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Saturday, February 19, 2011

Oração da Manhã



água do deserto;
rogai por nós!
água de pedra;
rogai por nós!
rio das montanhas distantes;
rogai por nós!
praia não descoberto;
rogai por nós pecadores!


---
Morning Prayer
water of the desert,
pray for us!
water from stone,
pray...
river from distant mountains,
pray...
undiscovered beach,
pray for us sinners.

3 comments:

Professor 0110 said...

When I read this little orison, the first thing that sprang to mind was that it asked the "water of the desert", the "water from stone", the "undiscovered beach" to pray for "us sinners", because rivers and beaches and stones are themselves sinless...because how can they sin? and so God's ear might be willing to listen to them when they pray for our sake...or because we ask them to be mediators because we are ashamed to put ourselves in God's presence.

Is that the meaning, or am I off track?

Ben

Unknown said...

Amen.

Montag said...

Baysage
Thanks... you know that response by another is the perfect end to such prayer.

Ben
Yes... that's good. I like it. It closely tracks the entire intention of the RC Church in their litanies to Mary.
I wrote a prayer for her last fall in the poetry blog..."Autumn Tanager something-something" and the sing-song nature of the RC litanies induces a trance-like meditation.
I was thinking along the lines of miraculous, and the undiscovered beach was along an unknown ocean, like Balboa upon his peak in Darien seeing the Pacific for the first time...
and undiscovered beach parallels "undiscovered land from whose bourne..." etc. etc. and the entire cycle of Life and Death is on our side.

The concept of Shame is interesting. It strikes me as one end of the "wormhole" whose entrance is Sin and Taboo...
a very long passage through time and space.