• A day with its festivity taken away
• Gladden us by his intercession
• The prayer does not ask for an example
• What the list had already settled
• Green, fourth class, asked to be glad

A day with its festivity taken away

Start with what happened to this morning, because it is a fact about the calendar and it sets up everything else.

Before 1955 the Nativity of Our Lady carried an octave. That means the day after the feast stood inside it, still festal, still white. Pope Pius XII’s reform of that year suppressed the octave, and only three survived into the books this ministry uses. So the morning after yesterday’s feast is not a continuation of anything. It is green, fourth class, and it asks that he gladden us by his intercession.

Sit with the sequence. A day that once had festivity of its own had it removed by a rule, and what is left in its place is a Sunday at its third printing and one martyr with three prayers. If any morning in the year had grounds to be flat, it is this one. The prayer appointed for it asks that he gladden us by his intercession.

That is the first thing worth having from today. The request for gladness is not attached to an occasion. There is no feast to hang it on, nothing was achieved, and no anniversary falls. The Church asks for gladness on a Wednesday with the festal rank stripped out of it, which means the gladness she is asking for was never conditional on the day being a good one.

And see which way the sentence runs. It does not say let us be glad. It says gladden us, which puts the verb on somebody else and leaves us in the accusative, on the receiving end of it. To ask that he gladden us by his intercession is to ask that gladness be done to us rather than got up by us.

Most of what people carry about their own moods runs the other way. Cheer up. Look on the bright side. Find something to be grateful for.

Every one of those puts the work inside the person who has none of it to spare. Not one of them is what this prayer does. It asks that he gladden us by his intercession, and the person saying the words is not the one expected to produce the result.

There is a plain relief in that which is easy to walk past. If gladness has to be self-started, then a flat morning is evidence about you, and the flatter it gets the worse the evidence looks. Gladden us by his intercession removes the evidence entirely, because it never assigned you the job in the first place.

Gladden us by his intercession

Now the mechanism, because the Collect is careful about it and the care is the gift.

May Gorgonius, Thy Saint, O Lord, gladden us by his intercession.

Read who is doing what. Gorgonius is asked to intercede. God is asked to do the gladdening. We are the ones gladdened.

Three parties, and the only one with nothing to perform is us. That is the whole architecture of gladden us by his intercession, and it is worth slowing down for, because it is so unlike the arrangements people are used to being offered.

An intercession prayer always risks collapsing into a swap, where the saint stands in for the congregation and does their religion for them. This archive ran into that risk directly on the first of September and had to find a way past it. Today the prayer finds its own way past it, in its second clause, which is the part that usually gets skimmed.

And cause us to rejoice on his festival which we are devoutly keeping.

The rejoicing is ours. The keeping is ours, in the present tense, being done as the words are said. So the prayer hands the cause outside and keeps the act inside, and gladden us by his intercession turns out not to be a request to be spared anything at all.

Take the second half of that seriously, because it is the guardrail the argument needs. Nothing here says that what you do makes no difference. The prayer describes people who are actively keeping a day and asks that their keeping of it be glad. A gladness with no one doing anything is not what gladden us by his intercession describes.

Look also at the modesty of the ask. It is not for deliverance, or for strength, or for the day to be made significant. It asks for gladness, which is a small word, and gladden us by his intercession is asked on the lowest-ranked kind of day the calendar has. The Church had the whole vocabulary of rescue available and reached instead for gladden us by his intercession.

The prayer does not ask for an example

Here is where the day’s own text asks for a naming, so I will make it.

Look hard at what the Collect asks this martyr for. Not that we imitate him. Not that his courage instruct us. Not that his death put our own troubles in proportion. It asks for his prayer, and it asks God for the gladness, and gladden us by his intercession is the whole of the request.

That matters because there is a very common teaching that says the opposite, and the opposite is cruel. It says that a person who has been through something owes the rest of us its uplift. That their suffering ought to come back to the room as encouragement. That the useful part of what happened to you is the part other people can take away feeling better.

So the group named this morning is people who have survived sexual assault, and the harmful teaching evaluated is the one that turns their account into material. The demand that the story arrive with a redemptive ending. The pressure to be an example of recovery so that the room is not left uncomfortable. None of that appears anywhere in gladden us by his intercession, which asks a martyr for a prayer and asks God for the gladness.

Put the fruit test to the teaching, the way this ministry tests everything: by their fruits you shall know them. Ask what the make-it-useful doctrine grows inside Christian rooms, since that is the record this ministry is entitled to examine.

It grows testimony as a performance, with an expected shape and an expected close. It grows people who edit the account down to the part that lands well, and who learn which details make a room go quiet and leave them out. It grows a congregation that wants the recovery and not the injury, and a survivor who works out very fast which half is wanted. And it grows the sentence look how strong you are, offered as praise and received as an instruction.

Two things this is not saying, and both matter. It is not saying that speaking is wrong, or that an account freely given has no worth; plenty of people choose to tell it and that choice is theirs alone. And it is not saying that a survivor cannot be glad, or should not be. The claim is narrower: gladden us by his intercession locates the source of gladness outside the person, so no one in the room is on the hook to generate it and then hand it round.

And the Collect’s silence on the point is doing real work. It had a martyr available, which is the strongest example material a calendar can offer, and it asked him for a prayer. Gladden us by his intercession is a request made over the top of an example the Church declined to use.

We named this group five days ago, so let me say what is different. That morning was about what a prayer asks for on somebody’s behalf. This one is about what the prayer declines to ask a sufferer for, which is a claim about the demand rather than about the request.

I am also not making this an argument about who is owed what by whom. That is a real question and it is not today’s. Today’s is about a Collect that had every opportunity to ask a martyr for an inspiring example and asked for his prayer instead.

What the list had already settled

Which brings the argument down to the size it actually lives at.

There is a story sometimes told of a woman who sings second alto in a community choir that practises on Wednesday evenings in a hall behind the library.

She had been in the choir eleven years and had spent most of the summer working out how to say one sentence to the person who runs it. She wrote versions of it down. She timed it. She had a fallback ready in case the first version went badly, and a second fallback after that.

What she wanted was to stand with the altos, where her voice had sat for two years, rather than where the list had her. It is a small administrative thing and she had built a fortnight of dread around it.

She arrived early on the first Wednesday of the autumn term to get it over with. The part list was already pinned up by the door. Her name was in the altos, and it had been typed there, not crossed through and rewritten.

No one said anything about it, that evening or since. The person who runs the choir had worked it out over the summer and dealt with it in the ordinary way she deals with everything, which is by putting the list up before the room fills.

That is the turn, and it is smaller than a kindness speech. She never had to make the case, which is what gladden us by his intercession sounds like when it happens to somebody. The gladness of that Wednesday was arranged by somebody else, in advance, and her part in it was to turn up and sing, which is precisely the shape of gladden us by his intercession.

I am not going to tell you this fixed the rest of her life. It did not. She still walks into most rooms with a version of that sentence ready, and she would tell you so before I did. What changed is only that on one Wednesday a year she does not need it.

The Collect is doing what the choir list did. It arranges the gladness at one remove, before the person concerned arrives, and asks nothing of them except that they keep the day. Gladden us by his intercession is the liturgical form of finding your name already typed in.

And it is worth saying what she was spared, because it was not the seating. It was the fortnight of drafting, and the fallbacks, and the arithmetic of how much she would have to explain. Gladden us by his intercession is a prayer against that arithmetic, not against the discomfort at the end of it.

Green, fourth class, asked to be glad

Last section, and it is the calendar making the case better than I can.

A commemoration is not a feast, and the difference is the point. St. Gorgonius gets no Mass of his own this morning. He gets three prayers inserted into somebody else’s, on a day of the lowest rank, in green rather than red. This archive stood on that distinction a week ago, and today it is the reason the prayer works.

Because think about how little the Church has to work with here. A name. A date. An office in a household. Relics that were mostly lost in a revolution fifteen centuries later.

On that, with the octave gone and the Sunday at its third printing, she asks that he gladden us by his intercession.

She could have asked for less and been safer. A prayer for perseverance would have fitted the material perfectly, and no one would have thought twice about it. Instead the one request made of the one new saint on the barest day available is for gladness, and gladden us by his intercession is what she settled on.

That choice is the argument. A Church that only asked for endurance on days like this would be telling you what it expects such days to be. Asking that he gladden us by his intercession on a fourth-class Wednesday is a claim about what an ordinary morning is permitted to hold.

And the Lesson appointed for this Mass warns against vain glory in the same breath. Glory of that kind is taken from other people’s regard, which means it has to be extracted from a room. Gladness of the kind asked for here is given, and the difference between the two is the difference between the thing the Lesson warns about and the thing the Collect requests.

So if you do one thing with this before the day gets going, do not resolve anything. Take the flattest hour in front of you and stop waiting for it to earn the right to be a good one. That is the whole instruction, and gladden us by his intercession is the reason a green Wednesday is allowed to be glad.

↑ The order resumes below.