Opening Address The mountain is the part everybody remembers. Three verses of Mark, a mountain thrown into the sea, and a promise about prayer so large that most of us have quietly filed it under things the Church says on a good day. What hardly anybody stops on is the sentence that arrives before any […]
Tag Archives: daily offering
15
Nov
Nov
Opening Address Today the Church keeps Albert the Great, and the Mass she gives him is the Mass of a Doctor. The Collect asks that we follow the path of his teaching. The Introit says a man’s mouth was opened in the middle of the assembly and that he was filled and clothed for the […]
14
Nov
Nov
Opening Address Friday, the fourteenth of November. Today the Church keeps St. Josaphat, Bishop and Martyr, and hands him a Lesson that makes a strange claim about who is fit to stand at an altar: a high priest can deal gently with people who are ignorant and who go wrong for exactly one stated reason, […]
13
Nov
Nov
Opening Address Good morning, and welcome to the Daily Offering for Thursday, the thirteenth of November. Today is a fourth-class feria, green, the fifth weekday after the twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, and it has no feast of its own. It takes that Sunday’s Mass entire, with one commemoration laid over it: St. Didacus, a Franciscan […]
12
Nov
Nov
Opening Address The Church has one instruction for a shepherd, and today it gives that instruction three times before the homily starts. Feed my lambs, feed my sheep, says the Introit. Feed the flock of God which is among you, says the Epistle, not by constraint, but willingly. Three imperatives and one adverb, and the […]
11
Nov
Nov
Opening Address Most of the Church’s prayers open by naming something true about God and then ask for something on the strength of it. Today’s opens by naming something true about us. O God, Who see that we cannot survive by any power of our own. That is the ground of the whole prayer, and […]
10
Nov
Nov
Opening Address Today the Church keeps Andrew Avellino, a confessor, in white, and it hands him six verses about a household sitting up late. The instructions arrive first, and every one of them belongs to the servants. Then the sentence turns, and the man they have been waiting for takes the work out of their […]
08
Nov
Nov
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 […]
07
Nov
Nov
Opening Address Good morning, and welcome. Today is Friday, the seventh of November, the Feria VI after the Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost. The vestments are green. There is no saint on the calendar today and no commemoration attached to the Mass, which means the Church hands us the Sunday’s own texts one more time, unchanged, […]
06
Nov
Nov
Opening Address Three mornings in a row the same Mass has opened with the same sentence, and the sentence is a claim about power: there is none that can resist thy will. Sunday said it, Wednesday said it again, and today says it a third time in green, with nothing else on the calendar. That […]