Mass Talks 10: The Collect

When planning this sermon on The Collect, the latest in a series of explanations of the Mass, I didn’t think at first that there would be enough material to justify speaking about it alone. It is one of the briefest elements that comprise the Mass. After a little thought, however, I came to realize that much can be said about this terse prayer that precedes the Readings of the day.

My first comment is about the curious name Collect. It’s spelled just the same as the verb ‘collect’ and may be a clue to its meaning. It’s taken from the Latin word, collecta and has been rendered by the English translators of our Mass texts as the “Opening Prayer.” The Vatican has frowned upon this novel nomenclature and insisted that the proper word Collect be reinstated. This forces the issue of figuring out the meaning of this obscure term.

Collect seems to mean ‘collected prayer,’ or a prayer that ‘gathers together.’ The strange term may refer back to an ancient custom of assembling or ‘collecting’ the people together to celebrate Mass, during which time the priest said a prayer. The collect then is a public prayer (as opposed to a private one) in which the priest addresses God as the representative of the people: a real priestly act of being the spokesman for the congregation and their mediator with the Almighty. In this prayer the priest ‘collects’ all your intentions, summarizes your individual prayers, and places them before God. Another less plausible explanation, but one that makes its point, is that the word collect means ‘recollected,’ that is, that the people are to be mentally alert in thinking about what they should be praying for. For this reason, after the priest says “let us pray,” he is supposed to pause for a moment to allow you to be conscious of being in God’s presence and to formulate your intentions before proceeding.

“Let us pray,” (the oremus of the Latin) is a summons to the congregation for prayer. For this the priest faces the people. In the old Tridentine Mass, the priest opened and closed his hands when he said ‘let us pray,’ as an inviting gesture. Although this movement has been suppressed for the collect, it is still given after the priest washes his hands and says, “Pray brethren...”. As I have said before and for reasons that I have already given, at this parish the priest then faces eastward for the prayer itself where God is not only symbolically present (in the East) but where, in our church at least, the real Eucharistic presence of Christ is found housed in the tabernacle.

Regarding the collect prayer itself, you should note that it is typically brief, unlike many of our private devotional prayers. This brevity has been a staple feature of the Roman rite from ancient times. But saying that the prayer is brief does not mean that it says but little. It is in fact often packed with rich theological content and urgent supplication, the very model of concision and good form. It has a regular pattern about it, following a classical structure, that I want you to recognize, especially when our current English version of it falls to the opposing tendencies either to clip the Latin phrases and thus to deprive them of their full meaning, or else to elongate them with sentimental appendages which are completely foreign both to the historical Roman brevity I mentioned and to the sobriety or un-emotionalism that has been characteristic of traditional Catholic liturgy.

The true structure of the Collect is this: after “let us pray” and the silence, the Lord is solemnly addressed, usually as “Almighty, everlasting God.” (This too has often been abridged or sentimentalized in the modern translation). After this address comes the signal Latin word qui meaning ‘who’: “O almighty and everlasting God who...” This ‘who’ (also notably missing from our English) is very important because it follows a biblical and historical pattern of prayer. Just like a child when about to ask his parents for a favor, might first remind them of something in order to get what he wants (“Dad remember when you said that we could go outside after dinner...”), so in prayer we first remind God about something wonderful He did in times past, or we bring to His attention (not that He has memory lapses) some attributes of His, such as his mercy, love, or His bounty. Then, and only then, when we have bent His ear, so to speak, and have aroused His empathy, do we begin to make our petition. This manner of prayer is a masterwork of diplomacy.

What we ask God for, or what we remind Him of, may express some general theme or conform to the current liturgical season. In order to demonstrate this to you, I take the example of the Collect already said for this Mass. First, I’m going to give you a literal rendition of the Latin original and then the version given by our English translators (and which I am obliged by the Church to use–at least for now, until the new approved version will be completed). So, the prayer would read this way:

Let us pray. We beseech you, O Lord our God, (you’ll never find the word ‘beseech’ or ‘beg’ in our texts at present), we beseech you that, in that same charity / by which your Son in loving the world / delivered Himself up to death (there’s the reminder of God’s goodness in the past), so may we now walk eagerly (in that same charity). The petition here is that we become as rich in love, as was Jesus had when He endured His passion! That’s asking quite a lot, of course, but when we pray we ought to think large and ask for great things.

And now for the official version of this prayer that I used to open this Mass. “Father” (this is typical: reducing God’s name to ‘‘Father,” which is not the one used in the Latin text),“help us to be like Christ your Son, who loved the world and died for salvation.” Now, there are some translations that are worse than this one, and at first hearing, this might seem to convey the sense of the Latin adequately. However, it misses the significant fact that we not only want to be “like Christ” but that we want to have a love like His, a love, namely, that motivated His sacrificial death. Here we have an example of stripping the text of an essential component that restricts or contorts its meaning. I should also make a point about the banality of this text, so lacking in rhythm and grace.

And now to add insult to injury, I must mention that there is also added to the American edition of the priest’s altar missal a so called “Alternative Prayer.” How these free alternative paraphrases ever got approved by the Holy See is indeed intriguing but not to the point here. But, just for your information, I want to read to you this alternative prayer that, according to present allowances, the priest may use in place of the already feeble English text given as a translation. It reads: “Father in heaven, the love of your Son led him to accept the suffering of the cross that his brothers might glory in new life” (although this is true, it is not what the prayer says). It continues, “Help us to embrace the world you gave us” (that’s pretty well close to a denial of Christianity. To “embrace” the world is an invitation to worldliness, one of the major causes of sin); and then this: “that we may transform the darkness of its pain into the life and joy of Easter” (this is another gratuity and a good example of the embarrassing banality that has plagued our English Mass texts. I wont comment further about “the world’s pain” or about the power we supposedly have acquired to transform “pain’s darkness”–gobbledegook even by very low standards).

I don’t intend to make these remarks about our terrible English texts the main subject of this sermon. The issue however is serious. When we cry out to God for something, as when we say, “Lord, help me,” our prayer, however short, is direct and clear in meaning. But when we say such things as I read to you, one wonders what the priest’s prayer really means. Prayer ought first to be intelligible and without excessive verbiage or truncation. Thus we stand to lose a great deal here–just as in many other things in our Catholic tradition that have been taken away from us–if we do not get the prayers that the Church has giving to us. We await a new and improved translation. The happy news is that one is on the way.

A final word about the Collect: it has a regular conclusion. I will give a literal English translation with some of the traditional phraseology: “Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, world without end. Amen.” Note that we always pray to God through Christ because, as our Lord says, no one can come to the Father except through Him. The Holy Spirit is the Person of the Trinity who “binds” or relates the Father and the Son, hence the prayer says “in the unity of the Holy Spirit.” Your reply to the prayer, your “Amen,” makes the prayer your own, as if it were your own.

Perhaps this little explanation and commentary on the Collect will make you a bit more aware of this brief text of the Mass and encourage you to “raise your minds and hearts” to God at that time, without which there can never be any true prayer, in the proper sense of the word.

Please grant me the indulgence of ending this sermon with a little composition of my own making: a ‘collect’ in the traditional classical form whose petition I hope finds favor with God and with you:

Almighty, everlasting God, whose Word both created the universe and became man for our eternal salvation, grant, we beseech you, that we may soon hear, in an authentic and dignified translation, the words of the sacred liturgy which your holy Church has prepared with such solicitude for our eternal welfare. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, world without end. Amen.