Gracious God, we offer thanks for the witness of Harriett Beecher Stowe, whose fiction inspired thousands with compassion for the shame and sufferings of enslaved peoples, and who enriched her writings with the cadences of The Book of Common Prayer. Help us, like her, to strive for thy justice, that our eyes may see the glory of thy Son, Jesus Christ, when he comes to reign with thee and the Holy Spirit in reconciliation and peace, one God, now and always. Amen.
A rather strange collect.
Why do you think it’s strange, Abouna?
This line seemed out of place in a prayer:
“whose fiction inspired thousands with compassion for the shame and sufferings of enslaved peoples, and who enriched her writings with the cadences of The Book of Common Prayer.”
The word “fiction” in a prayer was jarring to me. The “cadences” clause seemed too self referential, something much better left to a short description of her life, which I imagine goes with the collect. (I have never seen a hard copy of Holy Women Holy Men, but I imagine a short life goes with the prayers as in previous Lesser Feasts and Fasts, with which I am slightly more familiar).
Looking at it more closely I think that the word “shame” here is meant to imply that a culture that tolerated racial chattel slavery was shamed, (of course quite rightly), but grammatically the shame here is the slaves’ shame, not the slave owners and their accomplices.
To be perfectly honest I find the quotation of the Trisagion in St. Tikhon’s collect to be slightly cheesy (and perhaps even patronizing?), and the quotation of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” is likewise a bit cheesy. But I doubt that scriptural sense of “beholding the glory of the coming of the Lord” is actually dealt with in this collect.
I admit finding the whole expansion, in every direction, of Holy Women Holy Men strange as well, and I am unsure of the propriety of liturgical commemoration of everyone who is somehow significant or a hero.
I made a stab at re-writing it, but was unsuccessful.