Saturday, November 22, 2014

Further up and further in?

     "Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?
     "I do not know. I have told his story as he told it to me. There are times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of the coincidence between a rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination and a careless trap, but that indeed is not my profoundest belief. You may think me superstitious, if you will, and foolish; but, indeed, I am more than half-convinced that he had in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense, something—I know not what—that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination. We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger, and death.
     "But did he see like that?"

     H. G. Wells, "The door in the wall," The door in the wall, and other stories (1911), as reprinted in Tales of the unexpected (London:  Collins, [1922]), 209-210; and The complete short stories of H. G. Wells, ed. John Hammond (London:  J. M. Dent, 1998), 583-584.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

"if we do not look exclusively to Jesus Christ and therefore to God we lose the capacity on this basis to think inclusively."

"wer nicht exklusiv auf Jesus Christus und so auf Gott blicken will, der verliert eben damit die Fähigkeit, von ihm aus inklusiv zu denken!"

     Karl Barth, CD IV/1, par. 57, trans. Bromiley & Torrance, p. 58.  =KD IV/1, par. 57, p. 61.  German from the Digital Karl Barth Library.

Monday, November 17, 2014

Happiness uninterrupted and complete

Cod. Bibl. Capit. Veron. LXXXV [80].
Replace with the very collect once available here.
Give to us, we pray, O Lord our God, 
always to rejoice in your devotion, because perpetual and complete is [our] felicity if we serve continually the author of all goods. Through.

"Da nobis, quaesumus, Domine Deus noster, in tua semper devotione gaudere, quia perpetua est et plena felicitas, si bonorum omnium iugiter serviamus auctori.  Per."

     Collect for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time.
     This is no. 934 in Corpus orationum, which traces it back to Mohlberg no. 486 in the Veronese or "Leonine" sacramentary (Cod. Bibl. Capit. Veron. LXXXV [80]) written in the early 7th century, but containing prayers dating back into the early 5th (400-440 according to the ODCC).  (The scholars consulted through 1956 by Mohlberg had attributed this collect to Popes Damasus (366-384), Leo I (440-461), Gelasius I (492-496), and Vigilius (537-555), i.e. to periods ranging from the mid-4th to the mid-6th century.)  But it is also no. 2599 (sacramentaries from the 8th century and later):

"Fac nos, quaesumus, domine deus noster, in tua devotione gaudere, quia perpetua est et plena felicitas, si bonorum omnium serviamus auctori."

Cause us, we pray, O Lord our God, always to rejoice in your devotion, because perpetual and complete is [our] felicity if we serve continually the author of all goods.  Through.

The former is mistranslated in the 2010 Missal as:

"Grant us, we pray, O Lord our God, the constant gladness of being devoted to you, for it is full and lasting happiness to serve with constancy the author of all that is good.  Through."

And, according to Fr. Z, in the 1973 Missal as:

Father of all that is good, keep us faithful in serving you, for to serve you is our lasting joy.