He was apprenticed to a merchant at Vilna, went to school at Volodymyr, learned ecclesiastical Slavic and the breviary, and in 1609 studied privately under a Jesuit named Fabricius. He entered the Basilian monastery of the Trinity at Vilna in 1604, at twenty-four, and was ordained priest in 1609.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was superior of several monasteries. He was consecrated Bishop of Vitebsk on the twelfth of November, 1617, and became archbishop the following year. He wrote at least three treatises, among them one on the baptism of St. Volodymyr and one on monks and their vows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was killed at Vitebsk on the twelfth of November, 1623, by an axe-stroke and a bullet. Six years to the day after he was made its bishop. A commission appointed by Urban VIII beatified him in 1643, and he was canonized in 1867.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The encyclopedia does not say who killed him or why, so this offering does not either, and it says nothing about why his feast sits on the fourteenth when he died on the twelfth. What it gives is a man of ordinary trade stock who spent nineteen years in a monastery and six as a bishop and died in the town he had been given.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which is enough for today, because today’s Lesson is not about how he died. It is about what makes anyone fit to be handed the care of other people. And the answer it gives is that he was compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Introit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Let us all rejoice in the Lord, celebrating a feast-day in honour of the blessed Martyr Josaphat, at whose passion the Angels rejoice and give praise to the Son of God.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Psalm 32:1 (Douay-Rheims<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Rejoice in the Lord, O ye just: praise becometh the upright.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Glory be to the Father\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Let us all rejoice in the Lord, celebrating a feast-day in honour of the blessed Martyr Josaphat, at whose passion the Angels rejoice and give praise to the Son of God.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (The antiphon is a liturgical composition rather than a passage of scripture. Only the psalm verse beneath it is scripture.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Arouse in Thy Church, O Lord, the spirit wherewith blessed Josaphat, Thy Martyr and Bishop, was filled when he laid down his life for his flock; that by his intercession we also, moved and strengthened by the same spirit, may not fear to lay down our lives for our brethren. Through our Lord.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hebrews 5:1-6<\/a><\/strong> Douay-Rheims<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lesson from the Epistle of blessed Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n For every high priest taken from among men, is ordained for men in the things that appertain to God, that he may offer up gifts and sacrifices for sins: who can have compassion on them that are ignorant and that err: because he himself also is compassed with infirmity.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n And therefore he ought, as for the people, so also for himself, to offer for sins. Neither doth any man take the honour to himself, but he that is called by God, as Aaron was.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n So Christ also did not glorify himself, that he might be made a high priest: but he that said unto him: Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee. As he saith also in another place: Thou art a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchisedech.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Psalm 88:21-22, as the Missal arranges them (Douay-Rheims<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I have found David my servant: with my holy oil I have anointed him; that my hand may be always with him, and that my arm may strengthen him.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The enemy shall have no advantage over him: nor the son of iniquity have power to hurt him.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Missal draws the two verses into a single purpose clause. The psalm itself states the second as a promise: “For my hand shall help him: and my arm shall strengthen him.”)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Alleluia, alleluia.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the priest whom the Lord hath crowned. Alleluia.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (This verse belongs to no book of scripture. It is one of the Church’s own compositions for the feast of a bishop.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n John 10:11-16<\/a><\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Continuation \u271d of the holy Gospel according to St. John.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n At that time, Jesus said to the Pharisees: I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd giveth his life for his sheep. But the hireling, and he that is not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and flieth: and the wolf catcheth, and scattereth the sheep.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n And the hireling flieth, because he is a hireling: and he hath no care for the sheep. I am the good shepherd; and I know mine, and mine know me.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n As the Father knoweth me, and I know the Father: and I lay down my life for my sheep. And other sheep I have, that are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Read the first four verses of that Lesson as what they plainly are, which is a list of qualifications. Four items. Count them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He is taken from among men. He is ordained for men. He can have compassion on the ignorant and the erring because he himself also is compassed with infirmity. He must offer for his own sins as well as for theirs. And running underneath all four, stated as a flat prohibition: no man takes the honour to himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now look for the strength in that list. There isn’t one. Every single item is either a limit, a lack, a debt, or a bar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taken from among men is a statement about where he came from and it is not up. Ordained for men is a statement about whom he is for and it makes him an instrument. Compassed with infirmity is a statement about the condition he is in right now. And offering for his own sins puts him in the same queue as everyone he serves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Four qualifications and not one of them is a competence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The third of the four is the one that decides the day. He is compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is the whole day, and I want to sit in it rather than rush past it. Whenever the Church has gone wrong about who may hold responsibility, it has gone wrong by importing a fifth item that this passage does not contain. Some proof of soundness. Some evidence of arrival. Some sense that the person in the chair got there by being further along than the people in the pews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Lesson forecloses that in one clause. He is compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Notice the verb, because it is doing something. Compassed<\/em> is passive and it is spatial. It is not a verb of having overcome, and it is not a verb of having chosen. It means surrounded, hemmed about, with the thing still there on every side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The infirmity has not been dealt with. It is the weather he stands in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And a man may be compassed with infirmity for the whole of his life and never once be less fit for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it is not offered as a difficulty to be worked around. It is the stated reason for the one pastoral capacity the passage names. He can have compassion on them that are ignorant and that err because<\/em> he himself also is compassed with infirmity. Take away the infirmity and you take away the reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I will say it plainly and go on saying it. Compassed with infirmity is the load-bearing clause of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then there is Aaron, the only name the passage supplies. Neither doth any man take the honour to himself, but he that is called by God, as Aaron was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whatever you make of the theology, the grammar is clear and it is worth having in plain terms. Nobody in this arrangement appoints himself. The office is given, and a thing that is given can be given to someone who would never have been shortlisted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aaron did not put himself forward, and neither did the man compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I said on Wednesday, working through an Epistle that set every condition on the person holding a charge and none at all on the people in their care, that the duties in that relationship run downward and not by constraint<\/a>. Today’s Lesson is the prior question. Not how the charge is to be held, but who is fit to be handed it. And the answer is the man compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the Gospel, and here is where most readings of this passage go slightly wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We hear “I am the good shepherd” and we assume the contrast is with a bad shepherd. It isn’t. Read it again. The contrast is between a shepherd and a hireling<\/strong>, and the hireling’s defect is stated twice, and both times it is a fact about property rather than a fact about conduct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whose own the sheep are not.<\/em> That is the first statement of it. And then: the hireling flieth, because he is a hireling.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Because he is a hireling. Not because he is a coward, not because he is careless, not because he is wicked. The reason given for the flight is his employment status.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The shepherd here is not the stronger of the two men. He is the one who owns, and he may be compassed with infirmity himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This matters enormously, and it is the thing I want you to carry out of here. The passage is not running an inspection on anybody’s inner life. It never says the hireling is bad at the job. It never says he would pass or fail some test if the wolf had come at a different hour. It says the sheep are not his, and it treats that single fact as sufficient to explain everything he does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is a very cold and a very freeing thing to say. It takes the whole scene off the ground of quality and puts it on the ground of belonging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ownership and infirmity. Compassed with infirmity, and the sheep are yours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And notice who is not accused. The wolf is not the villain of this parable. The wolf is barely in it at all. It comes, it catches, it scatters, and nothing whatever is said about it, because a wolf coming is not a moral event. It is a Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nothing in the scene asks whether the shepherd is compassed with infirmity, because the Lesson had already granted it before the Gospel began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nobody in the passage is charged with anything except not owning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The qualification stands where the Lesson set it down. Compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the two halves of the day meet. The Lesson says the man fit for the care of others is the one compassed with infirmity. The Gospel says the mark of the one who stays is that they belong to what they are standing in front of. Weakness and belonging. Between them they use up the whole list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And here is the harmful teaching I want to put the fruit test to, because this text of all texts forecloses it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The teaching is that you must be well before you can be trusted with anything. Get the illness under control first. Get stable, then serve. Come back to us when you are steady. It is said to disabled and chronically ill people constantly, and it is said with particular confidence to people living with mental illness, and it has been said inside the Christian tradition for a very long time in a vocabulary of readiness and fitness that sounds like care and functions like a locked door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every one of those sentences assumes that a person compassed with infirmity is somebody to be waited on rather than somebody to be trusted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Apply the test. What has that teaching actually grown? It has grown congregations where the people with the most experience of being at the end of themselves are the ones structurally kept furthest from any responsibility. It has produced a class of permanent recipients. It has taught people whose bodies or minds do not stabilise that they will therefore never be givers, only receivers, for life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it has made the church’s own care flow one way, downhill, from the sound to the unsound, which is precisely the arrangement this Lesson does not describe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It does not describe it because its own priest is compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because the Lesson does not put the infirm person in the queue to be served. It puts him at the altar, and says his infirmity is the reason he can be gentle. It puts him in office compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not cured and then installed. Installed compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I named something adjacent to this on Tuesday and I want to be exact about the difference, because they are not the same claim. On Tuesday the question was whether needing somebody else’s hands every day is a failure to progress, and the Collect answered it by making an inability the premise of the prayer and asking for what we have no power of our own<\/a> to reach. That was about receiving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today’s question is the other direction entirely: whether being weak disqualifies you from being trusted with the care of somebody else. Tuesday asked whether you may be carried. Today asks whether you may carry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two directions, and one clause holding both of them. Compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the answer today is that the one compassed with infirmity is the one the passage wants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a story sometimes told of a woman whose family stopped speaking to her when she was thirty-one, over something that has got smaller in every retelling since and was never once settled. Two brothers, both parents, and after a while the cousins followed, in the ordinary way that these things spread without anybody deciding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Twenty years later a cousin she had met perhaps four times died in a town an hour away with nobody at all to arrange anything. The funeral director needed a next of kin. On paper she was nothing: a cousin by marriage twice removed, with no standing to sign a single form in the building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She did it anyway. She rang round three people who had known her cousin until she found out which hymn to ask for. She paid for the plot in instalments over fourteen months out of a pension that did not really have room for it. She sat in the front row of a chapel where eleven people came and not one of them was hers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am not going to tell you her family came. They did not. Nobody was reconciled by any of this and the twenty years did not get one day easier because of it. Nothing in this story gets fixed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What she had was the thing the Gospel names. The sheep were not, by any document anyone could produce, hers. And she stayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is the exact inversion of the hireling, and it is worth saying out loud. He has the title and no ownership. She had the ownership and no title. Everything the passage counts, she had, and everything it does not count, she lacked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the passage’s own word for her fits exactly. Compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And she was, in the plainest sense, compassed with infirmity herself, if you count a life that had been cut off at thirty-one as a wound that never closed over. She was not the strong relative. She was the one who had already lost everybody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which brings me to the line in this Gospel that I think Bloom exists inside. And other sheep I have, that are not of this fold.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Not other sheep I will acquire. Not other sheep who may apply. Other sheep I have<\/em>. Present tense, already possessed, standing outside the wall. The ownership is established before the enclosure is ever reached, and the bringing comes second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you have ever been told that you are welcome to become one of us, and felt the sting under it, that verse is the correction. There is no becoming in it. There is a shepherd stating a fact about a flock and then walking out to collect it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those sheep are not asked to be well first. Neither is the man compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And there is one more thing about the two orations, which I will not overwork but which is too exact to leave out. The Collect does not ask us to summon anything. It asks God to arouse in Thy Church the spirit wherewith blessed Josaphat was filled<\/em>. Filled, again passive, again something done to a man rather than by him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Postcommunion says the same in different words: the spirit of strength which unfailingly sustained<\/em> his life. Sustained him. Carried him. Not mustered by him on the mornings when he had it in him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A spirit that sustains a man is exactly what somebody compassed with infirmity requires, because he cannot supply it himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yesterday the Lesson said that the one who has begun a good work<\/a> in you is the one who will finish it, and that the unfinished are counted now rather than later. Today’s Lesson takes the same shape and applies it to office rather than to belonging. Not merely you are counted while unfinished, but you are fit while unfinished. You are fit compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One last thing, on the Introit, because the Church did something quietly startling with it. That antiphon is the same formula it sang on the first of this month, when the feast was for a crowd which no man could number<\/a> and the psalm verse was this same Psalm 32. The formula is a container. On All Saints it held a multitude nobody could count. Today it holds one name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the one name it holds today is a man of merchant stock from a town most people cannot place, who kept a monastery and then a diocese and was killed in the street. The container is the same size either way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One name, and the man it names was compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So take the list home with you, and take it in whichever language works. Four qualifications: where you came from, whom you are for, what you are still carrying, and the fact that you stand in the same queue as the people you serve. Nothing in there about being well. Nothing in there about being done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is in there is the clause. Compassed with infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He can be gentle with the ignorant and the erring because he himself also is compassed with infirmity. That is not a concession the text makes. It is the reason it gives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if that is the reason, then the people this tradition has most consistently seated at the back are the ones its own Lesson describes. Not as a kindness. As a qualification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They are compassed with infirmity, which is the qualification the Lesson actually names.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most merciful God, pour out Thy blessing upon these offerings, and strengthen us in the faith which blessed Josaphat, Thy Martyr and Bishop, upheld by the shedding of his blood. Through our Lord.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are here as a believer, hold this. You are not waiting on a clearance. The Lesson the Church reads today makes your infirmity the reason you can be trusted with somebody, not the reason you cannot, and it says so in the middle of a passage about the highest office there is. The spirit is aroused in the Church rather than manufactured by you. The good work in you was begun by somebody who intends to finish it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the sheep outside the wall are already his. You are compassed with infirmity and you are already on the list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are here without any of that, hold the same thing without it. Being still in difficulty does not disqualify you from being good to anyone. It is very often the thing that makes you able to be. The people who were careful with you when you were at your worst were rarely the people who had never been there. Do not wait to be well before you are useful to somebody, because that day may not come and it was never the condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You will very likely be compassed with infirmity on the day you are most use to someone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You are, right now, compassed with infirmity. So was the man they made a bishop, and so was the man they made an archbishop, and so is everybody who has ever been any good to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is not the obstacle. That is the qualification.<\/p>\n\n\n\nCollect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Epistle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Gradual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Alleluia<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Secret<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Holding<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Frequently Asked Questions<\/h2>\n\n\n