Greetings friends!
For a little while now, I’ve wanted to offer something for reflection that would be a little more frequent and more digestible than the occasional weekend homily. As I was looking over the prayers of the Mass, yesterday, I was struck by the beauty and depth of the Collect for Sts. Cornelius and Cyprian. That’s when it hit me – how many people pay much attention to the “opening prayer” for Mass? After the new translation, the prayers are more beautiful and more precise, but I know that the sentences can sometimes be confusing. How many people hear it, understand it, and really join their prayer to that one? In an effort to increase the “active participation” of the faithful, I am hereby announcing the beginning of “The Daily Collection.”
The premise is simple. Every memorial, feast, solemnity, and Sunday mass has their own unique Collect, often just called the “opening prayer” (weekday masses use the prayer from the Sunday before). Each time we have a day with it’s own Collect, I will post here a brief reflection on that prayer. This will give me a chance to unpack what it says, reflect on it’s meaning, and offer suggestions for letting it actually impact your daily life. Having said all that, I’ll first offer here a brief description of the history and theology behind the Collect:
The practice of using a collect in Mass is universal in the early Church, but I can find no record of it’s exact origin. Certainly, the practice can be traced back to at least the Desert Fathers. Christians in the early church fled the world and sought refuge in the desert. They began to form communities which prayed together, especially the psalms. Often, the monks would pray a psalm and then pause for individual silent prayer based on what the psalm said. After this silence, the leader of the prayer would pray out loud a prayer that gathered or “collected” all the prayers into one and presented them to God.
The Mass is a liturgy – the word “liturgy” comes from the Greek leiturgos, which means “work for the people” or “public work.” It denotes the official work of an organization. In the case of the Church, liturgy refers to the official public prayer of the Church. The most important part of this is the Mass and all the laity are supposed to actively and consciously participate in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass (e.g. paying attention to the prayers, spiritually uniting your personal offerings to the mass, making the responses, etc.).
Originally, when the priest said “let us pray” at the beginning of mass, he was actually inviting everyone present to make their own silent prayer for a little while before “collecting” them together with his public, official prayer. If you’ve ever been to the liturgy on Good Friday, you would have seen this exact pattern still being used. During the Solemn Intercessions, the Deacon tells the people what to pray for and then tells them to kneel down and pray in silence for a while. Then everyone stands and the priest prays a prayer that collects them altogether and offers them as the prayer of the whole Church. This is just one of the many ways that the Liturgy symbolizes and makes present the reality that the Church is a body made up of many individual, but united members who join their individual works and prayers together for the good of the whole world. It’s still a good practice to quickly unite your own prayer to everyone else’s while you wait for the altar server to get the book open to the right page and the priest to make his prayer.
So, starting later today, I’ll be offering reflections on the daily Collect so everyone can better participate in the prayer of the whole Church.