Speaking Differently | Our Language, Our Identity

Joseph Rudyard Kipling

1865 - 1936

Language has been appropriated by the enemies of reason and civilization for nefarious and deadly purposes. As a weapon, relativism has been quite successful at wasting words in a way that has enabled innumerable distortions of reality to take hold of conversations to the serious detriment of human conversations, understanding, well-being, and community.

Desperation brought on by language robbing and emptiness leads people to try to forge identities through social and political manipulation, which splits societies and results in many causalities. The negative consequences of language loss have long been felt by indigenous peoples. A group that loses its language weakens and loses its identity, making it more susceptible to manipulation. The Church will continue to fracture until Catholics recover the language, the poetry, of our patrimony.

The Liturgical Dialect of the Ordinariate

Familiarity with the Our Father or Lord's Prayer can guide the interested reader toward the rationale for the retention of hieratic or liturgical English in the Ordinariate and elsewhere. In the Mass of Pope Saint Paul VI, the Lord's Prayer is prayed in liturgical English. In devotions such as the Holy Rosary, the Hail! Mary is also commonly prayed in the same dialect. To pray in such a manner is to raise one's praying to an art. By deliberately using language that is beautiful, we train our hearts and minds to detach from casual expressions to unite our intentions with conviction to the beautiful prayers of the angels and the saints who are united most closely to the prayer of Jesus to the Father in the Holy Ghost. We avoid utilitarian language that obscures an ability to embody true intention, trusting as a child in the Father's Presence.

Very Members Incorporate: Reflections on the Sacral Language of Divine Worship by Dr. Clinton Allen Brand

• https://files.ecatholic.com/3059/documents/2016/3/2015_Brand_Antiphon.pdf?t=1457623388000

Speaking Plainly

Speaking in one's own voice, one's own vocabulary, is, of course, entirely acceptable to the Almighty. One could argue with a degree of reasonability that it is awkward to use hieratic expressions that require one to translate one's intentions into a prayer. But what is prayer but intention? Do we need to speak our intentions aloud? By so doing, we add effort, which allows us to hear our hearts and reinforces intention. Ultimately, we trust in God to free our prayers from unholy motives.

Romans 8:26 | Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.

We alloy our prayers to those of the saints whose intercession we call upon when our trust and love, graced by God, move us to enlist their help. God may answer our prayers in ways that we cannot readily perceive. In these moments of seeking divine guidance, we may find that the answers come through subtle signs or unexpected opportunities. It is in this openness to God's will that we cultivate a deeper relationship with the divine, allowing our faith to grow even in uncertainty. Our trust must not be confined to our desired outcome. The answer to prayer must be left to God, Who alone knows what best serves His will. He wills our salvation.

For our part, we must be deliberate.

By using a dialect of spoken prayer that may be a bit unfamiliar or even awkward, we detach from the need or temptation to manipulate God's will. With renewed objectivity we begin to cooperate more freely with God. Our awareness is reoriented away from expectation to receptivity to possibilities previously unimagined, possibilities offered to us by God who weds Himself to us for the sake of the greatest good, so that even in suffering we come to trust beyond our narrow perceptions and preoccupations to gaze upon the Light, however dimly perceived by us, that draws us into a deeper embrace.

Sacred Music

In Divine Worship, i.e., the Mass of the Ordinariate, music is more than mere accompaniment for an action, though that is entirely important to sustaining corporate prayer. Music, sacred music, becomes a bed upon which the text, the word of God, invites us into a profound festival of love. The Holy Ghost becomes our spouse, impregnating our prayer with His divine Presence to draw us into embrace with Jesus, the Word of God and Lover of souls. The word of God is written upon our souls by the Word Himself. To sing, then, is to be in prayer, in communion, with the One Who sings Himself in our souls. The 'yes' of the Blessed Virgin, her fiat, reminds us to allow ourselves, our hearts and minds, to become God's beloved. My soul doth magnify the Lord... .

As mentioned, music is not merely a form of accompaniment for an action. Singing is an act of prayer in and of itself. The language of song is most coherent when the text is poetry, art, of a sublime kind, not sentimental nor self aggrandizing. The music of Divine Worship often uses Anglican Chant, plainchant (English and Latin), and hymns that paint the text in a way that configures the singer to prayer, to mindfulness of the text. Ordinariate communities tend to sing confidently because they possess a repertoire of the best music. There is no excuse for not offering the Lord our truest and most beautiful prayers in music. Why? Heart speaks to heart (Newman), and a heart making itself beautiful for God through honest intent that reaches to God for grace to worship Him in the beauty of holiness (Ps 96:9) manifests a humble heart that knows itself in the heart of the Father through the Son in the Holy Ghost.

Not One Language

Grammar is important. Confusion is common because people cannot string together a few words in an order that makes clear one's intentions. One may have beautiful words, but without an ordering that allows those words to move in a rhythm whereby the composition moves in a direction that reaches the desired goal, it is like a boat being paddled by paddlers who have no sense of rhythm that allows them to work together in a meaningful way.

In these times when personal pronouns are used pugnaciously, defying grammar and common sense, and denial of reality is a kneejerk reaction by those who fear a threat to their imagined world, it is important to maintain sanity by being rational and choosing wisely with whom we share our pearls.

Or to put it more poetically... In these present times, when personal pronouns are wielded with a fierce tenacity, flouting both grammar and common sense, and when the denial of reality becomes a reflexive retort from those who doth tremble at the perceived perils to their fancied dominions, 'tis of paramount importance to preserve one's sanity through rational discourse and to wisely select those with whom we shall share our precious pearls.

If—
by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

(...)

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!