Daily Offering · 8 November 2025 · V Mass of the B. V. M. – Salve, Sancta Parens
Daily Offering: November 8, 2025 | Delivered From Present Sorrow
Good morning, and welcome. Today is Saturday, the eighth of November, and the calendar has nothing of its own to put here. When a Saturday in this stretch of the year comes up empty, the Church hands it to Our Lady, so the vestments…
The order of this offering
Before the readings
Offering and Canon
I
Opening Address
Good morning, and welcome. Today is Saturday, the eighth of November, and the calendar has nothing of its own to put here. When a Saturday in this stretch of the year comes up empty, the Church hands it to Our Lady, so the vestments are white and the Mass is the fifth Mass of the Blessed Virgin. Its central prayer asks to be delivered from present sorrow, and that phrase is the whole offering today.
I want to be exact about what kind of day this is, because it is not the kind of day we have had all week. The day the temporal calendar names is the Saturday after the Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost, and that feria is not commemorated at all. Our Lady’s Mass takes the whole day. After her Collect, and only after it, the Four Crowned Martyrs are commemorated. Her Collect is the one that asks to be delivered from present sorrow, and every other text in the Mass leans on it.
That order matters, and it is the reverse of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Those three days were the Sunday’s Mass repeated, with nothing of their own. This one has its own Introit, its own Lesson, its own Gospel and its own prayer, and the prayer is the one that asks to be delivered from present sorrow.
So we are not continuing anything today. We are on a day the Church built for a Saturday that had nothing scheduled, and what it chose to put on that day is worth walking through slowly. It put down the vocabulary of taking root and staying put, and a request to be delivered from present sorrow.
II
The Introit
(Sedulius; Ps. 44:2)
Hail, holy Mother, who in childbirth brought forth the King Who rules heaven and earth world without end. My heart hath uttered a good word: I speak my works to the king; my tongue is the pen of a scrivener that writeth swiftly.
The antiphon here is not scripture. It is a line of verse the Missal attributes to Sedulius, and the only scripture in the whole entrance chant is the psalm verse underneath it, Psalm 44:2, about a tongue that writes quickly. A day with no feast opens with a poem and a psalm about writing something down. That is already a small answer to a congregation asking to be delivered from present sorrow, because it hands you language on a morning that supplied none.
Hold that next to the request to be delivered from present sorrow. The first thing this Mass does is put words in your mouth on a morning that supplied none of its own.
III
The Collect
Grant us, Your servants, O Lord God, we beseech You, to enjoy lasting health of mind and body; and by the intercession of glorious and blessed Mary, ever Virgin, may we be delivered from present sorrow and partake to the full of eternal happiness. Through our Lord.
There are two petitions in that prayer and they are not the same petition. The first asks for lasting health of mind and body, naming both in one breath and refusing to rank them. The second asks to be delivered from present sorrow.
Read the second one again and look at the adjective. Not past sorrow, which could be recounted. Not future sorrow, which could be feared. Present sorrow, which is the kind that is simply going on, in the room, this morning, with no anniversary attached to it.
To be delivered from present sorrow is a strange thing to build a prayer around, and a stranger thing to put on an empty Saturday. Most prayers for relief have an event in view. This one asks to be delivered from present sorrow without asking what caused it, when it started, or when it is due to end. Whoever wrote it wanted people to be delivered from present sorrow on terms that did not require them to explain themselves first.
IV
The Commemoration
Grant, we beseech You, almighty God, that we who know how courageously Your holy Martyrs have confessed the faith, may experience their goodness as they intercede for us with You. Through our Lord.
After Our Lady’s prayer, this Mass commemorates the Four Crowned Martyrs, and the honest thing to say about them is how little is known. The Catholic Encyclopedia holds that of these four we know only that they died for the faith and where they were buried. The account that was later offered to explain their name it calls a tentative explanation with no historic foundation. Four men, kept on the calendar for centuries, whose names the Church does not have.
A second group is honoured the same day and stands on firmer ground: five stonecutters from Pannonia who refused a commission to carve a particular statue and were drowned for it, an account the same article calls substantially authentic. Cutters of stone, which is a trade you practise for years without producing anything anyone remembers. That is fitting company for people asking to be delivered from present sorrow.
Both groups belong on this day of all days. We said something close to this under faithful over a few things, and it lands harder here, because these four were not faithful over a few things we can list. The prayer does not ask us to admire a story. It asks that people who want to be delivered from present sorrow might experience their goodness.
V
The Epistle
From the beginning, and before the world, was I created, and unto the world to come I shall not cease to be, and in the holy dwelling place I have ministered before him. And so was I established in Sion, and in the holy city likewise I rested, and my power was in Jerusalem. And I took root in an honourable people, and in the portion of my God his inheritance, and my abode is in the full assembly of saints.
Wisdom is the speaker here, and the liturgy puts the words in Our Lady’s mouth on her own day. Count the verbs. Created, shall not cease to be, ministered, was established, rested, took root, and an abode that simply is.
Every one of them is a verb of remaining, which is not the vocabulary you would choose for people hoping to be delivered from present sorrow in a hurry. There is no arriving, no achieving, no leaving and no rescuing anywhere in those three verses. A Lesson chosen for people asking to be delivered from present sorrow contains no exits at all.
VI
The Gradual
Blessed and venerable are you, O Virgin Mary, who, with unsullied virginity, were found to be the Mother of the Saviour. O Virgin, Mother of God, He Whom the whole world does not contain, becoming man, shut Himself in your womb. Alleluia, alleluia. After childbirth you remained a pure virgin, O Mother of God, intercede for us. Alleluia.
The Gradual keeps the same theme and makes it physical. What the world cannot contain shuts itself into a room the size of a body, and the verse after the Alleluia says she remained. Not that she recovered, or moved on, or was restored to how things were before. Nobody in this Mass is delivered from present sorrow by being handed back an earlier version of their life.
She remained. On a morning when you want to be delivered from present sorrow, that word is doing more work than it looks like it is doing.
VII
The Gospel
And it came to pass, as he spoke these things, a certain woman from the crowd, lifting up her voice, said to him: Blessed is the womb that bore thee, and the paps that gave thee suck. But he said: Yea rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God, and keep it.
Two verses, and the second one moves blessedness off a fact of biology and onto something anyone in the crowd could do. The word to sit with is keep. It is the word you use for keeping a house, keeping a room, keeping a thing you have been handed rather than performing a task.
Hearing is quick and keeping is slow, and people who need to be delivered from present sorrow have usually had a great deal of practice at the second one. Keeping is what you do on the ninth year of something, and it is the only instruction offered to a congregation that has just asked to be delivered from present sorrow.
The Offering
Daily Homily | Delivered From Present Sorrow
Somebody had to decide what to do with this Saturday. That is not a pious way of speaking. There was a real rule to be written about weekdays with no feast on them, and…
Somebody had to decide what to do with this Saturday. That is not a pious way of speaking. There was a real rule to be written about weekdays with no feast on them, and this is the answer that rule gives in this part of the year.
The Church could have left the day blank. It could have repeated the Sunday, which is what it did on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Instead it kept one standing Mass in reserve for the leftover Saturdays, and the Mass it kept is this one.
Look at what is in it. A Lesson whose every verb is a verb of staying. A Gradual whose point is that she remained. A Gospel that swaps a one-time event for something you keep. And a prayer to be delivered from present sorrow, on the one day of the week that had nothing happening.
The least eventful day on the calendar was handed the most permanent language in the book, and the one prayer that asks to be delivered from present sorrow. I do not think that is an accident, and I think it is the whole reason to be here this morning.
Because most of the sorrow people actually carry has no event in it. It is not the funeral, it is the eleven months after the funeral. It is not the diagnosis, it is the Tuesday four years later. Ask someone what is wrong and they can tell you; ask them what happened and they often cannot, because nothing happened, and nothing is happening, and that is precisely the trouble.
That sorrow gets very little liturgy written for it, and it gets almost no sympathy, because sympathy runs on events. A sorrow with an event attached can be dated, described, and eventually filed. A sorrow that is merely present sits there with no handles on it, and the people around it run out of things to say by about the third month. Nobody stops wanting to be delivered from present sorrow; the room simply stops asking after it.
So a prayer that asks specifically to be delivered from present sorrow is doing something unusual. It does not ask what caused the sorrow. Yesterday’s offering was about that question, and about the friends who spent forty-two chapters insisting that ruin must be somebody’s fault, and you can read it under simple and upright. Today’s prayer is not asking about fault at all. It is asking about duration, which is a different question entirely, and it asks to be delivered from present sorrow without ever raising the other one.
Here is the teaching this cuts against, and I want to name it plainly. It is the idea that a sorrow which does not lift is evidence that you have not prayed hard enough, believed firmly enough, or worked at it properly. Not that you deserved it, which is yesterday’s error, but that its continuing is your doing.
Judge that teaching by what it grows, inside Christianity’s own record, because that is where we are obliged to look. It has told people with chronic illness that a body which does not improve is a soul which will not cooperate. It has told people carrying long-term depression that the darkness is a discipline problem, and that a fifteenth year of it is a fifteenth year of refusing help that was on offer. It hands the person with the least strength in the room the largest bill, and it does it in a kind voice. It also puts the one who most needs to be delivered from present sorrow in sole charge of the delivering.
I name those two groups because this Collect names them first. It asks for lasting health of mind and body, in one clause, with no ranking between them, before it asks to be delivered from present sorrow. The prayer treats a mind that will not come right and a body that will not come right as the same order of trouble and the same object of mercy. Anyone who has been told otherwise from a pulpit has been told something this Saturday’s own prayer contradicts.
There is a story sometimes told of a man who had lived in the same city for eleven years and still gave his address by the name of the street, never the number of the flat. He said “the place I’m staying” for over a decade. Nothing had gone wrong. He had work, papers in order, a nephew at the local school, and a sorrow with nothing in it to point at.
What he could not do was arrive. He went to the parish hall on Wednesdays and sat with his coat across his knees the entire hour, every week, for years. A coat on your lap is a sentence about how long you expect to stay.
Then one Wednesday a woman who set out the chairs took the coat off his knees, without asking and without ceremony, and hung it on the second hook by the door. She did it again the next week. By the spring he was hanging it up himself, and by the autumn he was the one setting out the chairs, and somewhere in there he began saying the number of the flat.
She never explained his sorrow to him and she never offered to fix it. She gave him a hook. She did not deliver him from present sorrow and she never once pretended to. That is the difference between visiting a room and having an abode in it, and it is closer to what this Mass is offering than any advice would be.
Which brings us back to the Lesson, and to the strangest line in it. My abode is in the full assembly of saints. Not a visit to the assembly, not a welcome into it, an abode in it, which is a word about mail and keys and a place your things stay.
That is what today puts in front of a person who wants to be delivered from present sorrow: not an exit, a residence. And the assembly it names is not a small one. It is the multitude which no man could number, which we stood in front of a week ago, and it includes everyone we asked eternal rest give to them for on Monday. You are being given an address inside a crowd that large, while the sorrow is still going on.
Notice what the day does not do. It does not promise the sorrow will end this week. It asks to be delivered from present sorrow and then spends every other text on the language of remaining, which is an odd way to behave if a quick exit were on the table.
I take that as honesty rather than as a let-down. A liturgy that promised resolution on demand would be lying to most of the people in the room, and the ones it lied to hardest would be the ones who had been sitting with the same thing for years. What this Mass offers instead is company for the duration, a claim that the duration is not a verdict on you, and a prayer to be delivered from present sorrow that is willing to be answered slowly.
And if none of the theology is yours, the ethical claim underneath it stands on its own without a word of it. A grief, an illness or a loneliness that has not resolved is not a report on your effort. People who read a long sorrow as a personal failure are usually protecting their own sense that suffering can be managed by the sufferer, and that belief costs its holder nothing and costs the person in front of them a great deal. You can refuse the inference and hang up somebody’s coat instead, and both of those are available to anyone.
So bring whatever this morning actually is up under this prayer. The Church is not going to tell you when it lifts. She is going to ask, on a Saturday that had nothing else on it, that you be delivered from present sorrow, and she is going to give you an address in the meantime.
↑ The order resumes below.
IX
The Secret
Through Your mercy, O Lord, and by the intercession of blessed Mary, ever Virgin, the Mother of Your only-begotten Son, may this offering profit us for prosperity and peace, now and forevermore. Through our Lord.
Now and forevermore. The prayer over the gifts asks for peace in both tenses at once, which is the same shape as asking to be delivered from present sorrow while being handed the language of staying.
X
The Holding
For those who pray: may God give you lasting health of mind and body, and may He count the mind first on the mornings when the body is the easier of the two. May you be delivered from present sorrow, and until you are, may you have an abode in the full assembly of saints and know the address by heart. May the One the whole world cannot contain keep you the way He kept a room the size of a body, and may you be delivered from present sorrow in His own time rather than on anyone else’s schedule. And may somebody take your coat off your knees this week and hang it up.
For everyone else, and the same thing said without any of the theology: a sorrow that has gone on a long time is not a measure of how hard you have tried. Nothing about its length is a statement about you, and the people who imply otherwise are managing their own fear rather than describing your life. You are allowed to belong somewhere before your situation improves, and you are allowed to be counted as one of the people who lives here rather than one of the people visiting. If you can, be the one who hangs up the coat. If you cannot, let somebody hang up yours.
Go in peace.
The propers of this Mass are those of the Saturday Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the fifth Mass, Salve, Sancta Parens, in the 1962 Roman Missal, following The New Marian Missal for Daily Mass compiled by Sylvester P. Juergens, S.M., S.T.D. (Regina Press, imprimatur 1961). Scripture is quoted from the Douay-Rheims.
Faith in Bloom is offered by Bloom Ministries in the Independent Catholic tradition, and is not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church.
