Which do you prefer:
Gracious God,
you filled your priest and martyr,
Saint Maximilian Kolbe,
with zeal for your house
and love for his neighbor.
Through the prayers of this devoted servant of Mary Immaculate,
grant that in our efforts to serve others for your glory
we too may become like Christ your Son,
who loved his own in the world even to the end,
and now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
– Amen.
Or:
O God, who filled the Priest and Martyr Saint Maximilian Kolbe
with a burning love for the Immaculate Virgin Mary
and with zeal for souls and love of neighbor,
graciously grant, through his intercession,
that, striving for your glory by eagerly serving others,
we may be conformed, even until death, to your Son.
Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
– Amen.
8 comments:
A.
It would help if you had included the original Latin Collect. The first prayer, with its two-sentence construction and avoidance of the relative pronoun, has the hallmarks of old-ICEL, but unlike most Collects of that provenance does not omit anything of importance. The authors could not resist adding extra material, and so the first English version is longer than the second, which I presume is a more accurate rendition of the Latin.
Like Fr Kavanaugh, I find the first more elegant, although it's not typical of its genre.
The first one sounds nice, but for the life of me, I can't remember what it said. I have to go back and look again.
The second one enflames my heart with a desire to go out and help someone as St. Maximillian Kolbe, who loved the BVM, would do.
The desirous results are better with the 2nd than with the 1st, so I will have to go with option 2. (Now I will go back and reread them)!
The first one requests elevation, the second one requests subjugation. I vote for the second, even if it is more clunky.
Keep in mind that these are meant to be heard - on the fly, as it were.
Do we often hear about "eagerly serving" others? "Willingly," yes. "Generously," yes. But I would suggest that serving "eagerly" is not going to hit home readily.
"...graciously grant, through his intercession,
that, striving for your glory by eagerly serving others,
we may be conformed, even until death, to your Son."
This is an unusual collection of oddly-placed phrases. Maybe, "...graciously grant that through St. Maximilian's intercession, we may serve others unceasingly and, in doing so, give glory to you, who lives and reigns..."
This is why I like Latin. By the time you get it accurate in (your language here) it seems to have regressed and become turgid or even evasive.
One of the few real saints in this new church era.
B, clearly.
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