Aug 14 Thu
What is the Opening Prayer or Collect?
In the Mass, the Collect is the first prayer that is proper to the priest.
It is not enough to have adored and praised God, and to have asked for mercy. We also need a concise formula that summarizes the petitions or intentions of the celebration.
The Opening Prayer is also called the Collect because it sums up and gathers together all the intentions of the day’s sacrifice. It is also the prayer of the plebs collecta, the prayer of the assembled people.
“Let us pray,” the celebrant intones, asking the people to join him, for this is a public and collective prayer.
We stand and observe a brief silence to help us realize that we are in God’s presence and to recall our petitions.
The priest then says the Opening Prayer in the attitude called orans. This gesture was in use among the Jews, in the attitude of one who expects to receive a gift.
We ask that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ our Lord; that God may free us from sin and bring us the joy that lasts forever, and many personal needs, material and spiritual. Our prayer to God the Father will then be not merely an individual petition but an expression and fulfillment of the unity of the faithful gathered through Christ in the Holy Spirit.
The Opening Prayer always begins with an invocation to God. It is followed either by a statement of the grounds on which our confidence that our prayer will be granted is based. The petition follows. Then comes the conclusion, which is invariably based upon a request for the intercession of our sole Mediator, Jesus Christ our Lord, and upon homage to the indivisible Trinity.
Despite the variety of formulas, we always ask for the same thing: what is essential in our Christian life. He promised to hear our prayer. Whatever we ask of him will be granted if it is good for our sanctity.
It is now time to unite our minds and hearts with the supplication that the priest directs to God on behalf of all.
With the “Amen,” we make the prayer our own and give our assent. Its translation could be: “Truly be so!” or “So be it!” or “Be it done so!” The Jews used it to agree on a contract and also to express a wish.
Amen is the last word of the New Testament. It is the last word, too, in holiness, which is man’s perfect adherence to the will of God. It is to say, “As you wish,” or “My Lord and my God: into your hands I abandon the past and the present and the future, what is small and what is great, what amounts to a little and what amounts to a lot, things temporal and things eternal.” I say Amen to all that you ask of me.
With that Amen, therefore, we acknowledge sincerely our total dependence on God. It is only fitting that we exert the effort to pronounce it decisively.