Loving God, who for the salvation of all didst give Jesus Christ as light to a world in darkness: Illumine us, with thy daughter Lucy, with the light of Christ, that by the merits of his passion we may be led to eternal life; through the same Jesus Christ, who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
LOL “provisional feast”! How can one even think of this feast day as “provisional” in any sense, but in a TEC kinda way, which means, I guess, Revisionist. The collect begins with a typical TEC avoidance of referencing God as Father, Lord, or Almighty (my bishop invariably starts any impromptu prayer with the invocation “Gracious God…” which becomes so borrring after hearing it for a few years. Massey Shepherd once told me that good collects were as hard to write as sonnets. The collect’s writer then commits a redundancy by using the word “with” twice in the same sentence. It would have been much better if the collect were written, “Illumine us, as Thou didst Thy daughter Lucy….” All in all, as a literary piece the collect is in essence flat, both emotionally and theologically, as if the writer was unconvinced and unenthusiastic about the subject. However, it would be much better for TEC not to insult Saint Lucy by including her in it’s now-ridiculous collection of politcially correct biographies. However, being a woman, I suppose they were looking around for more C chromosomes.
And of course I misspelled it’s. The misuse of apostrophes is anathema to me, so I guess its my comeuppance.
Not St Lucy of Narnia, I was disappointed to learn, but Saint Lucia of Syracuse.
Another day, another saint.
And that’s X chromosomes in my first post. Mortifying, critiquing someone else’s writing while committing so many of one’s own. I was referring to an informally arrived-at observation that the Standing Liturgical Commission seems to be trying to achieve gender balance for the former Kalendar (now a mere book, really, under a different title), and end up with as many women commemorated as men.
And to think I watched re-runs of “I Love Lucy” all day Sunday in preparation, only to find out it was Lucia. I am very disappointed.