Let’s look at the Collect for the upcoming 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time:
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 prayer. In the 1962 Missale Romanum we use it on the 4th Sunday after Easter. It is also in the ancient Gelasian Sacramentary. Listen to those “eee”s produced by the Latin “i”.
Savor those 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.
Varietas means “difference, diversity, variety.” It is commonly used to indicate “changeableness, fickleness, inconstancy.” I like “vicissitude”. The adjective mundanus is “of or belonging to the world”.
LITERAL RENDERING:
O God, 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.
CURRENT ICEL (2011):
O God, who cause the minds of the faithful to unite in a single purpose, grant your people to love what you command and to desire what you promise, that, amid the uncertainties of this world, our hearts may be fixed on that place where true gladness is found.
Let us revisit that id…quod. We can accurately say “love that which you command,” or “love what you command”, but that strikes me as vague. Can we be more concrete and say “love the thing you command… desire the thing you promise”?
We are called to love and desire God’s will in concrete situations, in the details of life, especially when those details are little to our liking.
We must love God in this beggar, this annoying creep, this Jesuit, not in beggars, creeps, and Jesuits in general. We must love Christ and His Cross in this act of fasting, this basket of laundry, this ICEL translation. I said it was a challenge!
We must not reduce God’s will to an abstraction or an ideal. “Thy will (voluntas) be done on earth as it is in heaven”… or so it has been said.
Lest we forget why we needed new translation….
OBSOLETE ICEL (1973):
Father, help us to seek the values that will bring us lasting joy in this changing world. In our desire for what you promise make us one in mind and heart.
Good riddance! “Values”. Very slippery. Typical of the obsolete translation.
To my ear, “values” has a shifting, subjective starting point. In 1995 Gertude Himmelfarb wrote in The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values that “it was not until the present century that morality became so thoroughly relativized that virtues ceased to be ‘virtues’ and became ‘values.’”
In this post-Christian, post-modern world, “values” seems to indicate little more than our own self-projection.
John Paul II taught about “values”, but in contradiction to the way “values” are commonly understood today. For example, we read in Evangelium vitae 71 (emphasis added):
“It is urgently necessary, for the future of society and the development of a sound democracy, to rediscover those essential human and moral values which flow from the very truth of the human being and express and safeguard the dignity of the person: values which no individual, no majority, and no state can ever create, modify, or destroy, but must only acknowledge, respect, and promote.”
In his 1985 letter to young people Dilecti amici 4, John Paul II taught:
“Only God is the ultimate basis of all values…. in Him and Him alone all values have their first source and final completion… Without Him – without the reference to God – the whole world of created values remains as it were suspended in an absolute vacuum.”
Benedict XVI has spoken about the threats we face from the “dictatorship of relativism”, from the reduction of the supernatural to the natural, from caving in to “the world”.
Christ warned His Apostles about “the world”, saying said: “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify of it that its works are evil” (John 7:7). He spoke about this world’s “prince” (John 12:31; 14:30 16:11). St Paul wrote: “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” (Romans 12:2).
If what “the world” offers gets priority over what God offers the world through His Holy Church, we produce the situation Paul VI described on 29 June 1972, the ninth anniversary of his coronation:
“Through some crack the smoke of Satan has entered into the temple of God.”
Our Collect today asks God to grant that His will be the basis of our “values” in concrete terms, not in mere good intentions or this world’s snares.
Of course today, we are seeing more than ever what Satanic smoke in the Lord’s House has done.
John XXIII and Paul VI wanted to throw the windows open to the world. Be careful what you wish for. Now we have to throw the windows and doors and maybe the roof also open to the renewing light and rushing wind of the Holy Spirit of Truth to clean out the slimy residue the smoke left on just about everything.
If the explanation about the Collect helped you in some way, chime in.
BTW… here is the 1928 Book of Common Prayer version:
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; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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> In this post-Christian, post-modern world, “values” seems to indicate little more than our own self-projection.
This being a statement that nearly invites a response from me by name, I offer that there are other derivations for values and guiding principles.
Firstly, anthropology, neurobiology, social biology and sociology have been informing us over the past 50 years that higher-cognition mammals (mammals particularly) depend upon cooperation and group cohesion for survival. We are hard-wired to depend upon others and to be altruistic insofar as it furthers our immediate goals. That’s obviously not a high bar, but it is a starting place: we need each other.
Secondly, the great evolutionary leap of higher primates (n.b. that if you ascribe that to God giving humans a soul, no worries, I don’t mind a substitution for the word “evolution”) is collective learning. That is, we and perhaps a select few of our more primitive primate ancestors can “share store, and accumulate information over time and across generations.” We can do this through gesture, speech, symbols, and finally through media. What would you and I know about Aristotlean or Natural philosophy without the ability to access the writings of Thomas Acquinas? Something, perhaps, but not as much without the foundation laid for us. We have a means of standing ont the shoulders of intellectual giants such as Tommaso d’Aquino and Aristotle (and because someone on the blog recently disagreed and I can’t help myself) Marx.
Thirdly, from these repositories, as communal beings, we form societies that develop both a sense of “mala in se” (arguably, what offends us as social Mammalia) and “mala prohibita” (what offends us as rational and learned beings) crimes which we codify and pass on and redact. You can add “sin” if you would like to combine subsets of the two into what offends a god–not just your own, hence lowercase.
Secular ideals and values can be iterated and enforced by secular societies without appeal to God.
Articles:
1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.
5. Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law.
6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.
That’s from the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” by the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson. It appeals to God for witness, but it is specifically a statement by the men of the French National Assembly, not a proclamation delivered on tablets from Sinai, which would have an origin of a different authority. And I say there are strong values stated within these first few articles and a mechanism for enforcing them–which I acknowledge were carried to excess and/or simultaneously ignored by Robespierre and the Reign of Terror, but that does not invalidate the values stated. It is possible to articulate a fully secular statement of values and to apply them collectively as a society.
There are later iterations of such foundational values–The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the proposed codicils that various theorists and critics have made to it in the last three-quarters of a century, for instance. But the idea that values,, unless they are Christian, are inherently self-projected cannot be accurate. Very few of us have such luxury as not to need a community to circumscribe and validate our sense of conscience.
Obsolete ICEL reminds me of the gratitude we owe to you and others who labored so hard to gain far better translations for the Faithful.
You are in my prayers daily.
Values is a couple good deals at the the sporting goods store. When values tried to replace virtues they had to attempt to borrow, deny, replace or divorce the idea of the prerequisite God (capital G) given virtues that gave these man made “values” any legitimacy. Without the virtue behind these values they ultimately fail, as PostCatholic admitted and as can be seen in our world today. They have lived in a virtuous society with virtuous friends and neighbors and now believe they thought up the idea themselves not realizing simple truths eg. even the most godless hardened soul who is a liar hates to be lied to. Why would that be? So I’m in full agreement that “values” rings hollow to me if we are approaching the throne of God and we should offer the best we can. I just hope and pray the NAB would get the same discernment and correction someday soon
A value is vague and changeable. Virtues are strong and have depth. There is talk about family values. What does that really mean? What a family holds dear? Their family values are different than mine. Virtues on the other hand are universal standards. One either has humility or they lack it. A person is magnanimous or they are not. I love virtues so much, they give a person a goal and it’s workable and measurable. Our society would do so well if rather than measuring height and weight we measured virtue in a person. Kids would love it because it’s something only they have the power to grow, with God’s help of course.
I like this one:
1928 Book of Common Prayer version:
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; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
I like the words used, “unruly wills and affections of sinful men”, and “among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found.”
The other versions are a bore to read. They lack description and don’t make you want to be that person whose heart is fixed where true joys are found. You instead are just a person reading a watered down prayer that inspires no one.