O Lord and Master of my life! Take away from me the will to be lazy
and to be sad,
the desire to get ahead of other people
and to boast and brag.
Give me instead
a pure and humble spirit,
the will to be patient with other people
and to love them.
O Lord and King!
Let me realize my own mistakes,
and keep me from judging
the things that other people do,
for You are blessed
now and always.
4 comments:
Ameyn! Ameyn! Have a blessed sarakosti, Dad! :)
It is always hard to put ancient prayers in modern language... I draw attention to the last paragraph of the prayer... "mistakes" is an understatement of "sins" - I can make an mathematical mistake, that is not a sin; I can make a grammatical mistake - that is not a sin. I applaud your attempt and in Christian charity draw this concern to your attention.
Dear Anonymous,
I am familiar with this prayer in the original Greek and also pray it in Greek as well as in English. You are of course correct in pointing out the difference between mistakes and sins, and your analogy applies broadly speaking. I also know the traditional English translations, but I prefer this one. It is not my own, but the one that is used in my local Greek church, and I have used it for as long as I can remember. I believe the translation originates within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, which tends to provide translations that are sometimes paraphrases. The reason they take such liberties is, as I've been told, that only the Greek originals are authoritative, both of scripture and of liturgical texts, and so they feel that they can take liberties with the English to make it easier to understand.
There are of course, mistakes and mistakes. In Great Lent our attention is on serious sin-mistakes. A ptaisma is a stumble or a fall, and I think you could say that that is what a mistake is. The old monks and nuns saw their 'ptaismata' as normally having a "God-dimension".
But St Ephrem doesn't tell us not to judge our brother/sister's actions. He tells us not to judge our brother or sister. Frequently our Baptism obligations call on us to judge our neighbour's actions.
But on the whole I think this is not a bad translation.
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