Daily Offering · 21 October 2025 · Feria
Daily Offering: October 21, 2025 | All Things and Followed Thee
Left all things, and followed Thee — Peter’s own words to Christ, and the whole shape of the life a fifteen-year-old orphan chose in the deserts outside Gaza seventeen centuries ago. Beloved, grace and peace to you this morning — however you arrive here:…
The order of this offering
Before the readings
Offering and Canon
I
Opening Address
Left all things, and followed Thee — Peter’s own words to Christ, and the whole shape of the life a fifteen-year-old orphan chose in the deserts outside Gaza seventeen centuries ago. Beloved, grace and peace to you this morning — however you arrive here: tired or hopeful, certain or doubting, welcomed elsewhere or shut out elsewhere. Bloom is not a room you have to earn your way into. Sit with us a moment, offered today in the spirit of a low Mass — Word, prayer, and offering, without pretense to more than that.
II
A Note on Today’s Judgment Call
October 21 in the 1962 calendar permits more than one legitimate option: the feast of St. Hilarion with a commemoration of Ss. Ursula and Companions, the feast of Ss. Ursula and Companions with a commemoration of St. Hilarion, a Requiem, or the plain ferial continuation of the Nineteenth Sunday. Bloom is taking St. Hilarion as today’s own named feast, with Ss. Ursula and Companions commemorated alongside him — the option that centers the day’s proper, individually-attested Mass rather than the ferial repeat, documented here plainly rather than left unremarked, in keeping with how every other judgment call in this project gets handled.
III
Introit
(Ps. 36:30-31)
The mouth of the just shall meditate wisdom, and his tongue shall speak judgment: the law of his God is in his heart. The verse continues: fret not thyself because of the ungodly, neither be thou envious of them that work iniquity.
IV
Collect
May the intercession of blessed Hilarion the Abbot commend us unto Thee, we beseech Thee, O Lord: so that what we cannot acquire by any merits of our own, we may obtain by his patronage.
(Commemoration of Ss. Ursula and Companions, Virgins and Martyrs) Grant us, we beseech Thee, O Lord our God, to venerate with unceasing devotion the victories of Thy holy virgins and martyrs, Ursula and her companions, that, though we cannot worthily celebrate their merits, we may at least offer them our humble service. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, world without end.
V
Epistle
Ecclesiasticus 45:1-6, Douay-Rheims — Common of Abbots
Beloved of God and men, whose memory is in benediction. He made him like the saints in glory, and magnified him in the fear of his enemies, and with his words he made prodigies to cease. He glorified him in the sight of kings, and gave him commandments in the sight of his people, and showed him His glory. He sanctified him in his faith and meekness, and chose him out of all flesh. For he heard him and his voice, and brought him into a cloud. And he gave him commandments before his face, and a law of life and instruction.
VI
Gradual
(Ps. 20:4-5)
Thou hast prevented him with blessings of sweetness; Thou hast set on his head a crown of precious stones. He asked life of Thee, and Thou hast given him length of days for ever and ever.
Alleluia, alleluia. (Ps. 91:13) The just shall flourish like the palm tree; he shall grow up like the cedar of Libanus. Alleluia.
VII
Gospel
Matthew 19:27-29, Douay-Rheims
At that time, Peter answering, said to Jesus: Behold, we have left all things, and have followed Thee: what therefore shall we have? And Jesus said to them: Amen, I say to you, that you who have followed Me, in the regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit on the seat of His majesty, you also shall sit on twelve seats, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And every one that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for My name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall possess life everlasting.
The Offering (Homily)
Daily Homily | All Things and Followed Thee
Left all things, and followed Thee — Peter says this almost as a question, half-statement, half-request for a receipt: we gave up everything, so what happens now? Christ’s answer is not a scolding for…
Left all things, and followed Thee — Peter says this almost as a question, half-statement, half-request for a receipt: we gave up everything, so what happens now? Christ’s answer is not a scolding for asking. It’s a plain accounting: a hundredfold back, and life everlasting besides.
Hilarion was fifteen when he made a version of that same trade. Orphaned young, converted in Alexandria, he gave away his entire inheritance to his brothers and to the poor and walked into the desert outside Gaza with nothing held back — no plan to keep a portion in reserve in case the hermit’s life didn’t work out. He built himself a cell barely large enough to lie down in, “a tomb rather than a house,” and stayed there the rest of his long life, becoming, almost by accident, the man historians credit with founding monastic life across Palestine and Syria.
That kind of total leaving isn’t only a monastic story. There is a story sometimes told of a man who crossed an ocean with one suitcase and a language he barely spoke, having left behind a house he’d spent twenty years paying off, a job that had given him standing in his community, and a name that people in his new country couldn’t pronounce correctly for the first several years he lived among them. He didn’t leave because leaving was easy or because the new place promised comfort. He left because staying had stopped being survivable, and because he believed — the way Peter seems to believe in today’s Gospel — that what waited on the other side of the leaving was worth the total cost of the departure.
Christ’s answer to “what shall we have” is not modest. A hundredfold. Not a partial refund on what was given up — an abundance that outsizes the original loss by an order of magnitude. That promise means something different depending on how much a person actually had to leave behind to hear it. For someone who left literally everything — country, language, the graves of people they loved, a name spoken correctly — the hundredfold isn’t decoration. It’s the whole reason the leaving was survivable in the first place: a conviction that the road itself terminates somewhere better than where it started, however long the road turns out to be.
Yesterday’s offering sat with mercy that doesn’t means-test the person receiving it. Today’s readings ask something adjacent of the person doing the leaving: whether the new life on the other side of departure gets to be judged by what was left behind, or by what it actually becomes once someone arrives. Ss. Ursula and her companions, commemorated alongside Hilarion today, are themselves remembered as having fled their own homeland seeking safety abroad before their deaths — their story, however legendary its details have become over sixteen centuries of retelling, begins with exactly this kind of total departure.
None of this requires belief in God to register as true. Anyone who has left everything behind for a chance at something survivable understands, without needing a theology lesson, that the leaving itself was the hardest and most costly part — whether or not the eventual hundredfold gets credited to God’s ledger or simply to their own persistence. For those who hold this in faith: Christ’s promise here is not abstract comfort for people who lost nothing. It is a specific accounting, offered to people who gave up everything, that the ledger does eventually balance, and balances toward abundance rather than mere survival.
So beloved — if you have left a home, a language, a name people could pronounce, a life that no longer worked, for the chance at one that might: today’s Gospel was written with your accounting already in mind. Left all things, and followed Thee. The hundredfold was never a metaphor for people who paid that price in full.
↑ The order resumes below.
IX
Secret
Receive, O Lord, this small offering made in memory of a young man who left everything at fifteen and never once looked back for it, and grant that whatever we have had to leave behind may be met with the same abundance he was promised.
(Commemoration of Ss. Ursula and Companions) Favorably look down, we beseech Thee, upon the gifts laid upon Thine altars, O Lord, for the festival of Thy holy virgins and martyrs, Ursula and her companions, that, as Thou hast conferred glory upon them through these blessed mysteries, so Thou mayest bestow upon us forgiveness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, world without end.
X
The Holding
(Benediction — two readings, one truth)
For those who hold this in faith: Lord, Hilarion left everything at fifteen and never asked for it back. Give that same courage to everyone who has had to leave a home, a language, or a name behind to survive, and let them trust Your accounting: a hundredfold, not a partial return. Hold Ursula and her companions, who fled seeking safety long before they were remembered as saints, and hold everyone walking that same road today. Amen.
For those still finding their footing: If you have left everything you knew for the chance at something survivable, that leaving was never a loss to be ashamed of. It was the cost of getting somewhere worth arriving at, and the road you’re on is allowed to end somewhere good.
XI
Frequently Asked Questions
Epistle and Gospel text: Douay-Rheims Bible, Bishop Challoner revision — the standard English scripture translation used across traditional hand missals. Introit, Gradual, and Collect text: rendered from the Common of Abbots (Mass “Os Justi”) and the Common of Several Virgin Martyrs, cross-checked against multiple independent sources for the 1962 Roman Calendar. Liturgical structure: the Missale Romanum (1962), feast of St. Hilarion, Abbot, with commemoration of Ss. Ursula and Companions, Virgins and Martyrs, following The New Marian Missal for Daily Mass by Sylvester P. Juergens, S.M., S.T.D. (Regina Press, Imprimatur 1961).
Faith in Bloom offers this reflection in the spirit of the traditional Roman Rite — a daily offering, not a Mass — welcoming all people, of every faith background, into the shelter of the Word.
