Sunday, May 23, 2010

Prayer for Pentecost




Come, thou Holy Spirit, come:
And from thy celestial home send thy light and brilliancy.

Come, thou father of the poor,
come who givest all our store,
come the soul's true radiancy.

Come, of comforters the best, of the soul the sweetest guest,
sweetly and refreshingly.

Come, in labour rest most sweet,
shade and coolness in the heat, comfort in adversity.

Thou who art the Light most blest,
come fulfill their inmost breast, who believe most faithfully.

For without thy Godhead's dower,
man hath nothing in his power, save to work iniquity.

What is filthy make thou pure,
what is wounded work its cure,
water what is parched and dry.

Gently bend the stubborn will,
warm to life the heart that's chill,
guide who goeth erringly.

Fill thy faithful who adore,
and confess thee evermore,
with thy sevenfold mystery.

Here thy grace and virtue send,
grant salvation in the end, and in heaven felicity. Amen.

Latin Hymn, 13th century

7 comments:

dana said...

I totally did not catch that this afternoon. of course my main goal was "stay awake, get the hell out of here, stay awake!) and i managed to get a copy of the missal but not of the ordinary. I might have messed those words up. it is three am and i totally rocked my 'church rat' status today. rocked it.

dana said...

p.s. i like that holy spirit. let's have some more of that.

Katherine C. Teel said...

That's awesome--Pentecost is a great day for church rats. It was a nice day for us, too.

Michelle said...

Sevenfold mystery? Teach me, Pastor - what are the seven parts? I would have said threefold.

This is lovely, BTW. I'd love to sing it :)

Katherine C. Teel said...

I had to go back and reread what the prayer said! "thy sevenfold mystery" refers to the 7 gifts of the Holy Spirit: fear of the Lord, piety, knowledge, understanding, counsel, wisdom and fortitude.

I'm sure it was originally sung in Latin. I bet it was beautiful, too. I'll see if my sweetie can find it set to music anywhere.

Anonymous said...

"Sevenfold mystery" refers to the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord.

Here's a nice version of the hymn, sung in the original Latin. This guy is putting a lot of Gregorian chant on YouTube, in order to help people sing it correctly. (Notice that the Latin version has exactly seven syllables in every line, seven being the number of the Holy Spirit.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4avRUD7YE5U&feature=related

Gretchen said...

So you're not a good Christian? Why post all these then?