Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Weekly Q&A , Tardy Edition

Eeek! Here it is the end of Wednesday and I forgot to do the weekly Q&A.

Welcome, new follower Ron. Good to have one more psalmsayer sharing a love for the Liturgy of the Hours. If any of you like  nature photography and Colorado scenery, you might want to check out Ron's blog.

Right now I'm in the thick of getting permissions from ICEL, Liberatrice Vaticane, the USCCB, and GIA for all the bits of the breviary and of church documents that I'm quoting in The Everyday Catholic's Guide to the Liturgy of the Hours. This is the un-fun part of writing a book. So, not too much mental energy left to write clever blog posts. However, I was struck by the odd conjunction of two words in the (new translation) concluding prayer for St. John Chrysostom last week.

The prayer referred to the saint's:  Invincible......patience.

One tends to think of "invincible" as a word associated with the strength and action of a warrior. It means, more or less, "unconquerable".   Whereas patience is a virtue that strikes us as somehow passive. The old translation calls it "patient endurance", which reinforces the passive aspect, compared to that wonderfully aggressive word, "invincible." Anyway, this has given me one more insight about spiritual warfare.

If you have any questions related to the Divine Office, the comboxes are waiting for you.