Sunday, April 1, 2012
The horns of the unicorns
It is time again for my favorite line from Palm Sunday, perhaps in all of Scripture:
"O Lord, keep not Thy help far from me; look to my defence; deliver me from the lion's mouth, and my lowness from the horns of the unicorns."
"Domoine, ne longe facias auxilium tuum a me, ad defensionem meam aspice: libera me de ore leonis, et a cornibus unicornium humilitatem meam."
It is tough to type in Latin! You do not realize how used you are to the patterns of letters in English.
Still a tremendous line, even if it is hard to type in Latin.
The missal says it comes from Psalms 21, 20 and 22. It took three Psalms thousands of years ago to come up with a prayer that cool.
Now we are used to seeing unicorns as cute and warm and fuzzy.
But the unicorn in the ancient Hebrew psalm is more like this.
Or like the one at the top of this post. Doesn't that picture kill you? I saw it and had to include it. Just the idea of Robot Unicorns. Hahahaa!
It is funny, I have fallen behind with the Web log -- too much work on the Leonard Pennario book, I am trying to coordinate all of the pictures -- and I see I have not posted since Tuesday, when I crafted the immortal prose titled "Spring Ding-a-Ling."
Spring Ding-a Ling is right!
Today I totally underdressed for church. I remembered too late that Palm Sunday Mass starts 15 minutes early because you have to bless the palms plus there is a procession. So I just threw on a dress and a jacket and ran out the door.
I froze!!
All through Mass I never stopped shivering. At one point my fingers got so cold I could not turn the pages of my prayer book.
It appears I have made this mistake before -- I knew I had written before about the unicorn prayer, and that is how I looked it up.
It is a tradition with me, freezing on Palm Sunday!
Still it feels like spring, hearing the prayer about the unicorns.
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1 comment:
One of the coolest things I have ever seen is the six-part tapestry depicting the "Lady and the Unicorn", which has its own room in the medieval Musee Cluny in Paris.
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