• A borrowed Mass, and what the borrowing is for
• The imperative that forbids nothing
• What a sentence about a person is about
• The affections, learned late
• Where the glorying lands

A borrowed Mass, and what the borrowing is for

Open the book at December 13 and count what actually belongs to her. The Introit is Psalm 44, a wedding song written for a king. The Gradual is that same verse again, cut in half and sung a second time. The Gospel is the Common’s, read over holy women all through the year.

The Lesson is Paul making his own case to a congregation that had been weighing him up. What is proper to Lucy is one prayer, and that prayer does not ask us to admire her. It asks that we be taught how to love, and the Lesson beside it says where the glorying goes: glory in the Lord.

This is not carelessness. A liturgy that wanted to hand you a woman’s achievements had the room to do it and chose not to use the room. It gave her the pages the book uses again and again, and at the centre of those pages it set a single instruction: glory in the Lord.

If you want to know what the Church thinks a saint’s day is for, that arrangement is the answer. It is a blunter answer than most preaching about saints will give you. The day is not a monument. The day is a room in which everyone present, the saint included, is told to glory in the Lord.

The plain version, for anyone with no use for the theology. A community can honour a person without making that person the subject of every sentence spoken about them. It can hold a day open in someone’s name and then spend the day on something larger than the name. That is what glory in the Lord means before it means anything about God at all, and it is an instruction about where a sentence points.

Then there is what the day does not do. It does not rank her against the other women these same pages are used for. It puts the borrowed formulary in front of each of them in turn and says the same thing over every one: glory in the Lord.

The imperative that forbids nothing

Paul is not squeamish here, and the grammar is worth slowing down over. He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord. There is no prohibition anywhere in that line, only an address: glory in the Lord.

A great deal of preaching has treated the verse as a rebuke, as though pleasure in one’s own work were beneath a Christian and the appetite ought to be starved. That is not what it says. Paul assumes the glorying, grants it, and only then tells it where to go.

One verse later he asks the Corinthians to bear with a little of his folly, because he is about to do some glorying of his own. He calls it folly and does it anyway. A man who thought the appetite itself was the sin could not have written that sentence.

So glory in the Lord is not an instruction to think less of yourself. It is an instruction about the object of a sentence and not about the volume of it. You may be pleased with what you have made. You may say so out loud, provided you glory in the Lord when you do.

What you may not do is make yourself the terminus of the pleasure, because you are not large enough to be a terminus and it will show in the end. Glory in the Lord is a redirection and not a muzzle. The distance between those two readings is the distance between a religion that shrinks people and one that aims them.

Then comes the second clause, and it is the harder one. Not he who commendeth himself, is approved, but he, whom God commendeth. A commendation is a public act.

It is a thing said aloud in a room, about a person, in front of people who will act on it afterwards. Paul is not describing a private accounting between a soul and God. He is describing the Corinthian habit of demanding letters, references and a track record recited on arrival, and he is saying that the habit does not do what they believe it does.

Hold the two clauses together and you have the whole day in your hand. Glory in the Lord, because that is where glorying goes. And stop asking people to establish themselves by recitation, because recitation is not what establishes anybody.

Both halves are about speech. Neither is about the interior of a person. Glory in the Lord is a rule for what comes out of a mouth in a room full of people, which is why it can be tested by anyone, believer or not.

What a sentence about a person is about

Here is the teaching this text has to evaluate, and it is almost never said out loud, because saying it out loud would make it plainly indefensible. It is the assumption that some people’s history is the permanent subject of every sentence about them.

People who have been to prison live inside that assumption. It is rarely hostile. It arrives as introduction, as context, as the helpful sentence somebody adds so the new person understands.

This is so-and-so, he was inside for a while, he is doing really well now. Said warmly. Said by someone who means well, and said again the following month to somebody else, and again after that, in a congregation that would tell you without hesitating that it glories in the Lord.

The harm is not that the fact is known. The harm is that the fact becomes the grammatical subject, and everything else in a life becomes a clause hanging off it. Achievements turn into despite. Ordinary competence turns into remarkable, considering.

A man runs a stall, keeps a rota, learns a trade, holds a marriage together for twenty years, and all of it gets reported as an outcome of the record rather than as his life. He is never simply described. He is always accounted for, in a room that has been told to glory in the Lord and has quietly kept the accounting to itself.

Today’s Lesson takes that grammar apart at both ends. Not he who commendeth himself, is approved lifts the burden off the person, who is not required to open every room by giving an account of himself. And glory in the Lord lifts the same burden off the room.

If the glorying belongs to God, then it was never the assembly’s to award or to withhold. Corinth is not the licensing authority. The verse tells the whole congregation to glory in the Lord, and it leaves no side door in the sentence for a committee to come through.

That is the part churches find expensive. Deciding whose good may be spoken of feels like stewardship, and it has felt like stewardship for a very long time. Glory in the Lord takes the job away, and a community that keeps hold of it anyway is holding something it was told to put down.

The feast itself is the proof, and this is the part I cannot get past. The Church has said Lucy’s name in the Canon of the Mass from the time of St. Gregory onward. It could have built her a Mass out of her story and it did not.

It built her one out of Psalm 44 and a letter to Corinth. It did that with a full account available and widely told, first set down by Aldhelm and taken up afterwards by Bede. The story was not missing. It was simply not made the point of her.

Glory in the Lord is the reason. A liturgy that had made her story the subject would have taught everyone in the building that a person is their most dramatic year, and it would have taught it every December since.

That is today’s distinction, and it is worth setting beside two days this archive has already spent on neighbouring ground. November 19 asked whether somebody must vouch for you before your good may be mentioned at all. December 2 asked how much of the room is yours once you are already inside it.

Today asks a third question: what the sentences said in that room are actually about. It is not the door and it is not the floor space. It is the grammar, and glory in the Lord is the correction to it.

The fruit test runs the way it always runs here, on our own record and not on another community’s. Where the assumption operates, the fruit is a person who can be praised but never simply described.

Roles stay quietly closed with no meeting ever held to close them. People learn to say the sentence about themselves first, before anyone else can, which is how you can tell it has become the subject. And the congregation congratulates itself on how welcoming it has been, which is the fruit that gives the game away.

None of that survives being written down, and that is usually the test. A teaching that cannot bear to be stated plainly is not a teaching. It is a habit wearing a teaching’s clothes, and glory in the Lord undoes it by moving the glorying off every person in the room at once.

The affections, learned late

There is a story sometimes told of a community choir that rehearsed on Thursday evenings in a hired unit on an industrial estate, between a tyre fitter and a firm that laminated worktops.

A woman joined it in her second year of not drinking, and she said plainly at the time that she had joined for the room. Thursday was the difficult evening. The unit was warm, it was eleven minutes’ walk, and there were folding chairs and a kettle and a reason to be somewhere until nine.

She did not like the music. She could not read a note of it and never learned to. For the first year she stood at the end of the back row and moved her mouth through anything above a fifth. That would not have counted as a way to glory in the Lord, and it was one.

What she turned out to be good at was counting. She sang alto by ear, badly at first, and the thing she could do that most of the others could not was come in correctly after a long rest. Twenty-three bars of silence and then an entry on the third beat, and she would be there, on it, every time.

The conductor started giving her the nod for the whole section. Four years in she said something to another member that got repeated afterwards: that she had come for the room and stayed for the counting, and somewhere in between the wanting had arrived without her arranging it.

I want to be careful about what that story is and is not. The choir never got good. There is no recording, they were not invited anywhere, and the tyre fitter complained about the parking every winter.

She still cannot read music. Nothing in the account resolves. The only thing that changed is that a woman who came for a warm room on the worst evening of her week ended up loving something she had not chosen to love.

That is exactly what today’s Collect asks for. Read the prayer again with the story beside it. It does not ask that we admire Lucy.

It asks that we be instructed in the affections of a loving devotion. Instructed, as in taught, over time, by turning up. The prayer takes for granted that what a person loves can be learned rather than either possessed or lacked, and it asks for the lesson instead of the feeling.

And it is the same shape as the Lesson, which is why they sit on one page. Neither text asks you to produce something from inside yourself. Both hand you an object and tell you to attend to it, whether that object is twenty-three bars of rest or the instruction to glory in the Lord.

Where the glorying lands

So the day arranges itself. Psalm 44 says the anointing followed the loving and the hating, therefore being the hinge the whole verse turns on. The Collect asks that our own affections be taught to us. And the Lesson says what to do with whatever gladness results, which is to glory in the Lord and not in the account we are able to give of ourselves.

For a person who is tired of being introduced by their worst year, there is something specific in that. You are not obliged to lead with the sentence. You are not obliged to earn the room by recitation, because the approval in question was never the room’s to issue.

Glory in the Lord, which in plain terms means point the pleasure at something big enough to hold it. Let your history be one true fact among the many true facts about you, rather than the heading printed over all of them. That is not denial. It is proportion, and it is what the verse actually asks for.

For a community the same instruction cuts the other way and it is less comfortable. If we glory in the Lord then we have handed back the job of deciding whose good may be mentioned. We were never qualified for it. We were only nearest to hand, and to glory in the Lord is to say so.

Lucy is in the Canon. Her Mass is borrowed from the Common. Her one proper prayer asks for an education in loving rather than a verdict on her, and standing over all of it is one line addressed to every person in the building on exactly equal terms: let him glory in the Lord.

↑ The order resumes below.