Good morning, and welcome. Today is Friday, the twenty-first of November, and the Church keeps the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, third class, in white. The day the temporal calendar names is the Friday after the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, and that feria is not commemorated at all. There is no other saint on the page and no commemoration of any kind. The feast takes the whole morning, and it brings one prayer of its own, in which a child is presented in the temple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Almost none of what follows is new, and that is the first thing to say about it. The Introit, the Lesson, the Gradual, the Gospel, the Offertory, the Secret, the Communion and the Postcommunion are the texts of the standing Mass of Our Lady, said here on the eighth of this month. One prayer is the feast’s own. It says that Mary was presented in the temple<\/strong>, and it asks that we be brought into the temple of God’s glory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So this is a day with one sentence in it that has never been read here before, and that sentence is where we are going to stand. It is short. It makes an enormous claim in passing and then asks for something much smaller.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Presented in the temple. Four words, and the whole of this morning turns on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The propers of this Mass repeat, and the honest thing is to say which ones and by how much. Every text except the Collect is identical to the Mass we prayed on the eighth of November, when the calendar had an empty Saturday and handed it to Our Lady. You can read that morning under delivered from present sorrow<\/a>. The Lesson and the Gospel are not reprinted below; they are named and linked, and the Introit and Gradual are printed again in the same words, because an antiphon that returns should read the same way twice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is new today is one oration. The Collect belongs to this feast and to no other day we have kept, and it is the only place in the whole Mass where anything is presented in the temple<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thirteen days separate this Mass from the one said on the eighth of November, and in that time exactly one clause has changed. It is the clause in which somebody is presented in the temple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a second small difference, and it is a single word. The Preface is the Preface of the Blessed Virgin on both days, and the clause naming the occasion changes: on the eighth it was said in veneration of her, and today it is said in her Presentation. One word inside a fixed form. The week this feast sits in hangs from the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, which we kept under thoughts of peace<\/a>, and that Sunday is not commemorated today either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the feast is carried by one clause. A three-year-old is presented in the temple in it, and every other word this morning would be said the same way on an ordinary Saturday with nothing on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Sedulius; Ps. 44:2)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hail, holy Mother, who in childbirth brought forth the King Who rules heaven and earth world without end. My heart hath uttered a good word: I speak my works to the king; my tongue is the pen of a scrivener that writeth swiftly.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The antiphon is not scripture. It is a line of verse the Missal attributes to Sedulius, and the only scripture in the entrance chant is the psalm verse underneath it, Psalm 44:2<\/a>, about a tongue that writes quickly. A feast for a child too young to say anything opens with a psalm about speech. She is presented in the temple with not one word of her own recorded anywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n O God, by Whose will the blessed Mary, ever Virgin, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, was on this day presented in the temple, grant, we beseech You, that by her intercession we may be found worthy to be brought into the temple of Your glory. Through our Lord.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n That is the whole feast, in one sentence, and everything below is an attempt to read it slowly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Presented in the temple, by God’s will, with an intercessor supplied. There is no other proper text today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ecclesiasticus 24:14-16<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Lesson is the one we heard on the eighth of this month and it is not reprinted here. Wisdom speaks, and the liturgy puts the words in Our Lady’s mouth on her own day. The line to carry into the Collect is the second one, where Wisdom says that in the holy dwelling place she has ministered before Him. A dwelling place is what she is called on the morning she is presented in the temple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Blessed and venerable are you, O Virgin Mary, who, with unsullied virginity, were found to be the Mother of the Saviour. O Virgin, Mother of God, He Whom the whole world does not contain, becoming man, shut Himself in your womb. Alleluia, alleluia. After childbirth you remained a pure virgin, O Mother of God, intercede for us. Alleluia.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Luke 11:27-28<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Two verses, and they are the two we read on the eighth, so they are not reprinted. A woman in a crowd calls out a blessing on the body that carried Him, and He answers by moving blessedness onto something everyone standing there could do. Hold that beside a prayer in which a child is presented in the temple<\/strong> and does nothing whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read the Collect again and look at where the biggest thing in it sits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n O God, by Whose will the blessed Mary, ever Virgin, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, was on this day presented in the temple.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Now find the largest claim in that clause. It is not the presenting. It is the four words set between two commas: the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And look at what grammatical rank the sentence gives it. It is not a verb. It is not a clause. Nobody argues it, nobody establishes it, nobody supports it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is an appositive, which is the form you use for a thing you assume everybody already accepts, the way you would write that your brother, a plumber, came round on Tuesday. The single most extraordinary statement in the prayer is made in the grammar reserved for uncontroversial background, on the way to asking for something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Presented in the temple.<\/strong> That is what the prayer is actually about, and that is the thing it treats as needing a request.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sit with the arrangement, because it is the reverse of how most of us carry this. We treat what God has done in a person as the open question and the admission as the settled part. You get in, or you do not; that part is visible, minuted, recorded. Whether anything real is going on inside you is the thing nobody can vouch for and everybody privately doubts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Being presented in the temple is the visible half of the day. It is the half that leaves a mark somebody else can check.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Collect has it the other way round. What is going on inside her is stated as a plain fact requiring no argument. What is asked for, humbly, at length, with an intercessor brought in to help, is that she be presented in the temple<\/strong> and that we be brought into the temple of God’s glory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the prayer takes the indwelling for granted and petitions for the paperwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It spends its one request on being presented in the temple, and none of it at all on being a dwelling place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One more thing sits inside that sentence. The only will named anywhere in it is God’s. By Whose will<\/em> she was presented in the temple<\/strong> is a clause about what God wanted, and nothing at all is said about what she was ready for. The accounts behind this feast put her at three years old, which is to say at an age where readiness is not a category anybody would apply to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nothing was arranged in advance by her. She was presented in the temple anyway, because that is what God wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the verb does not change when the prayer turns to us. She is presented in the temple<\/strong>; we ask to be brought into the temple of God’s glory. In the Latin it is the same word both times, and both times it is passive. Nobody in this prayer presents themselves. It is done to you, by somebody else, in a room with other people in it, and the person it happens to is never the one performing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be presented in the temple is not something available to you on your own. That is not a limitation of the phrase. It is the entire content of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second temple is not a building. That is worth stopping on. The prayer takes the word for a specific building in Jerusalem and uses it for the glory of God, which has no address, and it does not change the verb when it does so. Whatever admission to God turns out to be, the Church is telling us it is the same kind of event as a small child being carried up a flight of steps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be presented in the temple of God’s glory is that act again, performed on grown people, in the open, by somebody else’s hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The teaching this cuts against is one that nobody states out loud, so I am going to state it. It is the idea that God’s work in a person begins when an institution registers it. That whatever is going on in you is provisional until a room has admitted it, a rite has been performed on it, and a book has recorded it, and that an unregistered person is an empty one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am naming, this morning, people who have never been baptized, never confirmed, never formally received into anything at all. People who came back after twenty years and did not know what they were allowed to do. People who asked for something and were told no, and who read that no as a report on their soul rather than a decision taken in an office. And people who never asked, because they had already worked out that they did not have the standing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every one of them has been taught to hear being presented in the temple as a verdict, when the prayer treats it as an errand somebody else runs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Judge that teaching by what it grows, inside Christianity’s own record, because that is where we are obliged to look. It has produced adults who sat at the back of the same building for decades and never once thought of themselves as being in it. It has produced people who could describe, precisely and movingly, something God had done in them, and who would not say so out loud because no register carried it. It has produced the habit of treating a list of names as a spiritual instrument, and it has taught the people with the least standing in the room to hold their own experience at arm’s length until somebody with a stamp confirms it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Collect does not work that way. It says she is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit and then asks that she be presented in the temple<\/strong>, in that order, in one breath, with the indwelling in the position of a thing not up for discussion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a story sometimes told of a woman of fifty-eight who took a young man of twenty-three to the Tuesday morning adult swimming class at the municipal baths. He was not her son. He had lived in her house since he was seventeen, which is a different thing and not a lesser one, and he could not swim, and he was not going to say so to a room of strangers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What she did was get in first. Every week for eleven weeks she was in the water before he was, standing at the shallow end where he could reach her, and when the instructor came round she said his name out loud to the instructor and to the eleven other people in the class, so that he never had to introduce himself. She never asked him whether he was frightened. She never explained to anyone, including him, why she was doing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It happened in a tiled room where sound carries and nothing is private, in broad daylight from the high windows, in front of everybody. The thing that was done for him was done in the open, by another person, before he was in any position to do it himself, and it is the closest ordinary picture I have of what it means to be presented in the temple<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am not going to tell you he learned to swim, because he did not, not that year. He stopped coming in March and she went on going alone. Nothing in this story gets fixed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What he had, for eleven Tuesdays, was somebody standing where he could reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is being presented in the temple with all the theology taken out of it, in a municipal pool that smells of chlorine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which is what the Collect asks for. By her intercession<\/em>, it says, and that is the only ground it offers for anything: somebody else asking. Not preparation, not fitness, not a record of attendance. The prayer wants us presented in the temple<\/strong> of God’s glory on the strength of another person’s request, which is exactly the arrangement it has just described happening to a three-year-old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yesterday we sat with a kingdom handed over before anybody had been asked for anything, under fear not little flock<\/a>. Today the gift is not a kingdom, it is a description: you are already a dwelling place, and the prayer will not argue with you about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of the two things on offer this morning, being presented in the temple is the one that can be arranged, and it is still not the one you arrange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Wednesday we said that a person’s good work can go to the gates without an escort, under let her works praise her<\/a>, and today’s claim is the harder neighbour of that one. That day asked whether somebody has to vouch for what you did before it may be mentioned. Today asks whether the room is what put the thing in you in the first place. The answer this prayer gives is no, and it gives it in the grammar rather than in an argument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You are not presented in the temple in order to become a dwelling place. You are one already, and then you are presented in the temple.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA Word on Today’s Propers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Introit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Collect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Epistle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Gradual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n