Pentecost looms. Which means it’s been 50 days since I heard the words uttered near the beginning of the Easter Vigil Mass…and still, I can’t get them out of my mind.
The prayer came just after the first reading from Genesis, recounting the Bible’s familiar story of creation.
Opening the missal, our celebrant read this supplication aloud to the Easter-energized crowd:
Almighty ever-living God, who are wonderful in the ordering of all your works, may those you have redeemed understand that there exists nothing more marvelous than the world’s creation in the beginning
except that, at the end of the ages, Christ our Passover has been sacrificed. Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.
I noticed it initially, I think, because of its clunky construction. I can’t imagine any of my clients accepting such a convoluted sentence structure in the work they ask me to produce. (And as I’ve noted before, I struggle to have charitable thoughts about those who are responsible for often-abominable language in the “new translation” of the Roman missal.)
But today, on the eve of Pentecost, I wonder: Could the convoluted prayer somehow be construed as an early manifestation of the promised Paraclete?
And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit
and began to speak in different tongues,
as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim.
I have to admit that the tangled syntax did ultimately draw me back in.
I looked it up when I got back home that night…and I’ve been meditating on the prayer – off and on – throughout the Easter season.
Here’s what I’ve found…
Sit with the prayer a bit…
Exert a little effort to break it open…
And you come to realize that there’s a lot of beauty and truth threaded throughout its mind-numbing complexity.
God is wonderful…
…One whose marvelousness is revealed in the beauty of creation…
…and throughout all of time…
But we begin to understand the true magnitude of God’s loving Splendor, poured out on us, only in the person of the risen Christ…
…The All-Powerful One, with arms outstretched in self-sacrifice…to heal a broken world.
Let us pause now…to recall that we are in the presence of the Holy & Merciful One.
IHS
With Us Still 
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