Good morning, and welcome. Today is Saturday, the twenty-second of November, and the Church keeps St. Cecilia, Virgin and Martyr, third class. Before a single reading, before the saint is so much as described, the entrance chant hands us four words about somebody’s standing: I was not ashamed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The day the temporal calendar names is the Saturday 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The entrance chant is a single verse out of the longest psalm in the book, and it is a sentence somebody says about themselves. And I spoke of thy testimonies before kings: and I was not ashamed.<\/em> That is the whole of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whatever else happens this morning, the Church put that clause first. I was not ashamed<\/strong> is the frame the rest of it arrives inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Look at what the verse does not do. It does not argue the point. It does not offer evidence, produce corroboration, or explain how the speaker knows. It states a standing, flatly, in the past tense, and the Mass moves straight on to the next thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was not ashamed.<\/strong> Four words, said the way you would say that it rained on Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That flatness is where we are going to stand this morning, because everything else on the page is arranged around it. The Lesson comes from somebody who was in trouble and was not helped at the time. The Gospel ends with a shut door and five people on the wrong side of it. And the psalm the entrance chant comes from turns up again later in the same Mass with a request about where the disgrace in the room ought to land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was not ashamed is not a boast. It is a piece of bookkeeping, and the whole Mass is doing the same arithmetic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Ps. 118:46-47; Ps. 118:1)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n And I spoke of thy testimonies before kings: and I was not ashamed. I meditated also on thy commandments, which I loved.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The antiphon and its psalm verse are both from Psalm 118<\/a>, and the Missal has chosen a stretch of it about speaking in a room where the speaker has no rank. Kings are in the sentence. So is a person who talks anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n O God, Who gladden us by the annual feast of blessed Cecilia, Your Virgin and Martyr, grant, we beseech You, that we may by virtuous conduct follow her whom we venerate in this sacred rite. Through our Lord.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The prayer opens by calling the day a gladness before it asks for anything at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ecclesiasticus 51:13-17<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Lesson opens with an address to God that the Douay does not carry at this verse; it belongs to the Missal’s arrangement.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n O Lord, my God, Thou hast exalted my dwelling place upon the earth, and I have prayed for death to pass away. I called upon the Lord, the father of my Lord, that he would not leave me in the day of my trouble, and in the time of the proud without help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I will praise thy name continually, and will praise it with thanksgiving, and my prayer was heard. And thou hast saved me from destruction, and hast delivered me from the evil time. Therefore I will give thanks, and praise thee, and bless the name of the Lord.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (The antiphon joins the eleventh verse to the twelfth, passing over the clause standing between them and stopping short of the end of the twelfth.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hearken, O daughter, and see, and incline thy ear: and the king shall greatly desire thy beauty. With thy comeliness and thy beauty set out, proceed prosperously, and reign.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Alleluia, alleluia. The five wise virgins took oil in their vessels with the lamps: and at midnight there was a cry made: Behold the bridegroom cometh, go ye forth to meet Christ our Lord. Alleluia.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (The last three words of the Alleluia belong to the Missal’s arrangement. In the Gospel itself the cry ends “go ye forth to meet him,” and the psalm verses of the Gradual are from Psalm 44<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Matthew 25:1-13<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n At that time Jesus spoke this parable to His disciples: Then shall the kingdom of heaven be like to ten virgins, who taking their lamps went out to meet the bridegroom and the bride. And five of them were foolish, and five wise. But the five foolish, having taken their lamps, did not take oil with them: But the wise took oil in their vessels with the lamps. And the bridegroom tarrying, they all slumbered and slept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And at midnight there was a cry made: Behold the bridegroom cometh, go ye forth to meet him. Then all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise: Give us of your oil, for our lamps are gone out. The wise answered, saying: Lest perhaps there be not enough for us and for you, go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now whilst they went to buy, the bridegroom came: and they that were ready, went in with him to the marriage, and the door was shut. But at last come also the other virgins, saying: Lord, Lord, open to us. But he answering said: Amen I say to you, I know you not. Watch ye therefore, because you know not the day nor the hour.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Go back to the entrance chant, because it is short and it is carrying the weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I spoke of thy testimonies before kings: and I was not ashamed.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Two clauses. The first is an event: a person opened their mouth in front of people with power over them. The second is not an event at all. It is an accounting entry, and it is written in the negative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was not ashamed. The psalm does not say the speaker overcame shame, managed shame, or was given grace to bear it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It says the shame was not there. And it does not explain why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That absence of explanation is the thing to hold, because it is unusual. Give a modern congregation that clause and within a minute somebody will start supplying reasons: she had prepared, she had prayed about it, she had grown in confidence, she had done the inner work. The verse offers none of that. I was not ashamed<\/strong> arrives with no cause attached to it, which means the psalm is not presenting shame as an interior weather system a person manages well or badly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is presenting shame as something that gets assigned. And the whole Mass is about which way the assigning runs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Assigned, and therefore assignable elsewhere. That is the content of I was not ashamed<\/strong>, all of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n See what the Lesson does with it. The prayer in Ecclesiasticus is made by somebody in real trouble, and listen to what is actually asked for: that he would not leave me in the day of my trouble, and in the time of the proud without help.<\/em> Read that phrase slowly. The trouble has a shape and the shape has other people in it. The proud are named, and the speaker’s own situation is described as being without help while they have the run of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nothing in that sentence asks to be made braver. Nothing in it asks for a better attitude to the situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The request is about company, and the description is about who is doing what to whom. I was not ashamed belongs in the same ledger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Lesson and the entrance chant do one job between them. I was not ashamed<\/strong> is the conclusion, and the time of the proud is the working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And later in this same Mass, when the Communion antiphon returns to Psalm 118, it makes the assignment explicit: Let the proud be ashamed, because they have done unjustly towards me.<\/em> There it is, in the plainest possible terms. The shame is a real quantity, it exists, it has to sit somewhere, and the psalm asks that it sit with the people who did the injustice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is the direction. Not inward, onto the person the thing was done to. Outward, onto the doers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Follow the direction and the four words stop sounding like bravado. I was not ashamed<\/strong> is a statement about somebody else’s account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was not ashamed, says the entrance chant. Let the proud be ashamed, says the Communion. One Mass, one psalm, one movement, and it goes the opposite way to the one most of us were trained in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because here is the training. In a great deal of Christian teaching about purity, honour and scandal, shame is handled as a property rather than as an assignment. It becomes a thing you can catch. It attaches to bodies rather than to actions, and specifically to the bodies of the people acted upon, so that a person who has been harmed comes out of the room carrying something and the person who did the harming comes out of the room carrying nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Against that arrangement the psalm sets four flat words. I was not ashamed<\/strong>, said by the person in the room with no power in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am naming, this morning, people who were assaulted or abused and who came away carrying the disgrace of it. People who have never said the sentence out loud in a church because they were quite certain that the room would receive it as information about them. People who were harmed as children and grew up understanding themselves as the compromised party. People who told somebody once, and saw the conversation go delicate around them rather than around the person who did it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every one of them has been handed a version of shame that the psalm does not recognise. This morning’s psalm hands it straight back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It hands it back with no hearing and no conditions attached. I was not ashamed<\/strong> is where the psalm begins, not what it awards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was not ashamed is a sentence the Church puts in the mouth of a woman on her own feast day, and it is a sentence about standing, not about feelings.<\/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 congregations where the harmed person quietly stops attending and the harm never has to be discussed. It has produced language about damage, brokenness and lost purity applied to people who were acted upon rather than acting. It has produced decades of families keeping a thing in the family, which always means keeping it off the person who did it. And it has produced adults who can tell you exactly what happened to them and cannot say it without apologising for saying it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of that is in this Mass. I was not ashamed<\/strong> is what the Mass says instead, and it says it before the homily, before the argument, before anybody has been asked to justify anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is the first thing said and it is said to nobody in particular. I was not ashamed<\/strong>, and then the readings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a story sometimes told of a bus driver of fifty-two who stopped believing anything during the year his father was dying. It went slowly, the way that kind of thing goes, and then one Sunday he simply did not go, and then he did not go again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He started spending Sunday mornings in the launderette on the ring road, because that was the hour that used to be occupied and he could not think what else to put in it. He did not need to wash anything. He brought a bag anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A woman from the congregation found out where he went, and she began bringing her own washing there. She never asked him what he believed. She never asked him when he was coming back, and she never once told him that God understood, which he would not have been able to bear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the second week he said it out loud, over the noise of the machines, in a room with three strangers in it, that he did not think anybody was listening any more and had not for about a year. She said all right. That was the entire reply, and then she asked him whether the middle machine still ate pound coins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nothing in that exchange was private and nothing about it was managed. It is I was not ashamed<\/strong> in a room that smells of powder and hot metal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That went on for eleven months of Sundays. He said the thing plainly in a public room, nobody in that room treated it as a confession, and that is the shape the psalm is describing: I was not ashamed<\/strong> is what it sounds like when a true sentence about yourself does not have to be smuggled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am not going to tell you he came back, because he did not, not that year. She moved in the spring and the Sundays stopped. Nothing in this story gets fixed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What he had was somewhere to say a true thing at ordinary volume.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is the small, portable version of I was not ashamed<\/strong>, and it cost one person an hour a week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now take that back to the Gospel, because the parable has a shut door in it and shut doors are where this teaching does its worst work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read what the five outside are actually accused of. Nothing. Not one word of the parable calls them wicked, faithless, careless or proud. They ran out of oil, they were told by the others to go and buy some, and whilst they went to buy, the bridegroom came<\/em>. They were away doing exactly the thing they had just been advised to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hold that against the entrance chant. I was not ashamed<\/strong> opens a day that ends with a door shut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And when they come back they address him correctly. Lord, Lord, open to us.<\/em> The Douay is precise about that, and it matters, because this passage often gets preached as though the five were insolent or dismissive. They were not. They used the right word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nothing rude is recorded and nothing rude should be supplied. I was not ashamed<\/strong> is the morning’s first word, and it is not a warrant to go looking for a fault.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The answer they get, I know you not<\/em>, is a statement about acquaintance, and the parable’s very last line levels the ground under everybody: you know not the day nor the hour<\/em>. Nobody in the story knew. The five who went in did not know either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So whatever this parable is doing, it is not handing anyone a rule for deciding who deserved what. I was not ashamed is the sentence the Church chose to open the day with, and it fits the parable better than the accusations we tend to bring to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Note what the Douay does with the lamps, as well. The foolish do not say their lamps are going out. They say our lamps are gone out<\/em>, which is finished business, already true before anybody woke up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The failure had happened in the dark while all ten of them were asleep. Nobody was asked about it at the time and nobody could have been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The one failure in this parable happens where no question could reach it. I was not ashamed<\/strong> declines to make a verdict out of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the seventh of this month we sat with a man whose ruin was set down in a sentence with no conjunction anywhere in it, under simple and upright<\/a>. The point that day was that a person’s condition licenses no inference at all about what they are. Today’s claim is the same one run on disgrace instead of on disaster. Then it was that what happened to you is not a report on you. Now it is that the shame belonging to what happened to you was never yours to hold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two claims, fifteen days apart, and both of them are subtractions. I was not ashamed<\/strong> is the second one said in the first person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was not ashamed, and neither the psalm nor the parable will let you turn that into a competition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is no rank in it. I was not ashamed<\/strong> is not a score anybody achieved and not a level anybody reached.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Wednesday we said that a person’s works can go to the gates with nobody at all to escort them, under let her works praise her<\/a>, and this is the neighbouring lock on the same door. That day asked who has to speak for you before what you did may be mentioned. Today asks who walks out of the room carrying the disgrace after something is done. Endorsement is about the mouth that vouches. Imputation is about the back that takes the weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ten days ago, under not by constraint<\/a>, we read an Epistle that sets every condition in a relationship of authority on the person holding the charge and none whatever on the people in their care. Obligation asked which of the two the rules were written for. Imputation asks which of the two the shame follows home. They are two halves of one arrangement, and this morning’s psalm settles the second half in four words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was not ashamed.<\/strong> The psalm does the arithmetic in one clause and hands back the result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take those four words at their most ordinary and they still hold. Shame is a social instrument. It is handed out, and where it lands is a decision somebody makes, not a fact discovered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was not ashamed is the psalm declining to accept a delivery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You are allowed to decline a delivery. That is all I was not ashamed<\/strong> amounts to, and it is enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe 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
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The Gradual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n