• Three sentences and a whole day
• What the prayer will not say about us
• Gain is not a word about accumulation
• The pricing of a welcome
• Forty doors on a Tuesday morning
• An abbot who was told he was not qualified
• Where this leaves us

What we may not have through any merits of ours, we may gain. That is the first of the three sentences the Church gives an abbot this morning, and it is the only genuinely new thing in the day.

Three sentences and a whole day

Take the arrangement first, because the arrangement is an argument before a word of it is read. Everything the ear meets today was written for another day. The Introit is Advent’s, the Collect is Advent’s, the readings are Advent’s, and they were all read on Sunday to a congregation that had never heard of Sabbas. His whole footprint in the Mass is three prayers, said quickly, at the joins. Any merits of ours sits in the first of the three.

And the date is his. The calendar for December 5 does not read Friday, with a small mention. It reads as his day, in a book that gives him no reading and no chant, and the man has been dead almost fifteen centuries and cannot supply a single thing to justify the arrangement. Which is exactly the claim his own Collect makes: not through any merits of ours.

There is something worth having in that shape, quite apart from the theology. The amount of room a person is given is not the same as whether they are there. A room can be almost entirely somebody else’s and still be yours to be in.

For anyone reading this without the faith attached, the plain version holds up on its own terms. Presence and prominence are two different quantities, and a great many arrangements in ordinary life confuse them. Any merits of ours is the currency such arrangements usually run on. The Mass this morning does not confuse them, and neither does the prayer that says any merits of ours.

What the prayer will not say about us

Read the Collect slowly, because it is short and it does a great deal. May the pleading of blessed Sabbas the Abbot make us acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, we pray; that what we may not have through any merits of ours, we may gain… One petition, one concession, one mechanism.

The pronouns are the first thing in it. It is us and ours, twice, in a prayer said aloud by whoever is in the room. No one in that sentence is assessed on their own. There is no clause anywhere in it that sorts the room into the acceptable and the not-yet, and any merits of ours is a phrase that could not be spoken by a person who thought there were two categories present. Any merits of ours is said by everybody at once or it is not said at all.

What is missing comes next. The prayer states a lack and simply carries on. It does not say because we are unworthy, help us to become worthy; it does not append a condition, a test, a probation, or a list of qualifications to be produced later. It says what we may not have through any merits of ours, and then it asks for the thing anyway. Any merits of ours is raised and dropped inside one clause.

That concession is not liturgical manners. If it were merely modest speech—the sort of self-deprecation a person offers before making a request—it would be decoration, and the prayer would work just as well without it. It does not work without it, because any merits of ours is the hinge the whole request turns on. The whole request depends on the concession being literally true, because if any merits of ours could have produced the thing, the pleading of a Cappadocian abbot would be unnecessary and the sentence would collapse.

This is the same recognition that ran through no power of our own three weeks ago, in another key. That day the prayer confessed there was no strength in the room to rely on. Today’s confesses there is no record in the room to rely on either. Any merits of ours is the ledger, and the ledger is set aside in the first half of the sentence so that the second half can proceed.

Gain is not a word about accumulation

Now the verb, which is the part most easily read wrong. We may gain. In ordinary English, gaining is what a total does. You gain weight, gain ground, gain interest, gain an advantage, gain a qualification. Every one of those is a number going up because of something you did, over time, and none of them can happen quickly—which is the vocabulary any merits of ours belongs to.

The Collect uses the word for the opposite motion. What it describes is coming into possession of something that was never being built up in the first place—a thing that arrives whole, from outside, and is yours from the moment it arrives. You can gain a thing in a second that you could not have accumulated in fifty years, and no total of any merits of ours lengthens or shortens that second. That is the sense the prayer needs, and it is why any merits of ours can be dismissed in the same breath.

Hold those two meanings apart and the sentence stops being a piece of pious modesty. It is not saying your merits are small, so be humble about them. It is saying the thing you are asking for is not that kind of object at all: it does not sit at the end of a column of figures, so a short column and a long column are equally beside the point. Any merits of ours is not being called insufficient. Any merits of ours is being called irrelevant to the mechanism.

The ordinary version of this is easy to find and worth having. There are goods a person genuinely cannot earn and can only be given—a first language, a name, the trust of a street, being someone’s child. No one accumulates any of those, and no one is a fraud for holding one. Gaining, in that family of cases, means having been included rather than having been credited, and any merits of ours never entered the room.

Which is why the day’s own arrangement and the day’s own prayer say the same thing twice. Sabbas has three sentences and the whole date, and the first of them says we come into this not through any merits of ours. The footprint is small, the standing is complete, any merits of ours is beside the point, and no one is asked to reconcile the three.

The pricing of a welcome

There is a teaching that does real damage here, and today’s printed text is what refutes it. The teaching is that a person’s standing in a religious community is priced against what they can put into it—money, hours, usefulness, visible service—so that somebody who can only receive is a beneficiary of the place rather than a member of it. It is almost never stated as a rule. It lives in the arithmetic instead, and in one word: involved. Any merits of ours is the clause such a room has quietly deleted.

The people this lands on are people who are poor. People who cannot put anything in the envelope and know that this is a fact about them which others can see; people whose week has no spare hours because every hour is already sold; people who arrive, receive, and go home, and who work out fairly quickly that this is not what the room means by belonging. Any merits of ours, in that room, has become a description of the rota.

The refutation is in two of today’s texts and it does not need help from me. The Collect denies that merit is the ground of anyone’s acceptability, in the plural, out loud. And the Secret asks that the offerings already lying on the altar may be beneficial for our salvation because the abbot prevails by his prayers—which is to say that even the gifts do not carry their own worth. If the bread on the altar is not useful on its own account, no envelope in the building is establishing anybody’s standing, and no envelope in the building can be totted up into any merits of ours.

Weigh the habit by what it grows, and weigh it against our own record, because ours is the record we are obliged to examine. It grows giving lists that quietly become membership lists. It grows a hospitality that expects to be returned, so the family who cannot host anybody stops accepting invitations, and everyone calls that drifting away. It grows a vocabulary in which a person who receives is spoken of warmly and in the third person.

None of that is an argument against generosity, and this ministry asks for support at the bottom of this page. The distinction is simple enough to state: an invitation to give is not a price, and it becomes one the moment the giving is what establishes the standing. Any merits of ours settles which of those two a church is running.

Forty doors on a Tuesday morning

There is a story sometimes told of a man of thirty-six who came out after four years and took over a window round on a street of small brick terraces. The round was not his and he had not built it. It had been worked by the same man for thirty-one years, three days a fortnight, and that man was giving it up because his shoulder had gone; he had a soft-backed notebook with the houses in it, the money, and which back gates were unlocked. He did not sell the round. He walked it.

That was the whole of the first morning. The two of them went up the street together and knocked at about forty doors, and at each door the older man said the same two sentences. This is Dean. He’ll be doing your windows from Monday.

Then the money and the week, if they asked, and on to the next gate. He said nothing else about him at any door—not where he had been, not that he was reliable, not that he was a good lad, nothing that could be checked or contradicted, and no assessment of the man standing beside him in any form.

By eleven o’clock a stranger held thirty-one years of somebody else’s standing on a street where not one person knew him. He had earned none of it. Not through any merits of ours, and not through any of his. He could not have earned it: the thing being transferred was an accumulation of other mornings, and there was no way to enter it from the beginning. What he had was a notebook, a ladder, and forty doors that had heard two flat sentences and shrugged.

It did not resolve into anything tidy. Four houses changed hands within the year and two of the new owners did not want the windows done. The older man died in the second winter and the earliest pages of the notebook never did make sense—initials, half-prices, two names crossed out and no explanation. Dean still works that street, with about half the names, and he has never been able to say whose round it is.

An abbot who was told he was not qualified

The record of the man in today’s three prayers is worth reading, because his own community made exactly the mistake this offering is about. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Sabbas was born at Mutalaska near Caesarea in Cappadocia in 439, entered a Basilian monastery at the age of eight, came to Jerusalem in 456, and lived five years in a cavern as a disciple of St. Euthymius. In 483 he founded the Laura Mar Saba in the gorges of the Cedron, southeast of Jerusalem, and monks gathered there around him. None of that is any merits of ours, and his own prayer still declines to trade on a word of it.

Then this, in the encyclopedia’s own summary: the monks opposed his rule and demanded a priest as their abbot. His own community priced him and found him short. The answer, when it came, did not come from Sabbas producing the missing thing on his own account—the Patriarch Salustius of Jerusalem ordained him in 491 and made him archimandrite of all the monasteries in Palestine in 494. He was given the qualification he was said to lack, which is not the same as having accrued it, and any merits of ours is the phrase his Collect uses about precisely this kind of arrangement.

The rest is short. He withdrew to a new laura he had built near Thekoa. He was a strenuous opponent of the Monophysites and the Origenists, and he twice made the journey to argue his case in person to an emperor—to Anastasius at Constantinople in 511, and to Justinian in 531. He died in his laura on 5 December 532, which is the date this page carries. The monastic rule and the Typicon that bear his name are of doubtful attribution.

Set that beside shall receive an hundredfold, where an abbot’s own Mass was printed in full nine days ago—an Epistle, a Gospel, a Gradual, all of it. Sabbas gets three prayers on a Friday in Advent. The two arrangements are not a ranking of the two men, and reading them as one is the whole error the day is refusing. Any merits of ours is the clause that forbids the ranking.

Where this leaves us

The Advent ferias will keep doing this. The Mass of the First Sunday of Advent will be said again next week and the week after, as it was on Monday, and the saints who fall on those weekdays will mostly get three sentences at the joins, exactly as Sabbas does. It is not a small allowance grudgingly made. It is what a commemoration is: a name inside a Mass that was not written for it, with the day given anyway. Any merits of ours is not what buys a name its place in the book.

The Gospel that is not printed here says look up, and lift up your heads, because your redemption is at hand, and the reason it gives sits outside the person being addressed. Today’s commemoration puts the same structure into a single clause. What we may not have through any merits of ours, we may gain. The ground of the thing is elsewhere, which is why a frightened person and a well-resourced person are in identical positions this morning. Neither of them is standing on any merits of ours.

So take the arrangement home rather than the size of it. Three sentences carried a whole day, a lack was stated out loud and then walked straight past, and a verb that usually describes a total was used for something that arrives all at once. Any merits of ours is the clause that makes the rest of it work, and it works by subtraction.

If your account is thin this morning, or empty, or held against you by people who can count, the prayer on this page was written with that in mind and it does not flinch. Not through any merits of ours. It is said in the plural, by everyone in the room together, and the ones with a great deal to show say it in the same words as the ones with nothing.

↑ The order resumes below.