Everything we actually know about Lawrence of Brindisi starts with an unlikely fact: this Capuchin friar could preach, argue, and pray fluently in Italian, Latin, Hebrew, Greek, German, Czech, Spanish, and French. Not passably — fluently. He studied Hebrew scripture and rabbinic commentary so deeply that the scholars he debated with were reportedly astonished, not that a Christian friar knew their texts at all, but that he knew them well enough to argue on their own terms, with real respect rather than a translator’s shortcut.

That detail matters more than it might first sound like it should. It would have been far easier for Lawrence to require everyone else to come to him — to insist people learn Latin, adopt his categories, meet him entirely on his own ground before he’d take them seriously. He did the opposite. He learned their actual language and their actual frame of reference first, before he ever opened his mouth to answer them.

The respect he earned wasn’t a reward for cleverness. It was the plain, visible fruit of a slower and much less celebrated thing: he made the first move, in someone else’s tongue, instead of waiting for them to make it in his. That is precisely the spirit of wisdom and fortitude his own Collect asks God for today — not wisdom as private insight kept to oneself, but wisdom spent going toward people, in a form they could actually receive it in.

There is a story sometimes told of a woman who arrived in a new country with her two children, speaking almost no English, carrying a language and a set of customs that made her an outsider nearly everywhere she went, including for a while at church. Well-meaning people offered her pamphlets and a translated liturgy sheet. Polite smiles crossed a distance nobody quite closed.

What actually changed things was one older parishioner who decided, without being asked, to learn perhaps two hundred words of this woman’s language — enough to say her name correctly, ask after her children by name, sit next to her without an interpreter standing awkwardly between them. It wasn’t fluency. It wasn’t Lawrence’s eight languages. It was the same instinct at a much smaller scale: go first, in the other person’s actual reality, instead of waiting for them to arrive fully formed in yours.

For those who hold this as an act of faith, this is what today’s Introit means when it says the Lord filled him with the spirit of wisdom and understanding — not a private gift for Lawrence’s own use, but a gift spent entirely outward, on people who had no obligation to meet him halfway. For those who don’t use that language, or have never had reason to: the same principle holds without any theology attached. Welcome that requires the other person to already be fluent in your world first was never really welcome. It was a toll booth.

Today’s added commemoration makes the same point from a different angle. St. Praxedes is remembered for opening her own household to Christians being hunted in the earliest years of the Church — not admiring their suffering from a safe distance, but bringing them physically inside, at real risk to herself, and seeing that even their dead were honored rather than left exposed. Like Lawrence, her whole memory is built around one instinct: don’t wait for the vulnerable person to become less vulnerable, less foreign, or less inconvenient before you make room for them.

This matters for anyone welcoming immigrants and refugees into a country, a congregation, or simply a neighborhood. The paperwork, the pace of assimilation, the question of how quickly someone “belongs” — all of that is a conversation for elsewhere, not for this reflection. What today’s readings actually ask is narrower and harder to dodge: are you willing to learn the two hundred words? Are you willing to go first, in someone else’s actual language, rather than requiring them to arrive already speaking yours?

So beloved — whatever your own version of “eight languages” looks like: a genuine effort to pronounce an unfamiliar name correctly, patience with an accent instead of a raised eyebrow, curiosity about a custom instead of a demand that it be dropped. That is the spirit of wisdom and fortitude today’s Collect actually asks for. Not eloquence. The much harder discipline of going first.

↑ The order resumes below.