Hey, everyone.
I hope you all had a wonderful Pentecost, and are entering peacefully into Ordinary Time. I was blessed to be able to spend the Feast of Mary, Mother of the Church (the Monday after Pentecost) up in the mountains with Jesus, taking a very needed day of rest.
Welcome back to The Collect for Link’s Links. Today is Friday, May 24th. Here are some things I found interesting this week, and think you should check out too:
Link’s Links, May 24th
Read: I finished my read of Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis, and I loved it. Very Lewis, very allegory, very beautiful. Sure, the allegory wasn’t as obvious as “The Lion is Jesus,” but I thought it was a really wonderful book; good enough for me to want my own copy, even. Of course, that got me down the rabbit hole of CS Lewis works, of which there are many. Come browse with me here.
Listen: I went dancing last night, which was wonderful, and now I’m on the hunt for good dancing tunes; something with middle tempo and a strong, steady beat. Something like George Strait’s classic “I Just Want to Dance With You,” which you can listen to on Spotify or YouTube.
Think: I am no professional linguist, but I do have a working knowledge of Latin and let me tell you, there are some bad translations out there. That has prompted a major work in the liturgical world for the last twenty years of retranslating a lot of our rituals and rites into new, better vernacular, more accurately conveying the typical Latin text. Many of you may already be aware that the RCIA is changing to OCIA soon for precisely this reason. But what some of the new Catholics or non-Catholic may not know is that we started, as is proper, with the Mass, with the new translation of the Roman Missal (the Third Typical Edition) coming out in 2011 and featuring changes like “And with your spirit” in place of “And also with you.” As we prepare for more translation changes in the next few years (OCIA, the Breviary, and God-willing the Lectionary) I invite you to read this article, written back around the 2011 release of the new Missal. Think about what it means to be praying in translation — and why the quality of that translation matters.
Pray: In the same vein, Saint Francis de Sales once wrote (Devout Life, II.I.6):
It may help you to say the Creed, Lord’s Prayer, etc., in Latin, but you should also study them diligently in your own language, so as thoroughly to gather up the meaning of these holy words, which must be used fixing your thoughts steadily on their purport, not striving to say many words so much as seeking to say a few with your whole heart. One Our Father said devoutly is worth more than many prayers hurried over.
In that spirit, take some time today to look at this side-by-side of the Lord’s Prayer, to “gather up the meaning of these holy words.” See if you can identify what each Latin word means!
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