UNLEARNING WORTHINESS AND THE PRAYER OF HUMBLE ACCESS, PART TWO

Traditional Icon of the Return of the Prodigal Son. Public Domain.

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a two-part series on the Prayer of Humble Access. Check the archives to read Part I. 

But in thy manifold and great mercies…

We often think of mercy in strictly legal and punitive terms. Mercy is what happens when the prisoner who should have served twenty years in prison gets out after five, when the victim of a robbery declines to press charges against their attacker. And this is certainly one example of mercy. But the true meaning of the word is a good bit deeper. Its origins lie in the Old French word merci, which means “pity” or “thanks.” To be merciful is to have pity on someone, usually someone who cannot help themselves. It is therefore closely related to the Christian notion of grace; God’s favor towards us that is based not upon anything we have done or failed to do, but upon God’s benevolence. Of course, we experience that mercy when God forgives our sins. But we also experience it in the very fact that God gave us a law that we could sin against! The potential to be righteous is itself an act of grace – a mercy.  

Mercy and righteousness do not, in other words, occupy the same level of reality. Righteousness, important though it is, is a second-order phenomenon. Mercy is the deeper reality, and without it the concept of righteousness would simply not apply to us. In fact, the more I consider the words of the Prayer of Humble Access, the more I realize that mercy goes all the way back to the beginning.  

For if the giving of the Law was a mercy, so too was the act of creation itself. After all, nothing can deserve to exist, especially when it is nothing at all. Existence itself is a gift, freely given for no other reason than God’s benevolence – a mercy, in other words. So in the end our paltry notions of debt and forgiveness, merit and blame, worthiness and unworthiness are but phantoms of human design – creatures’ creations floating like flotsam, as all things must, upon God’s oceanic, primordial decree of mercy: “Let there be.” 

So when the Prayer of Humble Access bids us to trust not in our own righteousness but in God’s mercy, it is not directing us towards one concept instead of its equal and opposite counterpart, like wearing red rather than blue. Instead, it is encouraging us to focus on deeper realities rather than shallower ones. There is no good deed, no achievement, no way of being that could force God to give us the Eucharist, anymore than it could force God to give us existence. So stop worrying about it! Focus not on your worthiness or unworthiness, but on that miraculous, singular Presence whose property it is to always have mercy. 

Perhaps we judge Cranmer and the other Reformers harshly since they do so often narrowly talk about mercy in connection with punishment. Fair enough. But I suspect we also need to be reminded to focus on God’s mercy because it is such a peculiar thing. Mercy precedes creation, and as such our attempts to understand it on the basis of the created order will never truly succeed. It is a mystery, the primordial act of the invisible God who dwells in light inaccessible. To understand God’s mercy – to become merciful ourselves, as we are commanded – will take us far beyond our worthiness-obsessed cliques and rules of etiquette to unite us with the deepest mysteries of the faith: the foundations of the world laid uncountable eons ago, the unthinkable recreation of weak and dying souls in Jesus of Nazareth, and the wonderfully unknowable heart of the Godhead that pulls us towards itself at every minute of every day. 

We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs underneath thy table…

Seen in this light, there is an odd but profound pleasure in our moral unworthiness before the sacrament. It is rather like the joy of being wrong and loved anyway, or of finding out that school has been closed on the day you were required to give an unfinished report. The rules of life have suddenly been suspended and joy breaks out, gleefully ignoring all boundaries of worth and propriety. 

Look at what God does! See how the Trinity pours out its richest and choicest gifts on these tiny, transient human beings! What are we, in the end? Almost nothing at all – little bits of being bound into soul and body, dust given breath. To this profound finitude we have added the burdens of sin. We are buffeted by our hatred and envy, quick to judge our neighbors and slow to amend our lives, even when the fate of others (or even the whole planet) hangs in the balance. And what does God do? God keeps pouring out blessings on us, as if none of that mattered at all! Or, to put it even better: God somehow uses our very sins as excuses to give us even more gifts. We do not lose the gift of existence; we simply gain the gift of forgiveness on top of it. It must drive the devil insane! All the effort he has put into driving a wedge between God and us has instead brought us closer together. 

And perhaps we must think about this counter-cultural mercy even more, because this is how the world really is. We really are loved regardless of our worthiness, and every host on every altar of the church catholic is but one more reminder to us that what we experience in the Eucharist is not a dream. It is reality breaking through our illusions. While our unworthiness is morally regrettable, in the face of the Eucharist it merely amplifies the paradoxical joy of the whole celebration. To these unworthy creatures, God is giving a gift like no other, one that not even the holiest of angels could merit for itself. The most precious of gifts is placed in our bloodstained hands. And so our unworthiness, far from barring us from the table in a fit of scrupulous self-flagellation, merely reminds us that the world is a far stranger and more fantastic place than we have imagined – a place where creatures under condemnation by their families, societies, and even the divine law itself are given everlasting joy and freedom. 

That we may dwell in him, and he in us… 

All this is surely wonderful enough. And yet, the Prayer of Humble Access tells us, there is a yet more wonderful paradox awaiting us. For at the very heart of this unfamiliar and alien tableau of merciful mysteries, we find the most familiar and even domestic of sights: a table set for us, an invitation extended, and a God offering the very heart of the universe to us under the guise of simple bread and wine. To unlearn worthiness and learn mercy may be a strange and uncomfortable journey. It is like learning to walk over an invisible bridge – trusting in a support one cannot see. But it is also the journey to God’s home – which, it turns out, is also our home.  

For God is nothing if not a gracious host. The same mercy that made us out of nothing, preserves us from the power of death and sin and gives us its very self is not content to leave us uncomfortable. We are not, thank God, meant to be forever looking over our shoulder for the punishment we are sure is to come, forever cowed by unearthly seraphim and cherubim singing ineffable hymns in alien languages, forever looking to ourselves and fretting over our unworthiness in the face of such glory. The Eucharist is a feast because feasting is what is familiar and comfortable to human beings. That familiarity is part of God’s plan for us. 

I love the Prayer of Humble Access for many reasons, but most of all because it invites me to a feast that is both familiar and transformed, purified of all those human habits that threaten to ruin the meal. At the Lord’s table, there is no jockeying for position, no faux pas to be avoided, no backbiting or gossiping or tsk-tsking about “the wrong sort of people” being invited. Neither are there separate tables for the less sinful, who receive their food first while the more wayward hunger. Mercy sets the table, the mercy by which God makes the sun to shine on the just and unjust alike. So all who come to the banquet may finally, at long last, relax. There is nothing to do or strive for. We need only do that which comes most naturally to us: eat, drink, and rejoice in that strangest and most familiar of blessings – the loving kindness of God, older and infinitely more powerful than all worthiness, that uplifts and sustains us every day of our life.