Déus Méus et Ómnia!

O Lover,

Across the last decade I have periodically been drawn to this meditational prayer mantra attributed to Your poveréllo, Francis of Assisi (c.1182-1226). Curiously, the impact of this cryptic phrase has seemed to expand from one such visit to another, as if the verbal container were malleable and capable of repeated shapeshifting. This prayer post to You, O Lover, grows out of my most recent encounter with the vessel.

That the phrase’s translations vary from the most literal “My God and everything” grows in part from the grammar. While the case is probably the vocative of direct address (“O My [own] God . . .”), particularly if the three principal words are capitalized, it could also be nominative (among others). Indeed, I wonder whether the original may have been intentionally ambiguous so as to open the way for the heuristic range of meanings which did eventuate. I also muse over whether the mantra’s interesting apposition of You and ómnia, the Greek equivalent ta pánta (“all things”) profuse in Christian Scriptures, mirrors the paradox of You as both transcendently indescribable and immanently imbedded as the Ground of all gifted with being.

Seizing this grammatical opening, I have been growing into the following translation: “O My God: Totality!” The case as the vocative of direct address is akin to my inclination throughout the decade of this blog, a bent only strengthened by use of capitals. The employment of “Totality,” first encountered in the Beguine Hadewijch of Brabant (c.1200-c.1250) and unprecedentedly encompassing both creation and You as Creator, rings true to the inclusive reach of both the Greek ta pánta and Latin ómnia. The exclamation point, on the other hand, is my own: what You are drawing me into via this mantra cannot be easily restrained.

I confess, O Lover, to being an aspirant to the mystical life: I long, however inconsistently, for indistinguishable union of all having being with You as far as is possible, both now in and “then” beyond time. I intuit this convergence as characterizing Your cosmic and unitive vision of Love. My principal calling is to participate in this Your consolidating Project Mystérium (Eph 1:9-10) in a world riven by hatred, separation, and death. 

“O My God: Totality!” is thus my cry, my declaration that there is but one Reality: infinite You and all of us beloved finites irrevocably interpenetrated, and for the duration. In the light of the macro-impact of the Incarnátus I know nothing of either You apart from Your concretion in form, or materiality devoid of Your cosmic Self-infusion. Both are irrelevant abstractions; there can be no choosing between Creator and creation. There is only You within/around whom “we [all] live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Initially enamored and skewered by Tu Sólus (“You Alone”) as declaration of Your primacy, I now intuit those words as enlarged to the singularity of Reality, of Totality. In his Déus Méus et Ómnia Francis seems to have been connoting vastly more than he knew even while hinting at infinitely less than what actually is.

“O My God: Totality! ”Glory be!