• What the prayer does not say
• The office comes first and the work comes last
• The man himself, and what the record will not carry
• Being believed and being taught by
• Tuesday morning, machines running
• What this asks of an ordinary morning

A teacher of life. Four words at the end of a prayer that had every reason to end somewhere more impressive.

What the prayer does not say

Start with what the Collect could have said and did not. It could have asked that we be worthy to have as our intercessor a man of unshakeable orthodoxy, and it would have been true. It could have said a man who refuted error, or a man who governed his church well, or a man who left us his books. Every one of those is available, and the prayer reaches past all of them for a teacher of life.

That is not an accident of translation. The prayer has already used the grand vocabulary in its opening line, so it clearly has no objection to it. A great Doctor, foreshown by God, set to rule and to teach the Church. Then, having said all that, it goes back over the same man and says what he was, and what he was is a teacher of life.

Hold the difference between the two nouns, because everything else this morning follows from it. Doctor means teacher, but it has come to mean a particular kind: somebody who teaches the content, the propositions, the things the Church holds. A teacher of life is somebody who teaches the practice. Not what to think about living but how to do it, on a Tuesday, with the ordinary difficulties in the room.

You can be excellent at the first and useless at the second. This is not a controversial thing to say about churches; it is not a controversial thing to say about anything. A teacher of life is a rarer thing than a teacher of doctrine, and the prayer knows it, which is why it saves the phrase for the end.

For anyone reading this without the theology, the ordinary version needs no belief at all. There is a difference between somebody who can tell you what is true and somebody who can teach you how to get through a week. Both are worth having. Only one of them has ever got anybody through a week, and a teacher of life is the plain name for it.

The office comes first and the work comes last

Now the shape of the sentence, because a prayer is a made thing and its order is a choice. The Collect front-loads everything institutional. Foreshown divinely. A great Doctor. To rule and to teach Thy Church.

That is three separate claims to authority, stacked up before the prayer has asked for anything at all. Not one of them is a teacher of life.

Then comes the petition, which is modest: that we may be worthy to have him as our intercessor in heaven. And then, hanging off the end of that, the relative clause. Who on earth was a teacher of life.

Two prepositions do a great deal of work there. In heaven he intercedes; on earth he taught. The prayer splits his two jobs across the two places and gives the earthly one the plainer noun. The heavenly work gets the technical word, and the earthly work is described as a teacher of life, which is language anyone would use about a neighbour.

I take that as deliberate and I take it as an instruction. When you want to know what a life amounted to, the prayer suggests, the office is the first thing you say and the least of what you mean. A teacher of life is the sentence you write when the honours have all been read out and somebody asks what he was actually like.

And the Gradual makes the same move by a different route. Behold a great priest, who in his days pleased God. There was not found the like to him, who kept the law of the most High. Every verb in it is something the man did or kept, and not one of them is something he asserted. That is a portrait of a teacher of life rather than of a teacher of doctrine.

That is a striking set of praises for a Doctor of the Church. It says nothing whatever about his positions. The whole citation is about how a man conducted his days, which is exactly the register of a teacher of life, and it is the register the Church chose for a morning that could very easily have gone the other way.

The man himself, and what the record will not carry

The Catholic Encyclopedia gives a short account and a plain one. He was born at Imola in 406, was ordained deacon by Cornelius, the bishop there, and was elevated to the bishopric of Ravenna in 433. He died at Imola in 450. A teacher of life is the Church’s summary of the forty-four years in between.

What survives of him is preaching. He wrote a hundred and seventy-six homilies, and the encyclopedia describes them as in great measure explanatory of biblical texts, and as brief and concise. Brief and concise is not usually how a reputation gets built. It is, however, exactly what a teacher of life sounds like when you write it down.

The name is a nickname about speech. Chrysologus means golden-worded, and the article says simply that his oratory merited it for him. Not his learning, not his rulings, not his opposition to error, though he had all three. He is remembered under a name given him for how he talked to people, which is the same claim the Collect is making when it calls him a teacher of life.

Two famous things are commonly said about him that the Catholic Encyclopedia does not carry. The article says nothing at all about a letter to Eutyches, and nothing about its contents, though it does say that after Eutyches was condemned he tried to win Peter’s support and failed. It also says nothing about a formal declaration that he is a Doctor of the Church, and gives no date and no pope for one. Neither claim appears here as fact.

That leaves the title itself resting on today’s own prayer, which calls him a great Doctor in its opening line, and the Church’s own liturgy is a fair source for what the Church’s own liturgy calls somebody. The encyclopedia gives no feast day either. December 4 stands on the Missal alone, and a teacher of life is the description the Missal supplies with it.

Being believed and being taught by

Here is the teaching this morning has to weigh, and it is held sincerely by people who would be dismayed to hear it stated out loud. The teaching is that a church may hold, refine and hand on a settled doctrine about a group of people without ever having been taught anything by how those people actually live. Doctrine about a life, arrived at without a teacher of life.

And this is not the same thing as refusing to listen. Churches listen a great deal. They hold consultations, they receive submissions, they invite people to speak about their experience, and every one of those is real and some of them are done with genuine love. But listening produces a record, and being taught produces a change, and only one of those two things has happened when a doctrine comes out the other side exactly as it went in. The difference is whether anybody in the room was treated as a teacher of life.

This lands with particular weight on gay, lesbian and bisexual people, because they are among the groups most thoroughly written about and least often learned from. There is a great deal of teaching about their lives. There is very little teaching that treats any of them as a teacher of life, in the way the Collect means it, about how a person prays, keeps faith, stays in a marriage, raises children, forgives a family, gets up on a bad morning.

This is close to something said here nineteen days ago and it is a different claim, so the difference should be stated rather than left to be guessed. Out of season was about credibility, about whether a person’s account of their own life is admitted at all when they are known to have a stake in it. Today assumes the account is admitted in full and asks the next question. Being believed and being taught by are two separate acts, and a community can do the first for decades without ever once doing the second. Only the second one leaves anybody in the room a teacher of life.

Weigh the habit by what it has grown, which is the only test this ministry knows how to apply and the only one that does not require agreement about anything else. It has grown statements about people drafted by rooms containing none of them. It has grown listening exercises that produce a document and no change. It has grown a permanent standing category of members who are the subject of teaching and never a teacher of life, and there is no exit from that category, because nothing a person in it says can count as instruction.

The Collect refuses that arrangement from inside. You cannot be a teacher of life without having first learned how to live, and learning how to live is something a person does by being taught, usually by somebody with no standing to teach them. The prayer honours a bishop for it. It does not say he was a teacher of life because he was a bishop, and the order of the sentence suggests the reverse.

Tuesday morning, machines running

There is a story sometimes told of a group of women who met on Tuesday mornings in a launderette on a high street, because they had lost the room they used to have and two of them had to be there anyway and it was warm. Six or seven came. The owner knew all their names, put out extra chairs, and read his paper through the whole thing. They were survivors of assault, and none of them would have described the hour as anything other than a wash and a chat.

A new woman came in October and sat through three Tuesdays without saying much. On the fourth she said she could not manage the evenings, and that from about four o’clock onward the day came apart. The room did what rooms do. Somebody said it gets better and somebody said she was very brave, and both of them meant it.

Then the woman who had been coming longest put down her folding and gave her a procedure. Eat at half past four whether or not you want to. Put the radio on before you take your coat off, not after. Do one job that has an end to it, the sort of job you can see the end of from the beginning.

If you are still upright at seven, ring somebody about something that has nothing to do with any of this. She said it in order, out loud, over the driers, and made her say it back.

That is the difference the Collect is pointing at. Only one woman in that launderette gave her comfort in the shape of instruction, and instruction is what she needed. Months later a professional who came along once asked where the four steps had come from and which programme they belonged to. The woman said she had made them up herself, over about nine years, mostly by getting them wrong, and seemed puzzled that anyone would ask. A teacher of life is precisely what she was and the word would have made her laugh.

Nothing in this resolves. The group lost the launderette six weeks later when the owner sold up, and moved to a bench outside the library, and then stopped. The four steps were never written down, and the woman who made them moved away in the spring. The new woman still has the bad Tuesdays and still eats at half past four, which is the whole of what a teacher of life left behind.

What this asks of an ordinary morning

So the day comes down to a question you can ask about your own week, and it is not a comfortable one. Who taught you how to live, and did you ever count it as teaching? Most people can name the person immediately and have never once used the word about them. They were a teacher of life to you and you have probably never told them so.

And then the harder half. Whose life are you learning from, as opposed to about? A teacher of life is not a role anyone applies for, and the people who have most to give under that description are very often the people a community has already filed somewhere else.

If none of the theology is yours, the claim survives the translation without losing anything. Knowing about a way of life and being taught by somebody living it are different, and only the second one changes anybody. A teacher of life is the plainest available name for the second, and the Church has spent this whole morning insisting that it is the higher of the two titles it has to give.

↑ The order resumes below.