This week's Collect deserves the description that has been given to so many of the orations in our current English missal - it is CLUNKY:
O God, who in the abasement of your Son
have raised up a fallen world,
fill your faithful with holy joy,
for on those you have rescued from slavery to sin
you bestow eternal gladness.
The problem is word-order. In two places the translators have placed an adverbial phrase before its verb, whereas the verb would more naturally come before the phrase, thus:
O God, who have raised up a fallen world
in the abasement of your Son,
fill your faithful with holy joy,
for you bestow eternal gladness
on those you have rescued from slavery to sin.
But there is a further problem. The Latin has the word ut, which it uses to introduce clauses of purpose ('final' clauses) and of result ('consecutive' clauses). The translators have ignored ut, joining the two parts of the prayer with 'for' instead. The original asks God to make us joyful in this world, and so prepare us for eternal joy in the next. A more faithful translation would be:
O God, who have raised up a fallen world
in the abasement of your Son,
fill your faithful with holy joy,
so as to bring to eternal gladness
those you have rescued from slavery to sin.
