• The reason given is the world
• Nobody asks the sick man anything
• Lit by the fire of Thy love
• Being prayed for is not nothing

The reason given is the world

Read the commemoration Collect again and look for the reason it gives.

It does not say that Francis had earned anything. It does not say he was the holiest man available, or that he had asked. It says the world was becoming cold in spirit. That is the reason, and the remedy attached to it is the fire of Thy love.

The order is the argument. A temperature is named, and it is the temperature of the world, not of the man. Then the fire of Thy love is asked for. Francis appears third, as the place where the thing happened.

Most religious sentences about a holy person are assessments. They exist to tell you how that person scored, and by implication how you are scoring. This one declines the whole exercise. It reaches past the man entirely to a climate, and it asks that the fire of Thy love be lit against it.

If the reason for the fire of Thy love is the coldness of the world, then nobody in this room is being measured this morning. The condition being treated is outside all of us.

One step away from today sits a reading worth refusing. A feast whose subject is marks on a body can very easily be turned into a teaching about which bodies are worth something, or about suffering as a qualification. The Collect does not go there and neither will we. It asks for the fire of Thy love and says nothing whatever about what a body is worth.

Nobody asks the sick man anything

Now put that beside the Gospel. A man with dropsy is standing in front of Christ in a Pharisee’s house. What follows is a legal argument. Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath day. The lawyers are asked directly and they hold their peace, and while that silence is going on the man is taken, healed, and sent away.

Count what the man is asked for in those verses. Nothing. He is not asked to state his case, to account for how he got ill, to confirm he has tried everything else, or to say whether he deserves a sabbath. He does not speak once in the passage. The decision is made over his head, and it is made in his favour, which is how the fire of Thy love travels everywhere else in this Mass.

Notice who is under examination here, because it is easy to get backwards. The watching in verse one is aimed at Christ; they watched him is about the man they are trying to catch, not about the man they are trying to price. The sick man is never on trial at all. Nothing he receives is a verdict on him. The fire of Thy love is not an award.

That is the same shape as the commemoration. Something is settled on a person’s behalf while the room argues about eligibility, and the fire of Thy love arrives by the same route: asked for by somebody else, and lit in people who were not consulted about whether they qualified.

Lit by the fire of Thy love

Here is the teaching to test against all this, and it is not confined to churches.

The teaching says that help is a reward for a good enough account of yourself. Tell the story well and you will be believed. Tell it consistently, without going quiet in the middle, and the thing you need will follow. Fail to, and the failure is treated as evidence about you rather than information about what happened to you. On that account the fire of Thy love would be a prize for the articulate.

Apply the fruit test to that, the way we test everything here. Ask what it has actually grown in the institutions that ran it. It grew people who rehearsed. It grew rooms where the composed were believed and the shaking were doubted, and where a person too tired to be coherent on a Tuesday afternoon lost something real for it. It grew a Church very practised at explaining afterwards why somebody fell through, and very bad at putting the fire of Thy love anywhere near them beforehand.

I will name who pays most for that teaching, because today’s prayers need it named. People who have survived sexual assault carry the tell-it-well doctrine more heavily than almost anyone, and they carry it in a specific form: that credibility is something you perform, that an inconsistency is a confession, and that care is released only once the account has passed inspection. Set that beside this morning’s Collect. It asks for the fire of Thy love on the strength of another man’s merits and prayers, and it never once asks the person praying it to establish anything. There is no inspection anywhere in the sentence.

The difference from yesterday matters, since this is two mornings on adjacent ground. Yesterday the point was that the liturgy said nothing about what either martyr had done, and the argument was about what the prayers leave out. Today the argument is about whose account the request is made on. The fire of Thy love is asked for on a named third party’s credit, in plain sight.

Being prayed for is not nothing

An argument stays an argument until somebody’s Thursday morning is in it. There is a story sometimes told of a woman who spent a Thursday in a waiting area with a paper cup of water she never drank, while along the corridor a stranger she had met once was making her case to a panel. She had been told she could attend. She had decided, that morning, at the door, that she could not. The whole business took ninety minutes and she spent them looking at a plant on the windowsill.

What she remembers is not the outcome. It is that nobody came out to ask her for anything. Not a fuller account, not a firmer version, not the part she had gone quiet about the first time. At eleven the door opened and the advocate said it was done, and then asked whether she wanted a lift home. The fire of Thy love does a great deal of its work behind closed doors like that one.

She has said since that the hardest part to explain to people is that she was not being brave in that corridor. She was not doing anything at all. Somebody who was not her had assembled the thing, in a room she was not in, out of facts she had given once, badly, eight months earlier. The fire of Thy love, if you want the theological name for what reached her, came in the shape of a woman with a folder who did not need her to perform. That is the fire of Thy love with an appointment time and a car park.

Her story is not going to carry more than it can. A panel did not repair a life, and she would say so first and without any drama about it. What it did was move one weight off a person who could not lift it that morning. That is a small claim and a true one, and it is the size of claim the commemoration Collect makes when it asks for the fire of Thy love on somebody else’s merits.

None of this says that nothing you do matters, or that you are a passenger in your own life. The woman in that corridor still had to live the year that followed, and the sick man still had to walk home. What is being said is narrower: the thing that starts the change is very often not yours, and the fire of Thy love is not a fire you are expected to strike yourself.

If you do not believe in God, the plain version holds without borrowing anything. Almost nobody talks their way into being helped by being sufficiently convincing about it. What actually moves is someone deciding you are worth the trouble before you have proved it, and the fire of Thy love is the name this Collect gives to that arriving from outside. The practical form is small: be the person who makes somebody’s case when they are too tired to make it, and do not ask them to earn the favour first.

Everything in this Collect is plural. Our hearts. Our cross. We may bring forth. The fire of Thy love is never requested for one exemplary person and then distributed downward by merit; it is asked for a whole body at once, which means the person struggling hardest this morning is not petitioning from outside the group.

The Catholic Encyclopedia records that Francis received the stigmata at La Verna on or about September 14, in 1224, and that he died on October 3, 1226. September 14 is the feast this ministry kept on Monday.

The same encyclopedia preserves his instruction that the friars use low and mean tables, so that a beggar joining them might believe he was among his equals and need not blush on account of his poverty. Read that against today’s Gospel and the table arranges itself. The fire of Thy love, in the one concrete form Francis could legislate, was a seating plan that spared somebody embarrassment.

↑ The order resumes below.