Wednesday, 10/26/16
Six days a week I offer Mass
in a hospital chapel. Going into the chapel twenty minutes ahead of time
yesterday, I found a Muslim there. He had put down his prayer rug, and he was
saying his morning prayers.
That Muslim was using the
chapel to pray the way Mohamed taught him to pray, while we use that chapel to
pray the way Jesus taught us to pray. Of course, the two ways are completely
different, but still, we do both pray to the same God.
With that I recalled a Latin
phrase I often heard when I was a seminarian sixty-five years ago. Our text books used to point out that things that
we regarded as completely different can be quite similar “mutate mutandi.i” In English that phrase would be “having made the
changes that must be made.”
So, mutatus mutandi the Muslim and I were doing the same thing in that
chapel: we were both praying to God.
The Bible readings in today’s
Mass were written in a very different time two thousand years ago. However, mutatus mutandi, or making the necessary
changes, they still apply..
What was said back then about
slaves and masters getting along together,
can now, mutatis mutandi, be seen to apply to employers and employees getting along
well.
What was said back then about
striving to enter through the narrow gate, mutatus
mutandi, now applies to working hard for salvation, rather than taking it
easy.
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