SPIRITUS DOMINI
The Spirit of God
I want you to walk with me on a strange journey to a strange place.
I recently attended a lecture on the Wonder of Scripture, given by James Goldberg at the Neal A Mawell Institute at Brigham Young University. He talked about AI, stripmining, leather jackets, and how maybe we need to stop trying to extract pre-determined content from our canon of scripture, rather that we should sit down and experience what the stories have to offer.
He talked about using a healthy amount of speculation to “liken” the scriptures unto ourselves. Instead of finding the key truths that God wants for me as I read the account of Adam and Eve sewing fig leaf aprons, I can ask myslef how they learned to sew, and what clothing made of fig leaves would feel like. I can ask myself why I never needed to clothe myself until now, and why the Lord would see fit to also clothe me with something tougher than a fig leaf, warmer than a fig leaf.
Leaving the lecture, I was reminded of a poetry project I worked on a few years ago, but never shared any part of.
In the spirit of healthy speculation, opening up my imagination, and just… wondering, I asked myself:
What if the Catholics crossed the Atlantic centuries earlier, plowed through the countryside of New York, and found the Golden Plates before Joseph Smith? What would so many of the cultural elements of the Restored Church of Christ, taking shape in rural North America, have looked like if they were shaped in Italian cathedrals and sung at mass.
I turned to the 1985 LDS hymnal and compiled a list of hymns that were not adopted from other faith traditions, but those that had been written by members of this fledgling church. Any hymn that referenced the Restoration or the Book of Mormon. If You Could Hie To Kolob, obviously. And I asked myself:
What if this song were Roman Catholic?
Below, you’ll find one product of this exercise, a translation of W. W. Phelps’s The Spirit of God from English to Latin, expressed in elegiac couplets, a Greco-Roman poetry form (or at least my best modern approximation of it), with a Hosana refrain.
If you are an expert in Gregorian Chant, and want to do something strange, please help me set these to music and we can get a choir to sing it.
SPIRITUS DOMINI
Spiritus domini ardit in gloria terram procedit Caelum et angeli veniunt. Eos suscipite! Hosana, et gloria in excelsis Deo Sanctos in scientia extendit, restituens judices suos Virtus et scientia Dei per velamen erumpent Hosana, et gloria in excelsis Deo O, congregabimur, Regnum caelorum divulgetur nobis Nos possidebimus cum Deo gloria visionesque Hosana, et gloria in excelsis Deo Agnus et leo que simul cubabunt — beata tal dies! Iesus nunc servat amissam Ephraim, Ephraim Hosana, et gloria in excelsis Deo
I love alternate history restoration stories. If you ever feel inclined to turn this into a story of some kind, Further Light would love to take a look at it.