Augustine has his own Collect, and that is the one that carries great hope in Your forgiveness. He has his own Secret and his own Postcommunion as well. The Gradual is new: its first half is the familiar verse from Psalm 36, but its Alleluia comes from Psalm 88 and has not been sung here before. And the day carries a commemoration of St. Hermes, Martyr, with three orations of his own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Introit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Ecclus. 15:5; Ps. 91:2.<\/em> In the midst of the assembly he opened his mouth; and the Lord filled him with the spirit of wisdom and understanding; He clothed him with a robe of glory. Ps.<\/em> It is good to give praise to the Lord: and to sing to thy name, O most High. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. In the midst of the assembly he opened his mouth; and the Lord filled him with the spirit of wisdom and understanding; He clothed him with a robe of glory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The verse behind that antiphon is Ecclesiasticus 15<\/a>, where it is Wisdom herself who opens the mouth and fills it. The Missal hands the action to the Lord and puts it in the past tense. Either way the man is the object of the sentence and not its subject, which is the shape the whole day keeps. It is the same shape as great hope in Your forgiveness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Give heed to our humble prayers, almighty God, and through the intercession of blessed Augustine, Your Confessor and Bishop, kindly grant Your oft-given mercy to those upon whom You bestow great hope in Your forgiveness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, Who liveth and reigneth with You in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n O God, Who strengthened blessed Hermes, Your Martyr, with the virtue of steadfastness in his suffering, grant that, emulating him, and out of love for You, we may look upon worldly success as nought and fear no earthly danger. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, Who liveth and reigneth with You in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2 Timothy 4:1-8<\/a>.<\/em> Read in full on July 14<\/a> and July 21<\/a>. Paul charges Timothy to preach in season and out of season, warns him of ears that will go looking for fables, and then turns to himself: he has fought a good fight, finished his course, kept the faith, and a crown of justice is laid up for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ps. 36:30-31.<\/em> The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom: and his tongue shall speak judgment. The law of his God is in his heart, and his steps shall not be supplanted. Alleluia, alleluia. Ps. 88:21<\/a>.<\/em> I have found David my servant: with my holy oil I have anointed him. Alleluia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matthew 5:13-19<\/a>.<\/em> Read in full on July 14<\/a> and July 21<\/a>. Salt that has lost its savour, a city on a mountain that cannot be hid, a lamp that belongs on a stand and not under a bushel, and the warning that not one jot or tittle of the law will pass away before all of it is fulfilled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read the Collect once more and watch where the verbs land. God gives heed, God grants, God bestows. The only thing the people in that sentence do is have great hope in Your forgiveness, and even that is described as something placed on them rather than something they worked up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Augustine’s own day asks mercy for people who were handed their hope. Not for people who achieved it. Great hope in Your forgiveness arrives in that prayer as a gift already delivered, and the Church prays over the recipients rather than the earners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is not how most of us are taught to pray. It is not how the Epistle sounds either. Paul’s closing lines read like a ledger being closed out: I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Three entries in the black, and then the payment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can hear how a person might build a whole religion out of that. Fight well, finish, keep faith, collect. It is clean, it is measurable, and it puts the outcome in your hands. Most of us would prefer it, because most of us would rather be owed something than given something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the Church does not put Paul’s ledger in the Collect on Augustine’s day. It puts great hope in Your forgiveness there, and it makes God the one doing the bestowing. The prayer is not correcting Paul. It is telling you which end of the transaction you are standing on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the Gradual says the same thing a second time, in different words, and this is the verse that is new today. I have found David my servant: with my holy oil I have anointed him.<\/em> Read the order of those two clauses. The finding comes first, the anointing comes second, and nobody applied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is great hope in Your forgiveness in a single line of a psalm. Read Psalm 88<\/a> around it and the surrounding verses are just as blunt. God lays help upon one that is mighty. God exalts one chosen out of the people, God finds, God anoints, and God’s arm does the strengthening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n David’s record does not appear anywhere in that passage, and David had one. He had a lion, a bear, a giant and a kingdom. The psalm mentions none of it, because the psalm is not about what qualified him. Neither is great hope in Your forgiveness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the two new texts on August 28 make the same move twice. The hope is bestowed, and the oil is poured on a man who was found. Both are put in the mouth of a Church praying for people who carry great hope in Your forgiveness without having generated a particle of it themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Augustine was born on November 13, 354, at Tagaste in North Africa, to a pagan father named Patricius and a Christian mother named Monica. He embraced Manichaeism in 373 and stayed with it around nine years. He lived fifteen years with a woman he never married, and their son Adeodatus was born in 372.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was thirty-three when something broke open in a garden in Milan in September of 386, and he was baptised by Ambrose at Easter the following year. Nothing in that sequence looks like a man assembling great hope in Your forgiveness for himself. Then he was Bishop of Hippo from 396 until he died there on August 28, 430, aged seventy-six, while the city was under siege. Thirty-four years a bishop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If anyone had a record to plead, it was this man. His day pleads great hope in Your forgiveness instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Catholic Encyclopedia’s own account<\/a> adds one detail worth holding. Modern critics have argued that the Confessions reads later feeling back into the events of 386, and the article says so without deciding the question. Even the story Augustine told about his own turning is not entirely in his keeping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which is fitting, because the one thing his liturgy will not let him claim is authorship of his own hope. He is filled in the Introit. He is clothed in the Introit. He is prayed for, in his own Collect, as a man on whom great hope in Your forgiveness was bestowed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a teaching that follows from Paul’s ledger if you read it by itself, and it is everywhere. It says mercy is a reward for a demonstrated record. Show the days, show the change, show the fight fought and the course finished, and then the forgiveness applies to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until then you are provisional, and great hope in Your forgiveness is held in escrow. That teaching produces a very specific kind of belonging, and anyone who has lived inside it can describe it exactly. You are welcome, but you are not settled. Your standing is reviewed, informally and permanently, against a count that other people are keeping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Great hope in Your forgiveness is the exact opposite arrangement, and the difference is not sentimental. One of them can be revoked and one of them cannot, because one of them was issued by you and one of them was bestowed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to name where the counting lands hardest, because the text names it for me. People in recovery live under a counted record more than almost anyone. The count is often their own, kept for good reason and kept with real courage, and the count is not the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem is what a room does with the number once it can see it. It becomes the first fact about the person, and it gets checked. A relapse stops being an event in a life and becomes the collapse of a standing that was never actually granted, only extended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A person can be eleven years sober and still be introduced by the eleven years, as though the number were the reason they were allowed in. That is a welcome with a receipt attached. It is not great hope in Your forgiveness, and the two are easy to confuse from the inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Collect refuses that arithmetic outright. It does not ask God to reward a record. It asks mercy for people who have great hope in Your forgiveness, and it locates the hope on God’s side of the sentence, where a bad week cannot reach it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the hope was bestowed, then it was never yours to forfeit by failing to maintain it. That is the practical difference great hope in Your forgiveness makes on the worst morning of somebody’s year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is a different claim from the one made here on August 25, on being faithful in a little<\/a>. That day asked how much a person is handed and what gets counted as enough. Today asks whether the counting establishes the standing at all, and answers no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a story sometimes told of an old priest in a port town who kept a shallow bowl of clean water and a folded cloth on the step by his door. Anyone arriving off the boats could wash their hands before coming in, and most did. He was asked once, by someone who meant well, why he never first asked people where they had come from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He said the water did not need to know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Great hope in Your forgiveness works the way that bowl works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is a small answer and it is the whole argument. The washing was not a reward for having a satisfactory account of yourself. It was set out before anyone arrived, by a man who had no idea who was coming, which is the only way a gift can actually be a gift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the bowl had to be earned it would not have been a bowl. It would have been a test with water in it. Great hope in Your forgiveness is a bowl and not a test, and the Collect sets it out before it knows anything about you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n People who arrive from somewhere else know the difference between those two things immediately, because they have usually met both. There is the welcome that is set out in advance, and there is the welcome that turns out to be a probation with a warm tone. The first one lets a person put their bags down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Collect on Augustine’s day is a bowl set out in advance. It is prayed over people before anything is known about them, for the great hope in Your forgiveness already put in them, and it asks for a mercy the prayer itself calls oft-given. Not newly negotiated. Given already, and given often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The commemoration today is St. Hermes, Martyr, and here is what survives of him. There is a burial ground on the old Via Salaria, outside Rome, that still carries his name, listed among the catacombs that bear the names of their founders<\/a>. That is close to the sum of it: a road, a name, and a prayer asking great hope in Your forgiveness over him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His oration asks that, emulating him, we may look upon worldly success as nought and fear no earthly danger. It is a fitting prayer for a man whose entire worldly record has been lost. Whatever he accomplished is not recoverable, and what the Church still does, once a year, is say his name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which is the argument again, in the hardest form available. If a saint’s standing depended on a legible record, Hermes would have none. The Church would have quietly dropped him centuries ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead the calendar keeps a man about whom it can say almost nothing beside a Doctor about whom it can say almost everything, and prays the same great hope in Your forgiveness over both. The Doctor’s thirty-four years and the martyr’s blank page get identical treatment. That is either careless bookkeeping or it is the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Gospel’s warning about the jot and the tittle sits inside this and not against it. Not one letter of the law passes away, and Christ says so in the same breath as the salt and the lamp. Keeping the law is real work and today’s Gospel does not soften it by a syllable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What the Gospel never says is that the keeping is what bought you the hope. Great hope in Your forgiveness is not the wage the law pays out. It is the ground a person is standing on while they do the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yesterday’s offering, on becoming as little children<\/a>, looked at how wisdom goes down into the pit with a person before it teaches them anything. Today the propers put that same motion in the passive voice and hand it to a Doctor of the Church. He is filled, he is clothed, he is found and anointed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mouth that meditates wisdom in the Gradual was opened by somebody else first. That is the last thing great hope in Your forgiveness means: even the wisdom is received.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Keep it. Nothing here argues against counting days, or steps, or the fight fought and the course finished. Paul counted, and the Church reads his count aloud on the feasts of its greatest teachers, including St. Bernard’s on August 20<\/a> earlier this month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The distinction is narrow and it carries the whole weight. Your count measures your effort. It does not establish your standing, because great hope in Your forgiveness established it first. That is why a bad week is a bad week rather than an eviction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you have ever been told, in words or by the way a room handles you, that your welcome is under review, the prayer on the feast of Christianity’s most exacting theologian is not on the side of the review. It asks oft-given mercy for people carrying great hope in Your forgiveness. It does not ask them to show their work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if none of the theology is yours, the ethical shape stands on its own without it. A community that grants belonging up front behaves differently from one that extends it on condition, and you can tell which kind you are in by what happens on somebody’s worst day. That is a test anyone can run believing nothing at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May the pious prayer of holy Augustine thy Bishop and illustrious Doctor be not wanting to us, O Lord, but make our offerings acceptable to thee and ever win for us thy mercy. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, Who liveth and reigneth with You in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May God, who found David before He anointed him, have found you already. May the great hope in Your forgiveness that today’s prayer names be a thing you discover you were handed rather than a thing you have to build. May your count be your own and never your sentence, and may the mercy the Church calls oft-given reach you on the day you are least able to argue for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if you hold none of that: may you be met before you are assessed. May the people around you set the bowl out first and ask their questions later, or not at all. May your worst week cost you no one, and may you extend the same to somebody standing near a door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Go in peace. You were found first, and the great hope in Your forgiveness was never yours to earn.<\/p>\n\n\nCollect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Commemoration of St. Hermes, Martyr<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Epistle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Gradual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Found first, anointed second<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The man the prayer is attached to<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What this disarms<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The bowl by the door<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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And the martyr almost nobody can tell you about<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
If you are keeping a count<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Secret<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Holding<\/h2>\n\n\n\n