Almighty, ever-living God,
whom, taught by the Holy Spirit,
we dare to call our Father,
bring, we pray, to perfection in our hearts
the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters,
that we may merit to enter the inheritance
which you have promised.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Collect for the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Formerly called the “Opening Prayer,” the Collect brings the Introductory Rites of the Mass to a close. We have gathered together as a community of faith; we have confessed our sinfulness and praised the triune God; and now this prayer, led by the priest, unites or “collects” our hopes and intentions into one short prayer to the Father.
The Collect is usually quite broad in its scope, and almost always says something about how we should “know and love God, and do good according to his will,” in the words of the Catechism. We ask God to intervene in our lives, to shape us so that we can do his will in thought, word, and deed.
In the Collects for Ordinary Time, we ask God to give us the strength to do what must be done (Week 1), to grant “peace in our times” (2), to “direct our actions” according to his will (3), to keep us safe (4), to “fashion us” by his grace (6), to “keep from us… all that might harm us” (9), to fill us “with holy joy” (14), to give us “the grace to reject whatever is contrary to the name of Christ” (15), to deepen “our sense of reverence” (22). The Collects for other liturgical seasons have a different emphasis. In Advent, many of the Collects emphasize being ready for Christ, “worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom” (Advent I), to “gain admittance to his company” (Advent II). In Lent, we pray to “grow in understanding” (Lent I), to be nourished inwardly with God’s word (Lent II), to “hasten” towards Easter (Lent IV). The Collects of Easter emphasize our joy in the Resurrection of Christ, and our hope to participate fully in that Resurrection in heaven.
Many of the Collects have a venerable history, reaching back centuries or even millennia – the Collect above, which we pray on the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, was first written down in a Sacramentary used in Bergamo, Italy, in the 9th century.
