Daily Offering · 24 November 2025 · St. John of the Cross
Daily Offering: November 24, 2025 | We May Reach Everlasting Glory
Nothing in today’s Mass is new except three prayers. Every reading, every antiphon and every sung line of it was heard nine days ago, on the feast of a different teacher, and the Church has used the whole of it again for John of…
The order of this offering
Before the readings
The Word
Offering and Canon
I
Opening Address
Nothing in today’s Mass is new except three prayers. Every reading, every antiphon and every sung line of it was heard nine days ago, on the feast of a different teacher, and the Church has used the whole of it again for John of the Cross. What is his alone is a Collect, a Secret and a Postcommunion. The first of those asks that we may reach everlasting glory, and it is the only thing the day asks for us at all.
The Collect calls him an extraordinary lover of perfect self-denial and the Cross. And then it says who made him one.
Not who taught him. Not who required it of him. God made him that, in the past tense, and the sentence hands us no instruction at all about loving anything. When the prayer turns to us, it asks for something else, and it asks it in one clause: grant that we may reach everlasting glory.
That is the offering today. What the prayer describes, what the prayer asks, and the gap between them, which is wide enough to stand in.
On the asking side of that gap there is one clause. Grant that we may reach everlasting glory.
He was born at Hontoveros in Old Castile on the twenty-fourth of June, 1542, to Gonzalo de Yepes and Catherine Alvarez, poor silk weavers of Toledo. He went to the poor school at Medina del Campo and was apprenticed to an artisan. For seven years he worked for the governor of the hospital of Medina, and the account of his life at the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it exactly: he divided the time between waiting on the poorest of the poor and going to a school the Jesuits had set up. He took the Carmelite habit on the twenty-fourth of February, 1563, and the name John of St. Matthias.
He was ordained in 1567, met Teresa when she came to Medina to found a convent, went with her to Valladolid, and on the twenty-eighth of November, 1568, the reform was inaugurated with two companions in a small house. Nine years later, in the night of the third of December, 1577, he was taken prisoner and carried off to Toledo, where he suffered more than nine months of close imprisonment in a narrow, stifling cell. He got out in August of 1578. He was vicar provincial of Andalusia, and he died at Ubeda on the fourteenth of December, 1591.
None of that is what the day asks of you. The day asks that we may reach everlasting glory.
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II
A Word on Today’s Propers
This is the Mass of a Doctor, and the archive has already printed it. On the fifteenth of this month, for St. Albert the Great, we heard the same Introit, the same Lesson, the same Gradual, the same Alleluia verse and the same Gospel, under the keyword out of season. Seven of the ten texts match word for word, in English and in Latin alike: Introit, Lesson, Gradual with its Alleluia, Gospel, Offertory, Preface and Communion.
Three do not. The Collect, the Secret and the Postcommunion are proper to John of the Cross, and today adds a set of prayers for St. Chrysogonus besides.
So the readings are not printed again here. Their citations stand below with links to the Douay-Rheims, and the earlier post carries both in full. The Introit and the Gradual are reprinted, in the same wording as before, because they are short and they name the day and the Mass needs its frame. Everything the homily stands on is in the three prayers that are new.
And the first of them asks one thing on behalf of everybody in the room, which is that we may reach everlasting glory.
Yesterday’s Sunday was the last of the year, and its Gospel ended on the promise that my words shall not pass. Today the calendar turns straight into an ordinary Monday and hands a great teacher a borrowed Mass. There is something in that arrangement, and I will come back to it. The borrowed Mass still asks the one thing that matters, which is that we may reach everlasting glory.
III
Introit
(Sir 15:5.) In the midst of the assembly he opened his mouth; and the Lord filled him with the spirit of wisdom and understanding; He clothed him with a robe of glory.
(Ps. 91:2.) It is good to give praise to the Lord: and to sing to thy name, O most High.
(Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. The antiphon is repeated.)
(The Missal arranges this antiphon rather than quoting it. In the Book of Ecclesiasticus the one who opens the mouth and clothes the man is Wisdom herself, spoken of in the future; the Introit gives the action to the Lord and puts it in the past.)
IV
Collect
O God, Who made blessed John, Your Confessor and Teacher, an extraordinary lover of perfect self-denial and the Cross, grant that, by continually striving to imitate him, we may reach everlasting glory. Through our Lord.
V
The Commemoration of St. Chrysogonus, Martyr
Harken, O Lord, to our humble prayers, so that we who realize our guilt because of the evil we have committed, may be spared through the intercession of blessed Chrysogonus. Through our Lord.
Very little is known about him and the Church’s own reference works say so. He suffered at Aquileia, probably during the persecution of Diocletian, was buried there, and was publicly venerated by the faithful of that region. A titular church in Trastevere bears his name to this day, first mentioned in 499 and probably dating from the fourth century. About the sixth century, the Catholic Encyclopedia records, a legend arose that made him a Roman and the teacher of Anastasia, evidently to explain why he was venerated in the Roman church at all.
The name is kept, the record is thin, and the asking goes ahead regardless, so that we may reach everlasting glory.
His Secret is not his. It is the prayer said over the gifts for any martyr kept as a commemoration, with the name dropped in, and this archive printed it on the fourth of this month for Saints Vitalis and Agricola on the feast of a bishop who was faithful over a few things. Be appeased by the gifts we offer You, O Lord, and through the intercession of blessed Chrysogonus, Your Martyr, safeguard us from all dangers.
VI
Epistle
Lesson from the second letter of St Paul the Apostle to Timothy. 2 Tim 4:1-8
(This is the Lesson of the fifteenth of November and it is not reprinted here. It is printed in full, in the Douay-Rheims, in that day’s offering.)
VII
Gradual
(Ps. 36:30-31.) The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom: and his tongue shall speak judgment.
(Ps. 36:31.) The law of his God is in his heart, and his steps shall not be supplanted.
Alleluia, alleluia.
(Sir 45:9.) And he girded him about with a glorious girdle, and clothed him with a robe of glory. Alleluia.
(The Missal stops this verse partway. Ecclesiasticus goes on to add a third clause, that he crowned him with majestic attire, which the Alleluia does not sing.)
VIII
Gospel
Continuation of the Holy Gospel according to Matthew. Matt 5:13-19
(This is the Gospel of the fifteenth of November and it is not reprinted here. It is printed in full, in the Douay-Rheims, in that day’s offering.)
The Offering
Daily Homily | We May Reach Everlasting Glory
Read the Collect again with an eye only on its grammar, because the grammar is the argument.
Read the Collect again with an eye only on its grammar, because the grammar is the argument.
O God, Who made blessed John, Your Confessor and Teacher, an extraordinary lover of perfect self-denial and the Cross.
The extraordinary thing in that sentence is not addressed to anybody. It is a report. It is in the past. Its subject is God and its object is one man who died more than four hundred years ago.
The Church does not say John achieved a great love of hardship, or cultivated one, or arrived at one by discipline. She says God made him one, and then she stops describing and starts asking.
Read the request on its own, away from the description.
And what she asks for is this: grant that we may reach everlasting glory.
Sit with the size of that gap. On one side of the sentence stands a life of extraordinary austerity, credited to God and closed in the past tense. On the other side stands a request for every person in the room, and the request is not that we love self-denial, or the Cross, or anything that has happened to us. The request is that we may reach everlasting glory.
Nothing about the road there is specified, and no condition is set on the traveller. Only that we may reach everlasting glory.
Between the two there is one clause, and it is worth weighing every word of it. By continually striving to imitate him. Not by having imitated him. Not by having succeeded. The Latin has us clinging continually to his imitation, which is a direction you can be facing on your worst morning.
There is no quantity in it, no threshold, no finished article, and no test you could fail this week. By continually striving, and on that ground, we may reach everlasting glory.
We may reach everlasting glory. On the ground of still trying. That is the whole of the transaction, and it is barely a transaction at all.
I want to be blunt about why this matters, because there is a teaching that fills that gap with something the prayer does not contain.
The teaching goes by a short phrase. Offer it up. The idea underneath it is that a hardship you did not choose can be handed to you as a gift, and that the properly Christian response is to want it, or at least to be grateful for it.
Resenting it becomes a flaw. Saying plainly that it is bad becomes a failure of nerve. And a person who is in pain finds that the pain has quietly acquired a second job, which is to be evidence about their soul.
I will say who carries that. It lands on people living with chronic pain and long-term illness, on people whose bodies hurt every day and will go on hurting, and on anybody whose hardship arrived without being asked for. It lands hardest on the ones who were told, kindly, by people who meant it, that this was their cross, and that loving it was the assignment.
The prayer those people were handed this morning asks that we may reach everlasting glory, and it asks nothing else of them whatever.
Today’s Collect does not issue that assignment. It does the opposite, and it does it in its opening clause, before the sentence has finished introducing him.
Look at what has to be true for the Collect’s own sentence to work. A love of perfect self-denial had to be made in this man, by God, as a particular act. If such a love could be generated by being told to have it, the prayer would not need to credit anybody with producing it. The Church treats it as a thing given to one person, the way strength or a good singing voice is given, and given prayers do not convert into duties for everybody else.
What this one converts into is smaller and kinder. It converts into a request that we may reach everlasting glory.
That is the plain version, and it holds with no theology in it at all. You cannot be instructed into an affection. You can be instructed into behaviour, and often should be. But telling somebody to love a thing that is hurting them does not produce love; it produces performance, and it produces silence when the performance fails.
We may reach everlasting glory. Not we may come to enjoy the road.
If there were ever a morning to expect a demand of that kind, it would be the feast of a man the Church remembers for his austerity. There is no demand on it. There is a request that we may reach everlasting glory, and that is all.
And there is a difference here I want to be exact about, because this offering has stood somewhere adjacent before. On the sixth of this month we sat with a verse about the will of God and said that a present harm may not be called His will in order to keep somebody inside it, that there is none that can resist thy will and that this is not a reason to stay where you are being damaged. That was a question about where a hardship came from. Today’s is a question about what you owe it once it is here.
Providence asks who sent it. Affection asks whether you are required to be fond of it.
You are not. Not by this prayer, on this day, for this saint. Neither question changes what is asked for you here, which is that we may reach everlasting glory.
Apply the plain test to Christianity’s own record and see what the other teaching grows. It grows people who learned to describe untreated pain as a blessing and stopped asking anyone for help with it. It grows the particular loneliness of somebody who cannot say a true sentence about their own body in a church without feeling they have failed an examination. It grows a room in which the only permitted response to harm is gratitude for it, so that everybody in real difficulty is either lying or leaving.
And it grows quietly, because nobody teaches it from a lectern. It gets taught in a corridor, gently, by somebody who loves you.
Against all of that stands one short request, made for the people in that room, that we may reach everlasting glory.
We may reach everlasting glory. That is the whole sentence, and it makes no comment at all on how anybody feels about their own year.
There is a story sometimes told of a man of forty-six who had been sleeping in a stairwell since August.
On Monday mornings a small outreach team put a trestle table up in the inter-city bus station, by the departures board, with a tea urn and a stack of leaflets, and people sat on the moulded seats bolted to the rail and waited their turn as though for a coach. When his turn came he was offered a place on a twelve-week course called moving on, and the worker asked him, from the form, what he was working towards.
He did not say a flat. He said, out loud, in a room with fourteen people in it and the departures board clicking over, that he was not working towards anything this month. What he was short of was a bus pass and somewhere to charge a phone.
That is a harder thing to say than the answer on the form, and it is a great deal more useful. He named the lack instead of performing the aspiration.
The worker put the pen down, crossed out the goal box, and wrote bus pass.
I am not going to tell you it worked out, because I do not know that it did. He was not there the following Monday and nobody had a number for him. The course ran with eleven people on it and he was not one of them. Nothing in this story gets fixed.
What I will say is that he was doing exactly what today’s Secret does, which is to name a lack and then ask that we may reach everlasting glory. The Secret is the second of the three prayers that belong to this day.
May the pious prayer of holy John thy Confessor and illustrious Doctor be not wanting to us, O Lord, but make our offerings acceptable to thee and ever win for us thy mercy.
Wanting there is the old sense, meaning lacking, missing, short. The Church is not asking to be made worthy of this man’s prayer. She is asking not to be without it. It is a request about a shortage, phrased from underneath, and it asks the congregation for precisely nothing.
We may reach everlasting glory, and the Secret does not ask even that much of us.
Count what the three prayers of this Mass require of the people saying them. The Collect requires that we go on trying. The Secret requires nothing whatever. The Commemoration requires only that we know our own guilt, which is not an achievement either. Everything else in all three is asked to be given: mercy, intercession, sparing, safety, and glory.
We may reach everlasting glory, and it is asked for, not competed for.
Now put the two men of this day side by side, because the Mass does. One is a teacher with a body of writing and a reform of his order behind him. The other is a martyr of Aquileia about whom the record is so thin that a legend had to be invented in the sixth century to explain why Rome kept his name at all.
The Church ranks them without embarrassment. John takes the day; Chrysogonus takes three lines. And then she turns to each of them and asks the identical favour: pray for us, intercede, be not wanting to us. The ranking is liturgical and the asking does not scale with it at all.
Which tells you what the asking is actually for. It is the same in both cases, and it is that we may reach everlasting glory. If access to help were graded by attainment, the prayer to the Doctor would be a different prayer from the prayer to the man we know nothing about. It is not. Both are asked for the same thing in the same voice, and both are asked on the same ground, which is that they are alive to God and we are short.
That is the ground of the request too. We are short, and we may reach everlasting glory.
The eleventh of this month made a neighbouring claim about strength, that we have no power of our own and are kept by something else. This is its companion in the affections. Whatever love you have for the hard road, if you have any, was made in you and not manufactured by you, and if you have none at all today then the Collect has no complaint to make about you.
We may reach everlasting glory. That is what is asked for you this morning by name.
And if none of the theology is yours, the shape of the thing still stands. Nobody is improved by being told to be grateful for an injury. A commitment to keep going in bad conditions is a real thing and can be honoured. An instruction to enjoy the conditions is not a demand you can meet at all, it is a way of stopping the conversation, and any account of a good life that requires you to love what is hurting you has stopped describing human beings.
Today’s prayer describes one man, and then asks, for everybody else, only that we may reach everlasting glory.
The Church’s own prayer today asks for continuation, and asks that we may reach everlasting glory, and asks for nothing in between.
↑ The order resumes below.
X
The Secret
May the pious prayer of holy John thy Confessor and illustrious Doctor be not wanting to us, O Lord, but make our offerings acceptable to thee and ever win for us thy mercy. Through our Lord.
(Commemoration of St. Chrysogonus.) Be appeased by the gifts we offer You, O Lord, and through the intercession of blessed Chrysogonus, Your Martyr, safeguard us from all dangers. Through our Lord.
XI
The Holding
If you believe: the prayer of the Church for you today asks two things and neither of them is that you love your suffering. It asks that you keep facing the same direction, badly if that is how this month is going, and it asks that we may reach everlasting glory. Whatever affection the saints had for the hard road was made in them, and it was made, and it is not the fee for admission. Go and be short of things in front of somebody who can help, and let the asking be done on your behalf by a Church that has said these same words a great many times without once checking whether you were fond of the year you had.
We may reach everlasting glory. Nobody is asked to be fond of the road to it.
If you do not: the same shape holds with none of it. You are allowed to call a bad thing bad. Nothing about your endurance is improved by pretending to welcome what is hurting you, and no honest account of a person requires them to want their own difficulty. Say what you are short of, and say it to somebody who can do something about it.
Go in peace.
XII
Frequently Asked Questions
It asks one thing. After describing him as an extraordinary lover of perfect self-denial and the Cross, and crediting that to God, it asks that by continually striving to imitate him we may reach everlasting glory. There is no petition anywhere in it that we come to love hardship, and the ground it names for the request is continuing to try rather than having arrived.
Because they were printed nine days ago. Every reading and every sung antiphon of this Mass is word for word the Mass of St. Albert the Great on November 15, 2025, in English and in Latin, and only the Collect, the Secret and the Postcommunion are proper to John of the Cross. The citations are given above with links to the Douay-Rheims, and the earlier offering carries both texts in full. What is new today is the asking, and it asks that we may reach everlasting glory.
This day’s prayer does not ask it. The Collect describes such a love in one man, credits it to God, and places it in the past, and when it turns to the congregation it asks instead that we may reach everlasting glory. That is the ground this offering stands on, and it is worth knowing that a phrase like offer it up carries no authority from the prayers of this feast.
A martyr who suffered at Aquileia, probably in the persecution of Diocletian, and was buried and venerated there. A titular church in Trastevere carries his name, first mentioned in 499. The Catholic Encyclopedia records that about the sixth century a legend arose making him a Roman and the teacher of Anastasia, and says it was evidently framed to explain why Rome venerated him. Nothing more about his life can be said with confidence. His three lines of prayer ask the same help of him as the Doctor’s ask of John, so that we may reach everlasting glory.
The Lesson is the second letter of Saint Paul to Timothy, chapter four, verses one to eight, and the Gospel is Matthew chapter five, verses thirteen to nineteen. The Mass is the third class feast of Saint John of the Cross, in white, with a commemoration of Saint Chrysogonus, Martyr. Both readings are those of November 15, 2025 and are printed in full there. The one prayer proper to today asks that we may reach everlasting glory.
No. The argument runs without any of it. Behaviour can be asked of a person and affection cannot, so an instruction to be fond of your own injury is not a demand you can meet, only one you can appear to meet. You can take that and leave the rest, and nothing here asks you to pretend otherwise.
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The propers for this Mass are taken from the 1962 Roman Missal for the feast of St. John of the Cross, Confessor and Doctor, with the commemoration of St. Chrysogonus, Martyr. Scripture is given in the Douay-Rheims. The lives of the saints follow the Catholic Encyclopedia. Faith in Bloom is the daily offering of Bloom Ministries, written by Pastora Tori Matthews.
Faith in Bloom, under the Church of Bloom, is a ministry of Bloom Ministries, a nonprofit organization tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. It is offered in the Independent Catholic tradition and is not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church.
