Praying in the Church’s language

BY STEVEN WINGATE

This past Lenten season I walked out of confession and said my prayers of penance while the choir practiced one of those haunting Latin hymns that can make even non-Catholics fall in love (at least temporarily) with the Church and the beauty of its rituals.

Two years of foggily remembered high school Latin helped me trace a few words, but not the rest. The otherness of this once-learned but now-forgotten language grabbed my attention and held on.

When you speak another language, the adage goes, you become another person. And I wanted, in that moment of penance, to become another person: less bound by my anxiety, less likely to lose myself in anger, more rooted in a life of peace. So I decided, as I left the church that day, to start praying in Latin and see if it might help this new person emerge.

As a “boomerang Catholic”—raised in the faith as a child, fleetingly in and out of it through young adulthood, settling back into it once I had children of my own—my religious book learning isn’t particularly good. I knew no Latin prayers at all, not even a snippet.

Thankfully we have the Internet, which allowed me to look up the “Anima Christi”. This was the prayer I had been drawn to that day after confession—I must have heard someone praying it in Latin once, in a church pew or in an old movie from before Vatican II. I found the Latin text, printed it out, kept it by my bed and stumbled my way through it before I slept each night.

No new personality, no miraculous transformation. Every time I read it—butchering the unfamiliar words, ruining the cadence—I told myself I know I’m getting this wrong. But what I sought from praying in Latin actually resided in this feeling of error; the sense that my prayer would always be incomplete and imperfect, but that I had to keep on doing it anyway with humility, sincerity, patience.

The meaning of prayer rests in these things rather than in the perfection of form (though perfection of form is a beauty of its own). I had to let myself stumble, let myself grope more than the familiar English I knew would ever let me, in order to understand how prayer helps me find my way in the darkness.

I slowed down, mumbled less, stumbled more patiently and with more confidence that the “Anima Christi” would be there for me as it has been there for Catholics for the past six centuries.

I reached for other Latin prayers, setting deadlines for myself to learn them by heart. The Pater Noster and Ave Maria at first didn’t bring me to the same depth as the “Anima Christi”; they were so familiar to me in English that I thought about their translations as I spoke them, trying to figure verb conjugations and noun declensions. This pulled me out of the spirit of humility and into one of love for my own knowledge, which is hardly a recipe for fulfilling prayer.

So I tried other prayers I didn’t know in English and latched on to the “Oratorio ad Sanctum Ioseph”—a fitting prayer for me because I look to St Joseph most, since fatherhood is at the centre of life’s meaning for both of us. To me, this prayer exists only in Latin; I have resisted the urge to look it up in English so I can keep my verb-conjugating, noun-declining mind out of it.

This prayer, more than anything, brought me to the place that I hoped praying in Latin would bring me. Phrases from it started rolling through my mind and mouth—“te per hoc utrumque/ ut me, ab omni immunditia praeservatum”—that I had no choice but to approach with humility and patience because I didn’t understand them. I spoke them, as so many before me had spoken them, and they brought me into the communion with the living and the dead that Catholicism helps me seek. I thought of the early converts, learning to pray in languages they didn’t know. Syrians praying in Greek, Goths praying in Latin like me. Following along at first and being lost, but having faith that the prayers themselves could help them get found. Once I caught this spirit, phrases from the prayers I knew in English started coming to me, too.

fructus ventris tui, Iesus

iudicare vivos et mortuos

ora pro nobis peccatoribus

dimitte nobis debita nostra

One sleepless night it came together: the whole Ave Maria in Latin from memory, without worry over conjugations and declensions. It wasn’t the end of a journey but the beginning of one—finding the trailhead after months of whacking through the bushes.

Praying in Latin hasn’t, as the adage suggests, made me a new person. There’s something about the practice, though, that helps me separate myself from everyday worries not only in moments of prayer, but in the hurly-burly of daily life, too. I know there’s another language I can go to that brings me closer to who I’m meant to be.

Because in English I worry. I ask and tell and demand and cajole and plead and shout. But in Latin, I only pray.—CNS

Steven Wingate (stevenwingate.com) lectures in creative writing and literature and is the author of the short story collection Wifeshopping (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).