• Whose strength the prayer actually names
• Put forth Your power, in the imperative
• What that costs the house that copes
• Three kitchens on a wet afternoon
• The one thing we brought with us

Whose strength the prayer actually names

Take the Collect slowly and mark every source of strength in it by owner.

Put forth Your power, O Lord, we beseech You, and delay not: and with Your great might come to our aid, so that what is hindered by our sins may be hastened by Your merciful goodness.

The power is His. The great might is His. The merciful goodness that does the hastening is His. Put forth Your power sets the pattern in the first four words, and the prayer keeps it to the end.

Now mark what belongs to the room. Our sins, and our need of aid. That is the whole of our column, and both entries in it are difficulties rather than resources.

Nothing in the prayer tries to improve that column. It does not promise that our side of the ledger will get shorter, and it does not ask for our entries to be upgraded before the request is heard. Put forth Your power is said over the column exactly as it stands. The accuracy is the point, and the accuracy is what makes the asking possible rather than what disqualifies it.

I want to be careful here, because a prayer built like that can be read as an insult and it is not one. It is an inventory. The people saying put forth Your power are not running themselves down; they are being accurate about where the strength is kept, and they are asking for it from the place it actually is.

That is a different kind of honesty from the one we usually practise. The familiar move is to take stock of what we have, spend it, and pray only for the shortfall. This prayer never opens that account. It goes straight to put forth Your power without first totting up what the room might manage between them.

There is a practical reason to take that order seriously, and it is not only a devotional one. Anybody who prays for the shortfall has to price the shortfall first, which means measuring their own capacity before they are permitted to ask for anything. Put forth Your power removes that step. The asking comes first, and no assessment of the person asking stands in front of it.

Put forth Your power, in the imperative

The mood of the verb is worth having, because it is not a request in the softened sense. Put forth is a command, and it is given to God by people who have just admitted in the same breath that they are the ones holding things up.

Nothing in the grammar apologises for that. There is no preface asking permission to ask, no clause establishing that the speakers have earned a hearing. Put forth Your power stands at the head of the sentence with no run-up at all.

I think that is worth sitting with, because most of us were taught the opposite. We were taught to arrive with an account of ourselves, to explain the difficulty, to show that we had tried everything else first. The Collect skips every one of those paragraphs.

And put forth Your power is a startling thing to be allowed to say on a day this ordinary. There is nothing in the calendar this morning to justify an urgent request and no disaster in the parish to point at. The Church asks for the full weight of God’s power on a Tuesday of no particular distinction, which tells you she does not think the asking needs an occasion to license it. Put forth Your power is the ordinary setting rather than the emergency one.

And it is plural throughout. Put forth Your power, come to our aid, our sins, our need. There is no private column and no queue, so the person with the least left this morning is inside the sentence on the same terms as everybody else in the building.

That plural is doing real pastoral work. It means you can say put forth Your power without first establishing that your situation qualifies, and without measuring your exhaustion against the person next to you. The prayer asks the whole room’s question at once.

Which is a different claim from the November feast that said we have no power of our own, and the two should not be run together. That day was a description of what a human being is: not self-supplying, and never was. This is a request, in the imperative, for somebody with power to use it now. One says here is what we are; the other says put forth Your power anyway, and the second does not follow automatically from the first.

What that costs the house that copes

Here is the teaching I want to test against this prayer, and it is ours, said in our own buildings and usually meant kindly.

The teaching says that God does not give anybody more than they can bear. It follows from that, and people do follow it out loud, that whatever a person has borne was within their strength all along, and that the strength must therefore have been given, since here they are, still standing.

Apply the fruit test, the way we test everything here. Ask what that teaching has actually produced in the houses that received it. It produced households praised for coping and never relieved. It produced a vocabulary in which you are so strong is the last sentence said before a door closes. It produced people who learned that the way to be admired in a parish is to stop asking.

It produced one more thing, and this is the one worth naming plainly. It taught everyone around such a household that the situation was handled, because the household kept saying so, because saying anything else would have sounded like ingratitude. A parish can go years believing a family is fine on the word of a family that has been trained to give it. Put forth Your power is the sentence that never gets said in that arrangement, and the silence gets read as evidence that all is well.

I will name who pays most for it, because the Collect requires it named. People carrying long-term care for somebody they love have had this teaching handed to them more than anyone, and it converts their exhaustion into evidence that the exhaustion was survivable and therefore fine. Put forth Your power is the sentence the teaching quietly forbids them, because a person who has been told the strength was supplied cannot ask for strength without seeming to doubt the gift.

Set that against what the Church actually says at this altar three mornings running. She does not say we can bear it. She says put forth Your power, and she says it in the imperative, out loud, in the plural, on an ordinary Tuesday with no emergency to justify it. The prayer treats the need for outside strength as the normal condition of the room rather than as a confession of failure.

Close a door before it opens, because this can be misheard in two directions. It does not say that anybody who coped was fooling themselves, and it does not say that what they did was not theirs. It says that coping was never proof that help was unnecessary, and that a church which reads endurance as evidence has stopped listening for put forth Your power in the mouths of the people saying it most quietly.

Three kitchens on a wet afternoon

An argument stays an argument until somebody’s Tuesday is inside it, so I want to give you a household.

There is a story sometimes told of five people who had been each other’s family for eleven years without one of them being related to another. They had met on the same estate, two blocks facing each other across a walkway, and the arrangement had never been given a name by any of them. One December the cooker in the middle flat gave out in the same week the weather turned.

The woman whose flat it was did not work around it and did not go quiet. She rang the other four and said, plainly, that the cooker had gone and she could not do this on her own. That was the whole of her contribution to the fortnight that followed, and she has said since that saying it out loud was harder than anything that came after.

What arrived was not one capable person. It was four tired ones. Between them they had a bad back, a job with unpredictable hours, a flat with a two-ring hob and a temper about the rain. Not one of the four could have carried that fortnight alone and each of them said so at the time.

That is the part such a story usually leaves out. In most tellings the help has a hero in it, somebody with capacity who steps in and takes the weight off. There was no such person on that walkway. What there was instead was four people who had each said put forth Your power in their own words that week, and who then went and put a pan on.

So it got done in pieces, out of three kitchens, along thirty yards of wet concrete, twice a day. Covered dishes on the low wall halfway when somebody’s hands were full. A stacked pan going back the other way at nine at night. It was done in full daylight in front of forty windows, and two other flats started sending things along without being asked.

Nothing about it resolved. The cooker was not replaced that winter, no speech was made, and the arrangement went back to what it had been in January without anybody marking the change. I would rather leave it there than tidy it into a lesson, because the shape is what matters and the shape is the Collect. Put forth Your power is what she said, in her own words, to the only powers available to her, and the power that came was pooled rather than supplied.

If you hold none of the theology, the claim survives the translation intact. Strength is almost never a quality one person has enough of; it is a thing that gets assembled, late, out of several people who each have very little spare. Put forth Your power, said plainly and early to the people around you, is worth more than a year of managing quietly and hoping somebody works it out.

The one thing we brought with us

There is one more prayer in this Mass and it has been printed here twice without a word said about it. It is said over the gifts, and it asks something surprising of them.

The offerings, it says, are to be beneficial for our devotion and for our salvation. Not acceptable. Not worthy. Not sufficient. Useful, and useful to us.

Sit with the direction of that. An offering is the one thing in this Mass that the people themselves carried in, and the prayer said over it asks that it come back and do its work on them.

So even our own contribution is not left standing as ours. Put forth Your power runs through the Collect, and then the prayer over the gifts takes the one thing we carried in and hands that back too, redirected at the people who carried it. There is nothing in this Mass that we are asked to supply and keep supplying under our own steam.

And weigh what it does leave us, because it is not nothing. Our devotion is named. That is ours, and the prayer asks that it be fed rather than that it be produced. Turning up, bringing what you have, and saying put forth Your power in the plural with the rest of the room is the whole of the part assigned to us, and it is a part, not a formality.

Take that seriously if you have been on the receiving end of a great deal lately. Put forth Your power does not ask you to become a contributor before you are welcome inside the plural, and the prayer does not rank the room by what anybody managed to bring. It asks that whatever got brought, however little it was, be turned back to the good of the people who brought it. Put forth Your power is said by the whole building at once, and the building includes everyone who came in empty-handed.

Take the day itself, because the calendar is making the point in another medium. The Church had a free Tuesday, wrote nothing new for it, and asked for power a third time in words she had already used twice. She did not manufacture an urgency she had not felt or dress the repetition up as freshness. She said put forth Your power again, unhurried, and left it at that.

If you do one thing with this before the day is out, make it the asking rather than the bearing. Say the plain version of put forth Your power to one person who could actually help, today, before you have worked out how to manage without them. The prayer does that in the imperative, in public, without an apology in front of it, and so may you.

↑ The order resumes below.