was coming to her!†In monasteries nowadays we rarely seek revenge overtly. Monks no longer brandish the sword. Abbots are no longer ambushed on the dormitory staircase, prioresses no longer poisoned at their own table. We are content with the nasty little pinch, the discreet pinprick, the razor-like word, the withering glance. Ask God to convert you and all of that will have to go.
Grudges too will have to disappear. However fond you may be of your precious little pet grudge, it is incompatible with conversion. Ask God to convert you and the grudge you have been cherishing and feeding with tidbits picked up here and there is doomed to extermination.
Finally, should God answer our prayer for conversion, we will find ourselves strangely sensitive to a category of sins that often goes unconfessed: sins of omission, things left undone. Jesus refers to them in today’s gospel: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me†(Mt 25:45). Sins of omission are the result of spiritual blindness or selective vision. Either I fail to see or I choose not to see. Once God sets about converting us, turning us around, we begin to see the good things we could have done and did not, the good words we could have said but failed to say. With seeing, of course, comes the responsibility of doing. Ask God to convert you and expect to see occasions of grace where you have never seen them before.
Benedictines vow conversion of life. It can be understood in two ways: first, as a solemn promise to live in state of repentance, embracing the things that turn me away from sin and help me to live facing God; and second, as a bold and almost reckless permission given God to change me, to do in me whatever I cannot do in myself, and this not for a limited time or season, but hour by hour and day by day for as long as this time of earthly testing lasts.
“Convert us, O God our salvation†(Ps 84:5). I would not dare utter this prayer were it not given me by the Word of God and placed on my lips by the liturgy. But because it is in the Scriptures, because it is given us by the Church today, I cannot afford not to say it. He who inspired it will fulfill it. And he who will fulfill it is merciful, even as he is holy.
It occurred to me that one could just as well translate the Collect using “work” for “opus”. Sometimes I fail to see the obvious.
Convert us, O God our salvation,
and, so that we may profit by this work of forty days,
form our minds by your heavenly instruction.
theres a small typo today (i discovered your website
just in time to add it to my lenten observances)
“caelesitbus”
i dont have souter, but salutaris remained an adjective
(o salutaris hostia)into the middle ages
shouldnt it be “Deus Salus noster”?
thank you for your project, and may God speed it
Thanks for the observation! I corrected my copy.
The dictionary of liturgical Latin we call Blaise indicates that salutaris, when used as a masculine substantive, is “le salut” or “salvation”, as in the phrase listed by Blaise Deus, salutaris noster.
I am glad you found the blog! Spread the word. It is easier to put effort into this… let’s put it this way… I will continue to put effort into this so long as I know that people are reading and benefiting from it. The more, the merrier, as it were.
I stumbled across this blog in early January and have since become a daily visitor.
I studied Latin in high school and a little in university, but it has been unused for over 30 years now and to say it is “rusty” is a major understatement.
I’ve long wished to change that, and these columns are motivating me to finally do something about it. And right now I’m feeling quite pleased because I also picked up the “caelesitbus” typo this morning.
So thank you, Fr. Z; your efforts are appreciated in more corners of the world than you may realize.
I have to get these posts out in a pretty big hurry in the morning if I am going to get to the other work I need to do. Thus, I do appreciate the comments, for they let me know that the posts are being read.