a Grateful Response KANSAS MONKS
liturgy & the life of the church
Gone fishin’ for a prayer Seeing the fishers at their craft, while walking along the lower banks of the Tiber river the other day in Rome, I recalled when I was a novice in Atchison and accompanied my novice master, then-Father Owen Purcell, to the South Farm for some good fishing. Abbot Owen had long found his reflective silence while fishing farm ponds and the holes of Stranger Creek in Atchison County and our own Independence Creek where Lewis and Clark stopped on July 4, 1804. Other than the perch I had caught as a child while visiting my grandparents at Fisherman’s Point on the Lake of the Ozarks, I was a novice to fishing as well. After Abbot Owen taught me a few skills and we quieted down for our task, I made a long cast towards the other shore, and the lure landed at the base of several trees, in their shade. Abbot Owen’s intuition was as certain that there would be a strike as I was unprepared for the challenge of a five-pound bass. Perhaps it was the luck of one doubly a novice, just perhaps. Walking the banks of the Tiber I recognized the same calm in these fishers as they cast their lines just above the eddy formed by the ancient pier and Father James G. Leachman co-authored ‘Appreciating the Collect’, Fr. Daniel’s first book maneuvered their bait into the hole dug out by the water’s currents since antiquity when the bridge’s architecture and its Latin inscription were new. Fishing the Tiber’s strong current requires a subtle skill to distinguish between the current’s pull and the carp’s nibble, until the strike requires agile strength to coax the fish across the current to a buddy ready to haul in their dinner. One fisher even had a wood fire prepared for the meal to follow. I was returning from a visit on Tiber Island to the renowned Papal Latinist, Father Reginald Foster, OCD, who was recovering in the hospital built on the ruins of the temple to Asclepius, the god of healing. Father Reginald had taught me Latin these past 10 years and we were working on a fishing project of a different sort. We were fishing for just the right words to express in English the meaning of prayers written in Latin by popes and scholars of every culture throughout the past millennium and a half, yet offered every Sunday in the Mass we celebrate. I was rendering Latin prayers into English, which were then revised by Dom James Leachman also of Sant’Anselmo, before I presented them to Father Reginald in his hospital bed. Finding the right words to express the sentiments of an ancient prayer is like fishing in the current of the Tiber or on the South Farm. A mastery of human thought shaped by the Latin language is necessary to perceive the structure of the whole prayer and the function 22
of each word within. When one English word did not fit well within the overall composition, the three of us by quiet reflection would cast into the deeper recesses to fish for Father Daniel McCarthy the root meaning of the Latin word and there find the precise English word for our day. The prayer tradition, like the river current, is in flux as it flows round the many cultures and people who have inhabited the tradition and kept its force vital. So we are accompanied on this fishing trip by the many monks and scholars who composed these prayers in the Latin style of their day. The scribes are our fishing companions as are the bookbinders who produced the liturgical books. We can trace the history of these books, as they were circulated throughout Europe, and see how the prayers within them were shared here and there, first as marginal updates later to be integrated into the book’s subsequent edition as part of the local tradition. Through the prayers we can trace the development of the liturgical year and come to appreciate the concerns of each age, whether the pastoral care of people in their need, and of pilgrims, or the practices and reforms of monasteries, bishops and popes. What unites us on this fishing trip is our reflection upon the mystery of life in Christ. We may see others’ hopes within ourselves and make their prayer our own, just as our efforts to appreciate the liturgy will benefit generations of the faithful yet to come. Our meditations on these prayers benefit people today, because it takes the skill of a fisher to appreciate the prayer’s words and to recite them so that in the hearing they become the prayer of the assembly capable of bearing our hopes before God. We Benedictines are properly considered contemplatives; yet our community, like the sisters of the Mount in Atchison, has a strong tradition of putting our contemplative lives at the service of both our contemporaries and of those yet to regard our contributions. My contribution, Listen to the Word, is the result of constant reflection on the opening prayers of the Sunday Mass throughout the year, and includes five homilies that illustrate how to preach from the prayer of the Church. I hope that my contemplative fishing will enrich the prayer of our common meal. Listen to the Word, Father Daniel’s book on the opening prayers of the mass, is available for purchase in the St. Benedict’s Abbey Gift Shop. For more information contact the Office of Development at 913-360-7897, or send an e-mail to shop @kansasmonks.org.
