The Collect for the 20th Ordinary Sunday, already in the 8th century Gelasian Sacramentary, is also in the 1962 Missale Romanum for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost.
Deus, qui diligentibus te bona invisibilia praeparasti, infunde cordibus nostris tui amoris affectum, ut, te in omnibus et super omnia diligentes, promissiones tuas, quae omne desiderium superant, consequamur.
Immediately you noticed the different words for love and longing: diligo, amor, affectus and the related cor, desiderium, promissio. Each has its own subtle overtones which you can investigate. After all, when you love and believe you want to know more. Faith seeks understanding and love draws us to Love Himself. St Augustine (d430) worked from the ancient understanding of gravity as a force within a thing compelling it to seek its resting place. He describes love as his “weight”, urging his heart towards God. “Amor meus, pondus meum… my love is my mass” (conf 13, 9, 10).
Current ICEL translation (2011):
“O God, who have prepared for those who love you good things which no eye can see, fill our hearts, we pray, with the warmth of your love, so that, loving you in all things and above all things, we may attain your promises, which surpass every human desire.”
Today’s Collect pulses with longing.
When this is sung aloud – can we please sing our prayers more often? In Latin? – I hear the connection between invisibilia near the beginning and promissiones near the end.
The concepts are ordered climactically, beginning with the ways that we can love on our own, namely, with “natural” love before we receive our Christian character by baptism. Moving beyond mere human loves, in this world, aided by grace, we can have the infused virtue charity (cf 1 Cor 13). Finally, true love awaits us in heaven. Beyond anything we experience in this life, that Love will complete our every hope and longing.
Speaking of Love Himself, everything God promised is already fulfilled for us, but we still have to live in love to be with Christ later. What a mystery it is that, even though Christ defeated death, we must still pass through death to have Love’s fulfilment. For now, however, we can only ache for the completion of what God promised. We therefore long for Love, reaching out, thirsting for its fullness, its completing, healing, transforming power. This is the promise we live for in this vale of tears.
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