WDTPRS – 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time: Vicissitudes and confusion, fog of the world, smoke of Satan, coming precisely whence there ought to be coming clarity.

Let’s have a look in advance of the Collect for Sunday in the Novus Ordo, which I assume most of you attend (perforce or not).

COLLECT – (2002MR):
Deus, qui fidelium mentes unius efficis voluntatis,
da populis tuis id amare quod praecipis,
id desiderare quod promittis,
ut, inter mundanas varietates,
ibi nostra fixa sint corda, ubi vera sunt gaudia.

A master crafted this.

This same Collect is used for the Monday of the Fifth week of Easter and also in the 1962MR on the Fourth Sunday after Easter.  Therefore we have seen this prayer before. In the ancient Gelasian Sacramentary you find it on the Third Sunday after the close of Easter.  All those long eeee sounds produced by the Latin letter i are marvelous. Note the nice parallels: id amare quod praecipis, id desiderare quod promittis as well as ibi…sint corda and ubi…sunt gaudia.  In the first line the genitives unius…voluntatis are elegantly split by the verb efficis.  A master made this prayer.

The pages of our opportunely situated Lewis & Short Dictionary divulge that varietas means “difference, diversity, variety.”  It is commonly used to indicate “changeableness, fickleness, inconstancy.”  I like “vicissitude.”  The adjective mundanus, a, um, “of or belonging to the world”, must be teased out in a paraphrase.  Efficio (formed from facio) means, “to make out, work out; hence, to bring to pass, to effect, execute, complete, accomplish, make, form”.   Voluntas means basically “will” but it can also mean things like “freewill, wish, choice, desire, inclination” and even “disposition towards a thing or person”.

LITERAL TRANSLATION:
O God, You who make the minds of the faithful to be of one will,
grant unto Your people to love that thing which You command,
to desire that which You promise,
so that, amidst the vicissitudes of this world,
our hearts may there be fixed where true joys are.

There are more things to say about the construction of the oration.  For example, look at these parallels.

Deus, qui fidelium mentes unius efficis voluntatis, da populis tuis
id amare quod praecipis,
id desiderare quod promittis,
ut, inter mundanas varietates,
ibi nostra fixa sint corda,
ubi vera sunt gaudia.

Deus, qui fidelium mentes unius efficis voluntatis, da populis tuis
id amare quod praecipis,
id desiderare quod promittis,
ut, inter mundanas varietates,
ibi nostra fixa sint corda,
ubi vera sunt gaudia.

Wonderful.

Let us revisit that id…quod construction. We could simply say “love that which you command,” or “love what you command”, but to me that seems vague and generic.  Of course, we must love everything God commands, but the feeling I get from that id…quod is closer to what the Anglican version expresses: “love the thing which you command… desire the thing which you promise.”  This seems more concrete.   We love and desire God’s will in the concrete situation, this concrete task.  A challenge of living as a good Christian in “the world” is to love God in the details of life, especially when those details little to our liking.  We must love him in this beggar, this annoying creep, not in beggars or creeps in general.  We must love him in this act of fasting, not in fasting in general.  This basket of laundry, this paperwork, this ICEL translation…. Hmmm…, didn’t I say it was a challenge?  God’s will must not be reduced to something abstract, as if it is merely a “heavenly” or “ideal” reality. “Thy will (voluntas) be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

The Association For English Worship in 1985 put out an examination of the Prayers of the Roman Missal comparing two different English versions, ICEL and their own.  Here is the AEW version of the Collect: “O God, by whom alone the faithful are made one in mind and heart, grant us to love what you command and to long for what you promise, that so, amid the changes and chances of this mortal life, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.”  In the Anglican Church’s Book of Common Prayer of 1662 they hear on the Fifth Sunday in Lent: “O almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men: Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise, that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found.”  You have to love that!

By contrast with what we usually hear now.

Benedict XVI spoke eloquently and more than once about the threats we in the Church face from religious/secular relativism, the reduction of the supernatural to the natural, caving in to “the world”.  “The world” has its Prince who still dominates it until Christ the King comes again.

St. Paul wrote to the Romans: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (12:2 – RSV).

Christ put His Apostles on guard about “the world”: “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify of it that its works are evil” (John 7:7).

When what “the world” has to give is given preeminence over what God has to give through His Church, we have the crisis Pope Paul VI described on the ninth anniversary of his coronation (29 June 1972):

“Da qualche fessura sia entrato il fumo di Satana nel tempio di Dio…

Through some crack the smoke of Satan has entered into the temple of God”.

Vicissitudes abound right now.  Vicissitudes and confusion, fog of the world, smoke of Satan, coming precisely whence there ought to be coming clarity.

Crux stat dum volvitur mundus, is I think, the motto of the Carthusians.  While the world is spinning the Cross stands still.  The Cross is the center.  It is the center of the universe in several ways, given that its geographical placement was probably the Garden, which was later Mt. Moriah, which was latter Jerusalem.   More on this, well expressed by Fr. Mawdsley.  What he offers isn’t original but it is very well written. Crucifixion to Creation: Roots of the Traditional Mass Traced back to Paradise – US HERE – UK HERE  I warmly recommend this.

The Cross must be our firm point in our lives right now, especially as we see major elements of the Church spinning out of control.   We can get through this, but we will do so by clinging to the Cross and the crosses we receive for our “full, conscious and active” participation in the Passion Holy Church is about to undergo.