While on kid patrol at home today I've finally started re-writing my liturgical calendar program, making it more efficient and straightforward and vastly reducing namespace pollution. With the new version it'll also be easier to implement the pre-1969 "Tridentine" calendar, still followed by indult parishes and various schismatics, and for which there exists a large devotional literature.
I'd like to end up with an ordo calculator, which would report all the relevant liturgical information for each day in both calendar schemes - Mass readings, colors, proper prayers, preface choices, rank, readings from the Liturgy of the Hours/Breviary, historical and devotional information, &c, &c. Sort of the raw material for a new edition of Pius Parsch's The Church's Year of Grace, perhaps.
I'm doing this in emacs lisp, my "native" programming language - it's the first I learned and it's still the easiest for me to work with in emacs - so maybe when I'm done I can somehow output the info to the web each day.
I started writing this thing about 5 years ago, when one day I idly wondered what were the prayers and readings in the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours the day our eldest child was born.
Here's the official English translation of the opening prayer for yesterday's Mass, the first Sunday of Advent:
All-powerful God, increase our strength of will for doing good that Christ may find an eager welcome at his coming and call us to his side in the the kingdom of heaven, where he lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Can you make anything of that? It seems a pile of cold mush compared to this translation, found in volume 1 of In Conversation with God:
Almighty God, grant us the will to greet our Savior with our good works when he comes, so that we may be worthy to be on his right hand and possess the kingdom of heaven.
The reference to Christ's right hand in the latter prayer brings to mind Matthew 26:31-36 and the list of good works with which we are to greet him:
"When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left.
Then the King will say to those at his right hand, `Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.'
The second translation also helpfully specifies the side on which we wish to be found.
