The Glory Be, the prayer that asks for nothing

Three lines, at the end of a decade. You say them fast, often while catching your breath, and you move on to the next bead. It is probably the prayer you have said most often without noticing.

It deserves better than that, for one precise reason. Of all the prayers that come to you ready made, it is the only one you are not in.

The text, and the choice English forces

Two forms circulate, and both are received. The older one, kept in Anglican and Lutheran books and still widely said:

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

The current Catholic translation ends differently:

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.

Both are saying the same last thing, and English has no comfortable way to say it. The older ending, “world without end”, is a phrase nobody uses for anything else. The newer one, “will be for ever”, is plain, and it drops a word the older one was carrying.

The word is “ages”. The Orthodox and Greek Catholic form keeps it in English: “now and forever and to the ages of ages”. So does French, in both of its forms, with “aux siècles des siècles”. Ages of ages is not a long time. It is a stack of whole eras, one behind another, and the prayer ends by setting your evening at the bottom of that stack.

If you say “will be for ever” you are saying nothing false. But of the three you are the only one who has lost the ages.

Nobody is in it

Read the text again, this time looking for who is speaking. You will not find them. There is no “I” and no “we”, no name, no situation, no request. No imperative. No “give”, no “keep”, no “pray for us”.

Look at the verbs as well. In the first half there are none: “Glory be to the Father” names, and does nothing else. The second half has one verb about a time when you did not exist, and one about a time you will not see.

The comparison is worth making, because it is stark. The Lord’s Prayer is a series of requests, and it says “us” over and over. The Hail Mary opens with a greeting and closes with a petition, “pray for us sinners”. These are prayers in which somebody needs something and says so.

The Glory Be is not. Nobody asks in it, and nobody is asked for.

The Lord’s Prayer already ends this way

It is easy to assume the line is a devotional addition, an ornament stuck on the end of the decade. But it is already there at the end of the text Jesus gives.

For yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.

Matthew 6:13 (World English Bible)

Read what comes immediately before it, in the same verse: “Bring us not into temptation.” A request, the last one. Then, with no transition, a sentence that asks for nothing and no longer has “us” for its subject. The whole movement of the Glory Be is there, in two lines, inside the Lord’s Prayer itself.

What the clause about time is doing

“As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.” We recite that as a formula of scale, a way of saying a long while. It is not. The word doing the work is “as”.

The sentence compares. It sets your now, the now of the worry that made you pick up the beads, beside the beginning and beside what follows, and it declines to give it any special standing. Tonight is not a decisive moment in the matter. It is a moment.

Scripture says the same thing in the voice of the one being addressed.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”

Revelation 1:8 (World English Bible)

There is one echo here that a French reader gets and you do not. The French prayer ends “aux siècles des siècles”, and those exact words stand in the French Bible at Ephesians 3:21, so a French reader meets the end of their own prayer inside the verse. In English the same verse reads:

to him be the glory in the assembly and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.

Ephesians 3:21 (World English Bible)

“Forever and ever.” True to the sense, and no echo at all. It is worth knowing that the phrase you swallow at the end of each decade is a quotation, even when your Bible has stopped showing it to you.

It is not a thank you

This is the most common confusion, and it is worth undoing. Praising is not thanking.

A prayer of gratitude has an object, and the object is mine: what I received, what held, what was avoided. It turns toward God, but it goes by way of my own inventory. Take me out of the scene and there is nothing left to say.

The Glory Be has no object of that kind. It mentions nothing that is happening to me, good or bad. That is why it can be said on a day of gratitude and on a day of disaster without changing a word, and ring false on neither.

The Gospel gives the scene, and where it falls in the story matters. The angels speak on the night at Bethlehem, before the shepherds have gone to look at anything.

“Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good will toward men.”

Luke 2:14 (World English Bible)

Nobody has received anything yet, checked anything, verified anything. Praise does not wait for the results. And here the two Bibles part company again: where the World English Bible reads “good will toward men”, the French Segond reads “parmi les hommes qu’il agrée”, among the people he favours. One version hands out good will, the other says someone is pleased. The prayer holds either way, because it is asking for neither.

Say it once, alone

Tonight, one Glory Be. Not at the end of a decade, not attached to anything else. Standing or sitting, slowly, once.

Then, and this is the whole difficulty, add nothing. No request behind it, no “and I also bring you”. You will feel a pull toward filling the gap, because a prayer that asks for nothing opens no expectation, and you will not know what to do with that particular silence.

Stay in it for three breaths. That is the entire exercise, and it has nothing to give you but itself.

If it is the beads and the counting you are missing rather than the words, how to pray the rosary takes the object from the beginning.