Go to the Lesson first, because the Lesson is the new thing on the page and it is doing all the work.

I will give glory to thy name: for thou hast been a helper and protector to me.

That is the second verse, and the day’s whole argument has already arrived. A line and a half later it comes again, and the second time it is stripped down to its bones: thou hast been my helper.

Twice in three verses, in a reading of nine. Said once with a second noun beside it and once on its own, and the Missal is not being decorative.

Now read what stands between the two. Hast preserved my body from destruction, from the snare of an unjust tongue, and from the lips of them that forge lies. The destruction is real and physical, and the two instruments named are a tongue and a pair of lips.

Thou hast been my helper is the answer given to a man who was nearly finished off by what people said about him.

That is not how we are used to hearing about danger, so let me set the whole list out. Destruction. Roaring animals prepared to devour. Hands that sought his life.

The gates of afflictions. The oppression of the flame. The depth of the belly of hell.

Six perils there, and every one of them the kind a painter would enjoy. Now the other six: an unjust tongue, the lips of them that forge lies, an unclean tongue, lying words, an unjust king, a slanderous tongue.

Six mouths on one side. On the other a fire, a pit, some animals and the flat word destruction. Thou hast been my helper is the sentence he sets against all of it without ranking any of it.

Six is half, and half of what nearly ended this man was somebody talking.

And look at the arrangement. The Missal opens the Lesson on tongues, puts the fire in the middle, and closes on tongues again. Whatever the compilers of this Mass thought was going to hurt somebody, they thought it would mostly be said.

Hold that beside the sentence itself. Thou hast been my helper, and the helping was needed against words.

Because there is a very old piece of teaching that will not have it. Words are not injuries, it says. Sticks and stones. Nobody laid a hand on you. Take it as a compliment, take it as discipline, take it as the price of being unusual, but do not come here calling it harm.

That teaching has a devout version, and the devout version is worse. It says a slandered person should let their life be the answer. It says correcting an account of yourself is vanity, that defending yourself is a want of trust, and that the mature response to being lied about is silence and a longer patience.

The Lesson does not agree with a word of it. Thou hast been my helper, says a man counting mouths, and he counts them as dangers. He names every mouth that came for him, one after another, and asks nobody’s permission to put them on the list.

He counts them, in fact, in the same breath as a fire. Thou hast been my helper is what he says about all twelve, and he never sorts them into the serious and the imaginary.

There is a second thing here and it is easy to walk past. And in the sight of them that stood by, thou hast been my helper. The help is described as having happened where people could see it.

Not privately. Not inwardly. In a room with people in it, the same room where the lying was done. Thou hast been my helper was said where it could be heard.

Thou hast been my helper is a public sentence about a public rescue, and the Mass keeps it in public: the entrance chant has a man speaking before kings, and the Alleluia has a whole procession being brought in.

Which brings me to what I am naming this morning. I am naming trans people, and I am naming them because this Lesson is a catalogue of harms done by description.

An account of a person gets made. It is repeated by private mouths and printed by official ones. It is louder than the person, it arrives before them, and it is treated as the reliable version because it is the version most people have heard. Thou hast been my helper is what somebody says on the other side of that.

The Lesson has both halves of it in the list. There is the unjust tongue, which is a neighbour, a relative, a colleague at the next desk. And there is the unjust king, which is any account issued from a height, in the third person, about people who are not in the room.

The Lesson puts those two side by side in one clause. It does not treat the official mouth as a different order of thing from the private one, and it does not treat either as harmless.

Thou hast been my helper covers both, because both were in the list.

On the twenty-second of this month we kept a virgin martyr whose entrance chant is today’s, under i was not ashamed, and that day made a claim about disgrace: that shame is assigned rather than caught, and that it belongs to the person who acted. Today’s claim is next door to it and is not the same. That day asked where the shame lands after a thing is done. This one asks whether the account somebody else wrote of you becomes the operative truth about you, and whether you are permitted to contradict it.

Imputation is about the weight you are handed. Description is about the version that gets believed. Thou hast been my helper answers the second one.

Judge that teaching by what it grows, inside Christianity’s own record, because that is where we are obliged to look. It has produced pulpits confident enough to describe a whole category of people who were not present and had no reply. It has produced households where the account of one member is settled among the others and never once tested against the person. It has produced the counsel to bear misrepresentation as a discipline, which has protected every institution that ever gave it. And it has produced adults who can recite the version of themselves they were handed as children and cannot say what actually happened without stopping halfway.

None of that is in this Mass. Thou hast been my helper is what the Mass says instead, and it says it about somebody who was lied about and did not have to bear it alone.

On the seventeenth of this month, under the faith of God, we sat with a text that refuses to let a person take credit for what was done through them. Attribution asks whose act it was. Today asks the same question from underneath, and gets the same answer.

Thou hast been my helper hands the whole rescue away. Not one verb of the deliverance belongs to the man speaking. He gives glory, he praises, his soul praises to death, and that is the sum of what he claims for himself.

He is not being modest. He is being accurate about where the help came from, and thou hast been my helper is the accurate form of words.

There is a story sometimes told of a woman of forty-one whose family arrived at an account of why she left. It was not shouted and nobody meant it as cruelty. It was a tidy sentence, said at gatherings when her name came up, and it ran that she had turned her back on all of them.

She had not. But the sentence travelled and she did not, and after a few years the sentence was the only thing her cousins’ children knew about her.

Her uncle had been in the house the week it happened. He never argued with anybody about it and he never made a speech. Whenever the sentence came up at the long table he said the same eleven words, in the tone he used for everything else, and then passed the milk: that is not what happened, and I was in the room.

He was not making a stand. He was supplying a date.

They met most Saturdays in the café at a garden centre off the bypass, which had a long table and nobody minding how long they sat. He said his eleven words there perhaps forty times over nine years, and two people found it tiresome.

Thou hast been my helper is what that is, said properly.

She was not there for any of it. She heard about it years afterwards from a cousin who had been sitting opposite him.

I am not going to tell you the family changed its mind, because it did not. Two of them did. She and her mother have still not spoken and there is no sign that they will.

What she got was a true sentence kept in circulation by somebody who wanted nothing from her. Thou hast been my helper, in the past tense, about a man she barely knew.

That is the portable version of thou hast been my helper, and it cost one man eleven words and a Saturday.

Look at what he did not do, because it is the whole of it. He never asked her to explain herself, never asked her to come and account for it, and never once required her to be present at her own defence. Thou hast been my helper is help that does not send a bill.

On the nineteenth of this month, under let her works praise her, we read a text in which a woman’s own works go up to the gates and speak for her with no escort at all. That day was about the mouth that vouches. Today is about the mouths that lie, which is the same joint seen from the other side, and both days end with the person concerned not having to do the talking.

Thou hast been my helper is the same relief arriving by a different road.

Now the Gospel, which we also read on Saturday, and which today sits in a different company. It is worth one observation and not more.

The parable ends on something said. Amen I say to you, I know you not. Five people are outside a door and the last thing that happens to them is a sentence.

The Lesson is a man who was nearly destroyed by sentences that were false. The parable ends with one that is true. And the Mass puts them on the same page, in that order, so that the Lesson is read first.

Thou hast been my helper comes before the shut door this morning, not after it. Whatever fear the parable raises in you, the Mass has already answered it with a text in which somebody else moves first.

I am not going to preach a door at you. The day gives me a Lesson about rescue and I would rather give you that, and its five words are thou hast been my helper.

On the eighth of this month, under delivered from present sorrow, the argument turned on how long a trouble goes on and what that length is allowed to imply. Today’s Lesson is its other half: it says nothing about how long any of this lasted, and it names the deliverance in the perfect tense, as finished business.

And on the fourteenth, under compassed with infirmity, we had a priest described as hemmed in on every side by his own weakness. Today’s man is compassed about by the gates of afflictions, which is the same word doing a different job: there the enclosure is what he is made of, here it is what was done to him. Thou hast been my helper is the sentence that arrives in both cases from outside the enclosure.

If none of the theology is yours, take the plain version, because it holds without any of it. What is said about you is a real force in your life and it is not a lesser kind of harm because it left no mark. You are allowed to count it. You are allowed to name every mouth in the list, and you are allowed to have needed somebody.

Thou hast been my helper. That is a sentence about somebody else’s action, said by a person who was in no position to manage on his own, and there is no shame anywhere in it.

Say it in the past tense if that is where yours is. Thou hast been my helper, about the one person who supplied a date when a sentence about you was going round.

And if nobody has been that for you yet, the Mass says the words this morning on your behalf, before the readings ask anything of you at all.

↑ The order resumes below.