My God, My Mercy

I have a little prayer book entituled My God, My Mercy (quoting Psalm 68:18b - Deus meus, misericordia mea); this line one strikes each Wednesday at None in the Breviary, and to-day (being sick at home) I had the sudden inspiration (after a very spiritually dismal time) of reading the full Office again, which has at least restored my spirits while being insufficient penance for my sins, double-mindedness and backslidings.

(By special grant of the Holy See,

St Stephen and all his successors down to

Bl Charles, last Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary,

had the right to have the Cross carried before them.)

St Stephen the Confessor, King and Apostle of Hungary! What a figure, the flower of Magyar piety and chivalry, the Duke who led his nation to Christ, promoted the Church everywhere for the salvation of his people, received the crown of Hungary from the Pope himself, and, ever-devoted to the Holy Mother of God, whom he had declared Patroness of Hungary, was taken up to heaven at her intercession on the very day of her Assumption, called in Hungary the Day of the Great Lady. As his collect prays, may the Almighty grant St Stephen to be a potent fighter for the Church from heaven, who on earth was her zealous propagator.

(Note that his feast is kept some days earlier, on the 20th of August, in the new Calendar, and is a public holiday in Hungary - it is the anniversay of the translation of his relics to Buda.)

(The Holy Right Hand, principal relic of St Stephen:

with this hand he ministered to the sick and poor,

and it was preserved as a signal sign of his charity

while the rest of his body crumbled into dust.)

I liked, too, reading and praying the Wednesday psalms, some of them especially familiar to me nowadays by their continual reappearance in the Little Office, but some of them old friends not seen for some time: Pss 44, 45, 47, 48, 49 and 50 at Matins (a very happy sequence on which I've blogged before); Pss 96, 64, 100, 145 and the Canticle of Judith (xvi, 15-21) at Lauds; at Prime and the Little Hours, Pss 25, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59. (Vespers will be from the second half of the Gradual Psalms, including the beautiful Ps 131, Memento Domine David, and Compline uses Pss 33 and 60.) There's nothing quite like a Psalm.

I took the time also to read the Martyrology: such saints! What am I in comparison; what am I called to be...

As always, one reads the Martyrology for the next day, as a kind of holy advance notification: to-morrow brings (for Traddies) Pope St Pius X (may he pray for the Church, to drive away all Modernism, to redouble worthy reception of the Eucharist, and to restore peace and good order between the Society of his name and the Holy See, for the salvation of souls - to the glory of God).

But also commemorated are St Phœbe, known to St Paul; many holy martyrs and virgin-martyrs (many tortured and put to the sword, one plunged into molten lead, another cast into a fiery furnace, many monks of Lerins and their Abbot St Aigulf who were slain by the Saracens, and one, St Basilissa, a nine year old girl, who by her stedfast witness converted the Roman magistrate who ordered her put to torment and death); holy bishops and confessors; a hermit (St Simeon Stylites the younger); and the ordination of St Gregory the Great to the Supreme Pontificate, that his rays of sanctity might the more surely irradiate the Globe from the City - in the Novus Ordo, this is his feast day.

Eructavit cor meum verbum bonum

Spiritual aerobics: walking up and down and up and down and up and down the stairs here at home, reading Matins.  Told you I was crazy.

Because of time constraints, I usually say Matins (if at all) out of due order: before work, I say Lauds and Prime (asking for a blessing the day and my actions), perhaps fit in Terce and/or Sext at breaks, but in any case get them and None done by mid- to late-afternoon (I hope)... Vespers is said in the evening, then Compline to complete the day.  Or at least that is my general aim...

I must note that to me, Wednesday Matins are very beautiful because of their sublime (and not overly long) psalmody: Psalms 44 (Eructavit cor meum verbum bonum - a royal epithalamium, the song of David's love for his wife the queen, of God's love for Israel, of Jesus' love for His Mother, for His Church, for the Christian soul), 45 ("God is for us a refuge and strength"), 47 ("Great is the Lord and exceedingly to be praised"), 48 ("Hear this, all ye nations"), 49 ("The God of gods, the Lord, has spoken and summoned the earth") and 50 - the incomparable Miserere.  (Psalm 46, which would fit in the midst of these, is read at Lauds on Mondays - "All nations, clap your hands... psallite sapienter...")  Since to-day is the feast of a canonized queen who, widowed, took the habit as a holy religious, how fitting to sing Psalm 44 at the opening of her Office!

While my Latin is by no means perfect, I know these psalms well, having prayed them for many years in English in the modern Divine Office (let us say that some psalms aren't quite so well-recalled)...

Friends, such as Terra, prefer to pray the Benedictine Breviary, wherein Psalm 44 is instead the last of the twelve psalms at Monday Matins (or "Vigils"), while on Tuesdays at Matins the following psalms are prayed: the six Psalms 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51 in the First Nocturn, and another six, Psalms 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58 in the Second Nocturn.  Phew!  (And Psalm 50 makes its appearance as the second psalm daily at Lauds.)  

It is considered that St Benedict based his arrangement of the weekly cursus of psalms on that then current at Rome, making various changes here and there, while the Roman arrangement endured until the minor reform of St Pius V (who removed Psalms 21, 22, 23, 24, and 25 from Sunday Prime, and redistributed them among the other weekdays - until his day, Sunday Prime had nine psalms!) and the major reform of St Pius X (who decreed that each psalm - with the exception of the Venite, Psalm 94, and at penitential times the Miserere, Psalm 50 - was to be assigned but one Hour at week at which it was to be said, thus cutting back substantially on the length of the Office). 

Before 1912, the Roman Breviary, too, had twelve psalms at Matins - this number allegedly goes back to the Egyptian Fathers of the Desert, who received a response from an angel to their question of the proper number of psalms for the night office.  To this day, their lineal descendants, the Copts, pray in their Office an astonishing number of psalms every day, but they have a cheeky way of speeding up their devotions: one monk says the first of the psalms appointed, another the second, and so on - all together saying their respective psalms at once!

Whatever of this, the psalms for Wednesday Matins in the 1962 Breviary were previously included in the twelve said at Tuesday Matins until 1912: Psalms 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, and 51 - for Psalm 50 was instead said every day at ferial Lauds (and when this happens in the 1962 Breviary on Wednesdays, as in Lent, Psalm 50 is dropped from that day's Matins).