The Collect for Sunday next…

Collect for the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Show favour, O Lord, to your servants
and mercifully increase the gifts of your grace,
that, made fervent in hope, faith and charity,
they may be ever watchful in keeping your commands.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

It is easy to forget how utterly, radically, dependent on God we are. Sometimes God can seem to us like the icing on a cake, but without God simply we would not be; no us, no icing and no cake.

Show favour, O Lord, to your servants…

‘Can you do us a favour?’ we might ask of others: asking for a little boon, a little help with this or that to our advantage. When we ask God for favour, do we ask for a little boon, or are we aware of profound need for that which will move us from our fractured and flawed lives towards that good life that comes from hope, faith and charity and moves us to hope, faith and charity.

…mercifully increase the gifts of your grace,
that, made fervent in hope, faith and charity,

The gifts of God are expressions of his mercy, freeing and liberating. The Collect has us ask that they will help us to something new – and make us fervent in the qualities of grace.

We are not asking to be restored to the same-old but to be helped on to the wonder and awesome quality of life that is God’s.

…they may be ever watchful in keeping your commands.

Everything is down to God, but we should try to live at the same time as though everything is down to us. It begins with God, but we have a role to play in trying to bring his gifts to their natural, and supernatural, end.

Acknowledgements
~ Translation of the Collect: English translation of The Roman Missal © 2010, International Commission on English in the Liturgy Corporation. All rights reserved..
~ Commentary: (c) 2020, Allen Morris
~ Photograph: Birmingham Museum. (c) 2018, Allen Morris