Dear Church,
This past Sunday was the Third Sunday in Lent, and the Collect of the Day is a favorite of mine, so I thought I’d share a few reflection on it with you. Here’s the Collect:
Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
No power in ourselves
I find the confession this prayer makes that “we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves” to be a monumental relief. I spent a lot of my life trying to muster up enough willpower, strength, faith, energy, wherewithal to really please God. To live a good life. To show God I was worth having on the team.
For me, living a good life (a worthy goal in and of itself, of course) was bound up with proving my worth to God. I knew intellectually that it was “all about grace” but in the hidden recesses of my heart, I felt sure God was more pleased with some than with others, and I desperately wanted to place myself as high on the list as I could.
Sleeping At Last’s song “Atlas: One” captures some of how I felt, and still sometimes feel:
The list goes on forever
Of all the ways I could be better
In my mind
As if I could earn God’s favor given time
Or at least “congratulations”
I believed I had at least a little power to make myself and the world better, and therefore I had a God-given responsibility to do so. The shame and condemnation that would follow from failing to live up to these lofty ideals definitely qualify as “evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul.”
Thankfully failure, disappointment, and exhaustion have a way of bringing one to the realization that we really have no power in ourselves to help ourselves (plus some contemplative prayer and therapy—a story for another time). But this realization of powerlessness need not lead to despair, because when we get to the end of our own resources, we finally become open to learning how God’s power works in us to bring about transformation.
Grace requires nothing of me
Plus, even as my confidence in my own power to help myself was waning, I also sensed God affirming my desire for goodness and transformation for myself and the world. My longing to be good and bring forth good was good, and God delighted in it. The chorus of “Atlas: One” expresses this longing well:
I want to sing a song worth singing,
I’ll write an anthem worth repeating.
I want to feel the transformation,
The melody of reformation.
The song ends with a message I’m still learning to trust more and more every day:
I’ve spent my whole life searching desperately
To find out that grace requires nothing of me.
I’m learning to believe that I am deeply loved and lovable, delightful and delighted in by God for no particular reason. Just for existing, really, just for being who I am, not for how good or useful or helpful I am to God and others. So confessing that “we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves” is a refreshing reminder for me of my belovedness.
I’ve linked the song I’ve been quoting from below, if you’d like to take three minutes to listen.
Yous by grace,
Fr. Ben
