So I am not going to reprint the Epistle and the Gospel a second time. The citations are given below and linked, Sunday’s post has them in full, and you can read them there. We did the same thing on the feria that carried the thirteenth Sunday forward<\/a>, and the rule has not changed since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is genuinely new today is small and it is entirely in the commemorations. Two of them, which is rare, and between them they carry six prayers this ministry has never printed. One of those prayers gives us the brotherly crown, and a day with nothing of its own turns out to be exactly the right day to receive it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ps 83:10-11; Ps 83:2-3<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Behold, O God our protector: and look on the face of thy Christ. For better is one day in thy courts above thousands.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n How lovely are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts! My soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (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. The antiphon is repeated.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n One day in the courts above thousands. The psalm is not asking to be given a rank in the building. It is asking to be inside it, which is a smaller request and a much harder one to earn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Keep Thy Church, we beseech Thee, O Lord, with Thy perpetual mercy: and because without Thee the frailty of man cannot but fall, keep us ever by Thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Every working verb in that prayer belongs to God. Keep, help, lead. The people in the sentence are called frail and are not asked to stop being frail, which is the same arithmetic the brotherly crown runs on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May the pleading of blessed Giles the Abbot make us acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, we pray; that what we may not have through any merits of ours, we may gain by means of his patronage. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n We beseech Thee, O Lord, may the holy Abbot Giles prevail by his prayers, so that the offerings placed upon Thy sacred altar may be beneficial for our salvation. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n May the pleading of the blessed Abbot Giles for us, together with the partaking of Thy sacrament, protect us, O Lord, so that we, mindful of his way of life, may obtain the help of his intercession. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n May the brotherly crown of Thy Martyrs, O Lord, give us joy, and may it afford to our faith an increase of virtues and console us with many prayers. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n May we perform with pious mind the sacramental rites, O Lord, in honour of the holy Martyrs, and by them may both protection and joy increase for us. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that we may follow more and more the faith of those whose memory we venerate in receiving Thy sacrament. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Galatians 5:16-24<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Paul’s two lists, the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit, read in full on Sunday<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ps 117:8-9<\/a>; Ps 94:1<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It is good to confide in the Lord, rather than to have confidence in man. It is good to trust in the Lord, rather than to trust in princes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Come let us praise the Lord with joy: let us joyfully sing to God our saviour.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Matthew 6:24-33<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Two masters, the birds, the lilies, and the Father who knows the need before it is named, read in full on Sunday<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is one sentence in today’s prayers I would put on the wall of this ministry if I could only keep one. May the brotherly crown of Thy Martyrs, O Lord, give us joy.<\/em> Not their crowns. Their crown, singular, and the word the Church chose to describe it is a word about relationship rather than about achievement. That is the brotherly crown, and I want to spend this whole morning with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Count what the prayer does not do. It does not name a single one of the twelve. It does not rank them, does not tell us which of them held out longest, does not say which one broke and came back. Twelve people, one prayer, and one crown between them, and the Church has been perfectly content with that arrangement for a very long time. The brotherly crown has no leaderboard attached.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now hear the other commemoration, because the two prayers are making one argument from two directions. Giles asks that what we may not have through any merits of ours, we may gain by means of his patronage.<\/em> Read that clause slowly. It assumes, as a matter of course, that there is a gap between what we have earned and what we need, and it does not treat that gap as a scandal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two small prayers on a Tuesday nobody will remember, and between them they take apart the most successful bad idea in the history of religion. One says the crown is shared. The other says the gap is normal. Put them together and you have the brotherly crown, which is a good thing arriving in your hands with somebody else’s name on the delivery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let me give you what is actually known about Giles, which is less than the stories about him suggest. He is said to have been born of illustrious Athenian parentage<\/a> around the middle of the seventh century. He crossed into Gaul, settled first in a wilderness near the mouth of the Rhone, and then withdrew into dense forest near N\u00eemes, where he spent many years in the greatest solitude. His sole companion was a hind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to stay on the hind for a moment, because it is the one detail the record gives plainly and it is doing real work. A man alone in a forest for years, and the only other living thing in the account is a deer. Whatever else Giles was, he was not building a reputation out there. Nobody was watching the merits accumulate, and the brotherly crown is the kind of crown you can be given anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the king’s hunters found him. That is the turn in the whole story, and notice which way it runs: he did not go looking for a community, a community came crashing through the trees after him. He consented to receive disciples and built a monastery, and he died in the early part of the eighth century. The founding is a consequence of being found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The account of the king himself is one the encyclopedia flags as legend, and I am not going to build anything on it. What I will build on is the shape underneath, which is not legend at all: a man who had gone as far from other people as he could get, and whose life’s work began the day other people arrived. That is the brotherly crown running in the opposite direction, and it turns out to run both ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So we have twelve martyrs sharing one crown, and one abbot whose solitude produced a monastery. And the Church puts them on the same day, on a feria with no Mass of its own, in a set of prayers borrowed entirely from the previous Sunday. Today is a day that owns nothing and receives everything, which is the brotherly crown in the very structure of the calendar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is the teaching I want to test, and it is everywhere. The idea is that what you have with God is a payout on a ledger. You put in the prayers, the chastity, the attendance, the right beliefs held at the right temperature, and the balance is your standing. On that account the brotherly crown is unintelligible, because a crown that twelve people share is a crown nobody has properly earned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Apply the fruit test to that idea, the way we apply it to everything here: by their fruits you shall know them<\/span>. Ask what the ledger has grown in the churches that ran it. It grew people who could tell you their own balance to two decimal places and could not tell you their neighbour’s name. It grew a scarcity where there was meant to be a table, and the brotherly crown is the correction Christianity keeps quietly printing in its own prayer books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I mean that literally. This is not a modern objection imported from outside the tradition. The tradition wrote the objection into its own liturgy, in a prayer used once a year on a fourth-class Tuesday, and then largely stopped reading it aloud. The brotherly crown has been sitting in the missal the whole time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We came at this from another angle on Friday, when we said mercy is not a reward for a counted record<\/a>. That day the question was whether your past is an invoice. Today the question is whose account the good things are even in, and the answer the prayer gives is that they are in a shared one. The brotherly crown is not your balance. It is the room’s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yesterday we sat with a Collect that asked for free minds on behalf of a man who could not so much as speak freely<\/a>. The claim there was that a constrained life still produces real virtue. The claim here is narrower and, I think, harder: that even the virtue a completely unconstrained life produces was never that person’s private property. The brotherly crown does not only comfort the person with nothing to show. It disarms the person with plenty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is where I want to name who the ledger costs most, because today’s own prayer needs it named. People who have survived sexual assault are handed the merit account more often and more brutally than almost anyone, and it is handed to them in a specific form: that purity is a thing you keep, that it can be lost, and that what was taken from you registers as a debit in your column. That is the ledger doing what a ledger does. Against it stands a prayer asking for what no merits of ours can buy, and a crown that is brotherly rather than owned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Say the arithmetic out loud, because the misuse has worn a deep groove. If nothing in your column was ever the source of your standing, then nothing removed from your column can be the source of your loss. The prayer does not say your merits were damaged. It says your merits were never the currency. The brotherly crown was not withdrawn from anybody, because it was never issued in single copies in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We stood at this same wall on the feast of the Immaculate Heart, when the Epistle told us to come with confidence to the throne of grace<\/a>. That day the argument was about approach, about who is permitted to walk up. Today it is about inventory, about what is in your hands when you get there, and the honest answer for every one of us is very little that we made. The brotherly crown covers the difference, and it does not itemize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to give you a person now, because an argument stays an argument until somebody’s Tuesday night is in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a story sometimes told of a woman eleven years sober who cannot tell you which part of it worked. She went to a room above a hardware store on Tuesday nights, up a staircase with a bad handrail, mismatched folding chairs in a ring and a steel urn that took twenty minutes to boil. She was not driven there by conviction. She was driven there by a man from the room who had a car, for the first four months, because she did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ask her how she did it and she will correct the question before she answers it. She says a woman she barely knew answered the phone eleven times that first winter, at hours nobody should be awake, and never once mentioned it afterwards. She says somebody kept putting a chair out. She says the room did it, and she happened to be in the room, and she is not being modest when she says that, she is being exact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The part that took her longest was not the drinking. It was that she could not accept that her sobriety was not hers. She had spent two years trying to hold it the way you hold a possession, and holding it that way meant that every bad week read as theft and every good week had to be defended. The brotherly crown was the thing she could not get her hands around, because you cannot grip a crown that twelve people are wearing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What changed was small and she can date it. Somebody newer asked her how long she had, and she heard herself say we<\/em> instead of I<\/em>, and she did not correct it. Eleven years on she still says we. She will tell you plainly that she is not certain she stayed sober so much as she stayed inside something that was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We told a story of recovery on the feast of a Doctor of the Church, back when we heard that his wisdom came down like showers<\/a>. That story was about a person receiving. This one is about a person finally letting go of ownership, which is the harder half, and the brotherly crown is what is left in your hands when you do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you do not believe in God, none of this collapses, and you can test it against your own week without borrowing a single article of faith. Almost nothing good in your life was generated by you alone. The steadiness you are running on today was put into you by people whose effort you will never be able to itemize or repay, and the plain version of the brotherly crown is that a shared good is not diminished by being shared. There is no ledger, there is no balance, and there was never a single copy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which means the honest response is not gratitude as a duty. It is a change in how you carry the good you have. A person who thinks they earned it defends it. A person who knows it came round to them passes it on, and that is the brotherly crown behaving the way a crown of that kind behaves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I will not pretend this is comfortable in every direction. If you have worked extremely hard for something, being told the credit is not exclusively yours can land as an insult, and I understand why. But look at what the prayer actually removes and what it leaves. It removes the anxiety of holding it alone. The brotherly crown leaves you the whole of the good and takes away only the loneliness of having to own it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And look at what it does for the person at the other end of the room. On the ledger, that person is behind, and there is nothing to be done about it but catch up. Under the brotherly crown they are simply here, at the same table, with the same crown over the whole table. Twelve martyrs and not one name among them in the prayer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So carry this out of an ordinary Tuesday. Find one good thing in your life today that you have been treating as an achievement, and try holding it as an inheritance instead. Nothing about the thing changes. What changes is the grip, and the brotherly crown asks for a much looser one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then find the person nearest you who has nothing to show this week. Do not fix them, do not assess them, do not measure the gap. Put a chair out, which is the entire practical content of the brotherly crown, and let the borrowed Mass of an ordinary Tuesday do the rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grant us, we beseech Thee, O Lord, that this saving offering may both cleanse us of our sins and win for us the favour of Thy divine power. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n May God keep you in the courts He has already opened to you, and give you joy in the brotherly crown you did not earn and cannot lose, and set you among the people who will carry what you cannot carry today. Whatever your hands are empty of this morning, the crown is over the whole table and your place at it was never in question. May Almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if none of that language is yours, take it plainly. You are held up by more people than you can count, most of whom will never be repaid, and the good in you is not a private possession you have to defend. Put a chair out for somebody today. That is the whole instruction.<\/p>\n\n\nIntroit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Collect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Commemoration of St. Giles, Abbot<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Commemoration of the Twelve Holy Brothers, Martyrs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Epistle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Gradual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Secret<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Holding<\/h2>\n\n\n\n