Whose resurrection?

The Collect for the Fourth Sunday of Advent is especially well known because it is also the concluding prayer of the Angelus, and consequently recited by many people three times every day. Our current official translation bids us pray that we, through the Passion and Cross of Christ, may be brought to the glory of his resurrection. This version goes back at least as far as Challenor.

A few years ago, attending the Angelus recited by Pope Benedict XVI at noon on a Sunday in Rome, I was struck by a discrepancy between our familiar English version and the text recited by the Pope, who prayed ut . . . ad resurrectionis gloriam perducamur. This translates as that we may be brought to the glory of the resurrection, or even that we may be brought to the glory of resurrection.

I realise that the latter version, though accurate, would be distasteful to many, who would find it unacceptably vague. But the former brings out more clearly, I would suggest, that we are thinking here of the General Resurrection, in which we hope to participate. This is not a separate, second resurrection, but the resurrection of Christ extended to embrace us. The Latin speaks of his Passion and his Cross, but simply of the resurrection, indicating that the suffering was his, but the glory is his and ours.

The insertion of his in the English translation has necessitated a change in the conclusion to this Collect. Whereas the Latin uses the standard adverbial phrase beginning Per Dominum, the English ends with a relative clause: his resurrection. Who lives and reigns. (The CTS bilingual Daily Missal goes further, altering the conclusion in its Latin text to Qui vivis et regnas . . . as though the prayer were addressed to the Son, which it is not.)

The Anglophone preference for an insertion of his here seems to me to illustrate a more general point. Many of the prayers in our Missal originated in the first Christian millennium, before the Scholastic era. They are more content with allusion, whereas Scholasticism prefers definition. Modern translators, influenced by Scholasticism, tend to view earlier texts through scholastic spectacles, and so to produce a more definitive, less allusive translation than the texts warrant, losing subtleties offered by our oldest liturgical texts.

Advent 3

Today's Collect was preserved for us for many years on a scroll written in the eighth century. It is narrow but, when fully opened out, it is some four yards long, containing forty prayers. It is now kept in Geneva, but for some of its long life it was in Ravenna, though it was not originally written there. Still, it is known as the Rotulus (i.e. scroll) of Ravenna.

The prayers that it contains belong to the seasons of Advent and Christmas. They do not look on Advent as a penitential season, but rather as a time of joyous expectation. Today's Collect speaks of 'glad rejoicing' and the 'joys' of our salvation. It was a suitable choice for Gaudete Sunday, and is the only prayer from the Rotulus that occurs on a Sunday.

We can detect a similar serenity in last Wednesday's Collect, also from the Rotulus, in which we prayed that 'no infirmity may weary us, as we long for the comforting presence of our heavenly physician'. This brings into my mind a picture of the whole Church in an enormous waiting room at a doctor's surgery, with the patients keeping each other's spirits up as they await their turn.

Clunkiness

This Sunday's Prayer over the Offerings has already occurred in last Tuesday's Mass, and will occur another five times before Advent is over. It is an example of what many people call a 'clunky' text:

Be pleased, O Lord, with our humble prayers and offerings,

and, since we have no merits to plead our cause,

come, we pray, to our rescue

with the protection of your mercy.

As often happens, this 'clunky' feeling is due to the order of the words. Move two parentheses ('O Lord' and 'we pray') and you have a much smoother text: 

Be pleased with our humble prayers and offerings,

O Lord, we pray, 

and, since we have no merits to plead our cause,

come to our rescue

with the protection of your mercy.

The altered text is an example of what I like to call the 'Morecambe Missal' in memory of the great comedian Eric Morecambe who, when accused by conductor Andre Prévin of playing the wrong notes on his piano, naughtily replied that he was playing the right notes, but in a different order.

Prevenient

Some people have said to me that they are uncomfortable with the word 'prevenient' in the Prayer over the Offerings for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. It has no place in ordinary speech, they say. It may be helpful to reflect a little on the underlying Latin word praevenire, which means 'to go in front of', and occurs quite often in the Missal. We shall meet it, for instance, in the Collect for Saturday in the Third Week of Advent, which begins:

May your grace, Almighty God,

always go before us and follow after . . .

Before 1970, this was the Collect for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost. In the sixteenth century it found its way into the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, where it began:

Lord, we praye thee that thy grace maye alwayes preuente and folowe us.

Clearly, at that time 'prevent' could mean 'go before and enable' rather than 'go before and impede' as it does to us.

In the Mass of the Epiphany the Prayer after Communion begins:

Go before us with heavenly light, O Lord . . .

On the second day of Lent, praevenire is translated in our official version with the verb 'prompt':

Prompt our actions with your inspiration, we pray, O Lord.

So if you are uncomfortable with 'prevenient' in today's Mass, think of the sixth line of today's Prayer over the Offerings as meaning simply:

. . . on account of your grace going before her . . .