How to Pray the Opening Prayer
BOOK CLUB 2 | WEEK 3: A Devotional Journey Into the Mass, Ch. 3
If you’d like to purchase a copy of Carstens’ book, you may do so here. If you’d like to access the Table of Contents for this series, click here.
Now that we have made it into the Church and have made the Sign of the Cross, we can begin the prayer that is the Mass. While not chronologically the first action of the Mass, the Opening Prayer or Collect (pronounced COLL-ect) is certainly an important moment! The Collect changes week to week (or even day to day), and is often thematically related to the feast day or the readings.1
If you’re interested, one of my favorite Hillbilly Thomists songs, You, is a meditation on three of the Sunday Collects used each year.
The Collect serves, in a sense, as a mini road map of what we can expect in the Mass that day. By giving us a time and space to “collect” our thoughts and intentions, the Collect gives direction to our prayer, helps us to focus, and offers us a lens through which to see everything that comes next. It’s an incredible gift and an incredible tool!
[The] Opening Prayer keeps us pilgrims from wandering off into uncharted and dangerous territory. From the church’s doors, we began a voyage from a world of fleshpots , sin, darkness, and slavery, with all its fears and hopes, to the prelude of another world, a heavenly port to freedom and fulfillment such as the world of fleshpots and folly could never understand. God’s own food and drink—the Eucharistic bread and wine—will nourish us along the way. The bishop, like Moses with staff in hand, or the priest in his stead, stands at the head of the assembled pilgrims and directs us. And the Opening Prayer, or Collect, appears as a key mile marker that bonds the Church’s travelers, diverse in circumstance but united in our desire to reach a shared destination.2
So why is it so easy to just let the Collect come and go without giving any thought to it? Why do I always find myself wondering halfway through the readings: Wait, what did we pray earlier?
My hot take—and it really isn’t that hot of a take—is that we aren’t actually praying. It’s easy for us to breeze past the Collect when, for example, we don’t leave our worries and anxieties in the Lord’s hands as we walk through the Church doors, or when we don’t recollect ourselves and our Christian identity as the Mass begins. And yet, the Lord knows how difficult all these interior actions and postures can be for us, and in His Mercy, He gives us opportunity after opportunity to stop, become present, and join in the prayer of the Universal Church being offered at the Mass. This is why the Opening Prayer can be a moment of such grace.
Whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with ours. God thirsts that we may thirst for him.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church 2560
If prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with ours—our corporate thirst, which is comprised of but not limited to that of each individual at the Mass—then the Collect is a moment in which we can recall the ways that we are, individually, thirsting for God’s consoling and quenching presence in our lives, bring them together, and offer them, with the priest and with one another, as the Mystical Body of Christ.3 Carstens spends several pages on this interplay between private and public prayer, between individual and corporate thirst, and I encourage you to read it; however, for the sake of brevity, we won’t go into further detail here.
Suffice it to say that the Collect is an invitation to ponder and live out our individual membership in the Body of Christ that is the Church. We can tell the Lord the intentions on our hearts—our prayers, works, joys, and sufferings—and place them in the hands of the priest, who offers the Collect in persona Christi capitis (in the person of Christ the Head) to the Father in union with us and with Christ.
Ideally, the individual desires of each cell of the Mystical Body are collected by their head and presented to the Father in one single “I thirst” expressed by the Mystical Body of Jesus.4
We close the chapter out with a short but powerful discussion of the role of silence as an integral element in the back-and-forth discussion between priest and people and God that is the liturgy. While we may not be able to control the amount of silence in our parish liturgy, we can build a habit of silence in our daily lives, so that when those moments of silence do arise in the Mass, we are better able to take advantage of them.
The Mass is a moment when heaven brakes into earth—or earth into heaven—and we reflect again the heavenly liturgy. … When the Opening Prayer is offered by one and many, in silence and in words, it signifies—it is a sign—that our journey is moving in the right direction.
Next week, we’ll move into the Liturgy of the Word, but this week, I invite you to find some time for personal and communal prayer, both spoken and silent. Maybe it’s attending daily Mass. Maybe it’s adding a precious moment of silence to your family prayer time (I’m told candles help small children to focus!). Maybe it means paying more attention to the Opening Prayer at Mass this weekend, allowing yourself to be drawn into the dynamic of mutual thirst that is the Christian life.
We will discuss the readings of the day next week, and I will speak a little bit about the Liturgical app; however, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the Magnificat and Benedictus monthly missals at least in passing here, with the promise of further discussion next week.
Carstens, 30
If you are interested in diving deeper into this dynamic of prayer as thirst, I highly recommend this little book as a Lenten devotional.
Carstens, 34
In November and December I had the opportunity to teach my faith formation families about the prayers of the Mass. Learning about and writing our own collects was one of the activities. We used the image of the Sign of the Cross to talk about the four movements of the collect: upward, downward, inward, and outward. So each family wrote a collect in which they (1) called on God by name, (2) spoke of our relationship with God and who he is to us, (3) brought our requests to him, and (4) pledged to walk in faith and trust as a fruit of prayer.
I was inspired by this chapter to do with myself and my family what my wife does with her class before a school Mass: read the collect and take a time to decide on an intention to bring to mind when the celebrant prays it. This would be an easy in-the-car task on Sunday mornings for us.