Opening Address Welcome to Bloom’s Daily Offering for Tuesday, December 23, 2025. Today is a feria of the fourth week of Advent, second class, and the vestments are violet. There is no feast, no saint and no commemoration, and for the third morning running the Church hands us the same Mass without changing a syllable […]
Tag Archives: Bloom Ministries
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Opening Address Welcome to Bloom’s Daily Offering for Monday, December 22, 2025. Today is a feria of the fourth week of Advent, second class, and the vestments are violet. There is no feast, no saint, no commemoration, and not one word in today’s Mass that was not said yesterday. So the whole morning belongs to […]
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Opening Address Friday of the Ember week in Advent, and the Church puts two arrivals in front of us before it says anything else. Isaias promises a shoot coming up out of a stump somebody cut down. Luke sends a young woman up into the hill country in a hurry, and when she gets where […]
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Opening Address Advent has been running one formulary for days at a time, and this morning it stops and does something it does not do in any ordinary week. Two Lessons are read instead of one, each with its own Collect and its own Gradual, and the second of them ends with a sentence the […]
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Opening Address Advent goes violet for most of a month, and this morning a martyr’s red is laid across it for one day. The Church keeps St. Eusebius of Vercelli, a bishop who spent years of his life in exile a long way from the city he was given, and the Lesson it hands him […]
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Oppening Address Today the Church keeps St. Lucy, and the first thing worth saying about her Mass is that almost none of it is hers. The Introit is a psalm written for a king. The Lesson is Paul writing to Corinth about his own credentials. The Gospel is the one the Church reads over half […]
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Opening Address The Gospel this morning hands out three unequal sums before a single person in it has done anything at all, and it gives the reason in a single clause: to every one according to his proper ability. Five talents to one man, two to another, one to a third. Not a standard allocation […]
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Opening Address The Church gives St. Sabbas three sentences this morning and gives him nothing else whatsoever, and the first of the three carries the phrase this offering is built on: what we may not have through any merits of ours. No Introit of his own. No Lesson, no chant, no Gospel. A man born […]
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Opening Address A teacher of life. Those are the last four words the Church says about the man whose feast this is, and they arrive at the very end of the prayer, after everything grander has already been said. Listen to the order. The Collect opens with office. It calls him a great Doctor, foreshown […]
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Opening Address How beautiful are the feet. That is where the Epistle arrives this morning, and getting there takes four questions in a row, each one moving the answer a step further from the person you started with. How shall they call on him in whom they have not believed. How shall they believe him […]