 |
 |
Collect of the Week - 3 The Collect for the Second Sunday after Trinity Sunday (Third after Pentecost): Sancti nominis tui, Domine, timorem pariter et amorem fac nos habere perpetuum; quia nunquam tua gubernatione destituis, quos in soliditate tuae delectionis instituis. Per Dominum . . . So the Sarum Missal; the collect, with a couple of slight differences, is found in the Gelasian Sacramentary as the collect for the Sunday after the Ascension. I give the translation from the 1549 Prayer Book, which is much closer to the original than the revision which appeared in 1662: Lord, make us to haue a perpetuall feare and loue of thy holy name; for thou neuer faillest to helpe and gouerne them whom thou doest bryng up in thy stedfast loue. Graunt this, &c. The 1662 collect is a good deal longer, and has suffered considerable rearrangement: O Lord, who never failest to help and govern them whom thou dost bring up in thy stedfast fear and love; keep us, we beseech thee, under the protection of thy good providence, and make us to have a perpetual fear and love of thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Dr Goulburn is enlightening on this collect. Let me quote him: "In order to exhibit the original with entire accuracy, I may add that there is a play upon words in the latter part of the prayer, which is unavoidably lost in translation. If it is borne in mind that the word 'to institute' formerly meant to instruct, educate . . . the play upon words might be represented thus; 'Because never dost thou leave DESTITUTE of thy pilotage those, whom thou dost INSTITUTE in the stedfastness of thy love.' "You observe that the prayer, as it stood originally, did not directly ask, as it now does, for the protection of God's good providence. It was simply a prayer that, since this protection is never withheld from those whom God brings up in the stedfastness of his love, he would make us have a perpetual fear and love of his holy name, so that we may enjoy the protection." We note that the Latin collect begins with the 'Holy Name' of the Lord, placed very prominently as the first words of the prayer; these are moved to the end of the 1662 version, changing what is the main emphasis of the collect almost to an afterthought. God's 'Name' is a very important theme in the Bible. We find in the Ten Commandments: "You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain". The use of the word 'LORD' (capitalised) in this passage testifies to a desire to keep the commandment. It represents the Hebrew word YHWH, probably pronounced 'Yahweh', though this is not certain because ancient Hebrew did not employ vowel-symbols. Eventually, during the Middle Ages, a group of rabbinical scholars called the Masoretes devised a system of dots and dashes placed above and below the letters to represent the vowels. By this time however no pious Jew would actually speak the word 'Yahweh' aloud, for fear of breaking the commandment, and so the word 'Adonai', 'Lord', was substituted in reading aloud. The vowel-signs for 'Adonai' were placed around the consonants YHWH to remind the reader to do this. The King James Version, and other translations until recently, adopted the convention of rendering this hybrid word as 'the LORD'. Others who did not understand the Hebrew practice came up with the entirely erroneous form 'Jehovah' using the consonants from the one word and the vowels from the other. There is what one might call a Theology of the Name in the Old Testament. In some primitive strands of the OT it is clear that people thought of God as actually residing in his shrine - be it tabernacle or temple. So, in Exodus 28:33, Aaron is told to wear bells on his robe, 'And it shall be upon Aaron when he ministers, and its sound shall be heard when he goes into the holy place before the LORD, and when he comes out, lest he die.' The idea is, that God can hear Aaron coming, and hide himself, so that Aaron will not see him and die. As the religious thought of the Israelites developed it became unthinkable that God himself should dwell in a house made by human hands, and we get instead the idea that God's 'Name' dwells in the place. So at 2 Samuel 7:13 we have 'he shall build a house for my name'. At 1 Kings 5:5 Solomon says, 'I purpose to build a house for the name of the LORD my God'. Jeremiah 7:12 says, 'Go now to my place that was in Shiloh, where I made my name dwell at first' - that's how Jeremiah would express it; but the people who had actually worshipped at Shiloh would have thought of God dwelling there in person. The Name of the Lord is thought of as a sort of sacrament, a 'real presence' of the God who cannot be seen. This is clear from Exodus 33-34: Moses then said, `Please show me your glory.' Yahweh said, `I shall make all my goodness pass before you, and before you I shall pronounce the name Yahweh; and I am gracious to those to whom I am gracious and I take pity on those on whom I take pity. But my face', he said, `you cannot see, for no human being can see me and survive.' Then Yahweh said, `Here is a place near me. You will stand on the rock, and when my glory passes by, I shall put you in a cleft of the rock and shield you with my hand until I have gone past. Then I shall take my hand away and you will see my back; but my face will not be seen.' . . . And Yahweh descended in a cloud and stood with him there and pronounced the name Yahweh. The desire to make holy, or keep holy, the name of the Lord is of course reflected in the Lord's Prayer: 'hallowed be thy name' - the first petition of the prayer, and the same reverence for the Name caused the Collector to set it first in his prayer. The 1662 version reverses the order of the Latin invocation and petition, putting the invocation first (O Lord, who never failest . . .) and secondly the petition (Keep us, we beseech thee . . .). This is the far more common order, and may draw our attention to the drastic re-ordering of words in the Latin required to bring the Holy Name to the beginning. We may notice also what I have called the 'Anglican And' creeping in: "Keep us . . . AND make us . . .") We may note also the balance of 'timorem pariter et amorem' 'equally, simultaneously, fear and love', the two attitudes appropriate to God's name. Perhaps however the most striking word of the prayer is 'gubernatione' - 'by your pilotage'. 'Gubernatio' is the steering or piloting of a ship, 'gubernator' is a steersman or pilot. It can have the transferred sense of 'direction, management, government' but we do well to keep the literal meaning in mind and to relate it to the idea of the Church as a ship sailing through troubled waters. Cf. the story in Mark 4:37ff.: 'And a great storm of wind arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him and said to him, "Teacher, do you not care if we perish?" And he awoke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" [Siopa, pephimoso. Jesus here uses a Perfect Imperative, a very rare form, and very imperious indeed. He talks to the storm as a lord might talk to the least significant of his servants.] Here the ship is not merely a metaphor for the Church: the entire Church, Jesus and his disciples, are literally in a ship. Members will be aware of the importance of the ship-image in Christian thought. The main part of a church building is to this day called the Nave, or Ship. Noah's Ark, which saved mankind from the flood, is seen as a type of the Church. Some time ago I commented on the line in Venantius Fortunatus' hymn: atque portum praeparare nauta mundo naufrago. 'For a shipwrecked race preparing harbour, like the Ark of old' - J.M. Neale's interpretative translation. The same Neale, in his commentary on Psalm 107 (Vulgate 106), with reference to the passage beginning 'Qui descendunt mare in navibus' (They that go down to the sea in ships), quotes a prayer by Dionysius the Carthusian: 'At thy command, O Lord, let the waves of the storms of our life be silent, and stay Thou our tempest with a breeze of calm and gladness, that guided by Thee as Pilot into the haven of salvation, we may give thanks unto Thee for the works of Thy mercy.' Oriens. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%