Bloom’s Sunday Mass<\/strong>, and the Church’s instruction for the first morning of a new year is to put on the armour of light. Not to take stock, not to strip down, not to begin again from nothing\u2014to get dressed. This is the First Sunday of Advent, the vestments are violet, and a new liturgical year starts here rather than in January. We offer this Mass in the Independent Catholic tradition, following the 1962 Roman Rite, and we are not affiliated with or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church\u2014the same honest naming Old Catholic and Anglo-Catholic communities have used for well over a century. Beloved, grace and peace to you this morning, whatever kind of year is behind you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today is a first-class Sunday, the highest rank the calendar has, and it takes the whole day. The thirtieth of November is the feast of Saint Andrew the Apostle, second class and red, and this year he gives way entirely: no oration, and not even a commemoration. So there is no saint in this Mass and no red in it. There is a Sunday at the beginning of a year, two readings, and an entrance chant that has one line in it the Church will sing to you three separate times before you leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last Sunday closed the old year with a Gospel about the sky coming apart, ending on the sentence my words shall not pass<\/a>. This morning’s Gospel ends on the same sentence, in Luke’s words instead of Matthew’s, and then the new year begins. The Church did not choose a gentler door into Advent; it chose the same door, and put a change of clothes on the other side of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One last thing before we begin. None of the next half hour asks you to believe it first. If you have ever been told, in any room, that you arrived too late to count as fully part of it, this morning’s Lesson is doing arithmetic that concerns you, and the theology is optional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Confiteor and Kyrie are said here, from the Missal.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We begin where the Church always begins, with an honest accounting rather than an achievement. Each of us names what we have done and what we have left undone, in whatever words we actually have, and none of it is said aloud to anybody else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take the pause. Today’s Lesson is about to tell you to cast something off and put something on in the same breath, so there is no need to make the first half last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Gloria is sung or said here, from the Missal.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the song, and it comes after the accounting rather than instead of it. A year that has not happened yet is still given something to sing about before it is given anything to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Ps. 24:1-3, 4)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (The antiphon is verses one to three; the psalm verse that follows is the second half of verse four. The first half of that verse, “Let all them be confounded that act unjust things without cause,” is not sung.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n To thee, O Lord, have I lifted up my soul: in thee, O my God, I put my trust; let me not be ashamed: neither let my enemies laugh at me: for none of them that wait on thee shall be confounded<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u2123. Shew, O Lord, thy ways to me: and teach me thy paths. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two gestures in one sentence, and both of them are things a body does. A soul lifted up, and a face that is not made to look at the floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put forth Your power, O Lord, we beseech You, and come, that with You as our protector we may be rescued from the impending danger of our sins; and with You as our deliverer, may we obtain our salvation. Who livest and reignest with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Two clauses, two roles, and no interval between them. Rescued and saved, by a power asked to arrive rather than by a standard we are asked to meet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Romans 13:11-14<\/a>, Douay-Rheims)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Missal opens the Lesson with the address “Brethren,” which is not in the verse, and begins inside the eleventh verse. The Douay’s own opening clause, “And that knowing the season,” is not sung.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Brethren: It is now the hour for us to rise from sleep. For now our salvation is nearer than when we believed. The night is passed, and the day is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day: not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy: But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (Ps. 24:3-4; Ps. 84:8. The Missal prints both under a single heading this morning, the Gradual running straight into the Alleluia without a separate rubric.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n None of them that wait on thee shall be confounded.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u2123. Shew, O Lord, thy ways to me: and teach me thy paths. Alleluia, alleluia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2123. Shew us, O Lord, thy mercy: and grant us thy salvation. Alleluia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Luke 21:25-33<\/a>, Douay-Rheims)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Missal supplies the address “At that time Jesus said to his disciples,” which belongs to the arrangement rather than to the verse.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n At that time Jesus said to his disciples: And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, by reason of the confusion of the roaring of the sea and of the waves; men withering away for fear, and expectation of what shall come upon the whole world. For the powers of heaven shall be moved; and then they shall see the Son of man coming in a cloud, with great power and majesty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But when these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift up your heads, because your redemption is at hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And he spoke to them in a similitude. See the fig tree, and all the trees: when they now shoot forth their fruit, you know that summer is nigh; so you also, when you shall see these things come to pass, know that the kingdom of God is at hand. Amen, I say to you, this generation shall not pass away, till all things be fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (The Nicene Creed is said here, from the Missal.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We say it together, out loud, at the same speed, whatever each of us is privately able to mean by it. It is the oldest thing we do here, and it does not ask each of us to mean it identically in order to be said. Say the lines you can say and let the room carry the rest of them for you this morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Follow the verb, and the whole Lesson opens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light.<\/em> One sentence, one conjunction, two hands moving at once. There is no gap in that verse where the hearer stands with nothing on, waiting to be told whether they may put on the armour of light<\/strong>. Nobody is asked to get down to bare skin first and then wait to see whether anything is issued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That matters because the other reading is everywhere. Cast off, and then, once you have finished casting off, if you have done it thoroughly enough and for long enough, perhaps you may put on the armour of light<\/strong>. Paul’s grammar refuses the sequence. The two actions are one action, and the second one is the point of the first: you cast off in order to put on the armour of light<\/strong>, not in order to qualify for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before the clothing there is a sum, and the sum is stranger than it looks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For now our salvation is nearer than when we believed.<\/em> Read that as an equation, and the direction it faces is the whole of it. Paul is not measuring from the day anybody started, forwards to now. He is measuring from now to the end\u2014and by that measure every person in this room is exactly as near as every other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The hour is in the verse too, and you put on the armour of light<\/strong> at whatever hour you woke. It is now the hour for us to rise from sleep<\/em>, which is a thing said in a room where people woke at different times and are now all awake together. Nobody’s sum is adjusted for having been up longer, and nobody is told to wait a few years before they may put on the armour of light<\/strong>. The distance to the end is not shortened by seniority, and it is not lengthened by having arrived late.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now what the thing actually is, because armour<\/em> is doing real work here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Armour is kit. It is not a skill, not an interior state, not a record of service\u2014it is equipment, handed out, in a size, by somebody whose job is handing it out. A recruit on his first morning and a veteran of twenty years are given the same kit from the same store, and the recruit’s does not arrive later or thinner. Both of them put on the armour of light<\/strong> from the same shelf, at the same hour, on the same terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So when the Lesson says put on the armour of light<\/strong>, it is describing a vesting rather than an accomplishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the fifth of this month we heard the other armour passage, the one that tells us the fight is not against flesh and blood<\/a>, and it is worth holding the two apart. That reading assigns the enemy: it tells you who you are not fighting. This one assigns the wardrobe: it tells you what you have on while you do it. Advent is the season for the coat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And there is a second imperative, in the reading’s very last verse. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.<\/em> The same verb, a second time, and the object is a person rather than a virtue. Put on the armour of light<\/strong> is not a summary of good behaviour but a sentence about what is worn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the Gospel, which has a reputation, and which is not being used this morning to frighten anybody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read it for its imperatives, and not one of them is be afraid<\/em>. Look up, and lift up your heads.<\/em> Where terror is described\u2014men withering away, the sea roaring, the powers of heaven moved\u2014the instruction handed to the hearer is a posture. Raise the head that fear lowers. Put on the armour of light<\/strong>, and look up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is the same gesture the Introit made. To thee, O Lord, have I lifted up my soul<\/em>, at the door. Lift up your heads<\/em>, in the Gospel. A soul and a head, the same verb twice, and both of them lifted rather than bowed. Put on the armour of light<\/strong>, and carry it upright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the twentieth of this month Christ opened a Gospel with fear not, little flock<\/a>, and this morning he does not even bother to say it. He simply gives the order that fear makes impossible. Put on the armour of light<\/strong> and lift your head, and you will find you are not able to cower at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is one more thing the Gospel declines to say. They shall see the Son of man coming in a cloud, with great power and majesty<\/em>\u2014and not one word follows about an inspection. Nothing is checked. On the tenth of this month we sat with a returning master who, on arriving, will minister unto them<\/a> rather than audit them, and Luke’s arriving Son of man is no more an assessor than that one was. Your redemption is at hand<\/em> is a sentence about a debt being settled by somebody else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the strangest thing about this morning, and it is not in either reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Count how often you hear one particular clause. None of them that wait on thee shall be confounded<\/em>\u2014in the Introit, again in the Gradual as the response, and again in the Offertory over the bread. Three times, in a Mass with ten texts in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Confounded<\/em> means put to shame, and what the psalm insists will not happen is that waiting will make a fool of you. You put on the armour of light<\/strong> and then you wait in it, and the waiting is not the failure. Advent is four weeks of waiting, which is the one activity that always looks like doing nothing, and the Church’s answer is to sing three times that it is not humiliating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is the harm, and the Lesson has already done the work of exposing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a way of running a church\u2014running any room\u2014in which standing is measured by time served in it. The person who has been there longest is trusted most and deferred to; the person who came in last year is permanently the newest, and will still be the newest in a decade. It is rarely stated as a rule at all. It is simply how a room settles, and it produces a specific kind of Christian: one who never quite unpacks, and who is never told to put on the armour of light<\/strong> as though the coat were already his.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am naming who this lands on. People who came to faith at forty or sixty or seventy and spend the rest of their lives quietly assuming they are behind. People who were pushed out of a church young, stayed away for twenty years, and came back in adulthood to find themselves treated as beginners at something they had been thinking about the whole time. People who have never volunteered to read aloud, because they think they do not yet know the words, and are waiting for a year that never arrives. Every one of them was told at the door to put on the armour of light<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of that came out of this Lesson. Put on the armour of light<\/strong> is issued to the room at once, in one hour, in one sentence, with no clause about tenure anywhere in it\u2014and the verse before it has already done the sum that makes tenure irrelevant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the eighteenth of this month we sat with a sentence said over an ordinary building, that this place was made by God<\/a>, and today differs from it. That day asked whether you had to have come from somewhere in order to belong in a room. Today asks how long you have to have been in the room already. One is about the door you came through, the other about the clock on the wall, and a person can be waved through the first and still be measured by the second for thirty years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put on the armour of light<\/strong> is a sentence with no waiting list attached to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Weigh that habit by what it grows, and weigh it against our own record, because ours is the record we are obliged to examine. It grows congregations where a convert of two years will not answer a question in front of a member of forty. It grows people who have read more theology than the churchwarden and still call themselves new. It grows a great many adults still in the back row in their fourth year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a story sometimes told of a trans woman of fifty-six who volunteered at a small local museum in a converted mill, one Tuesday morning a week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She had never worked in a museum, nor anywhere front-facing, having spent thirty years in a job with no public in it at all, and she had put off asking for two years on the grounds that she did not know enough about mills, having never once been handed anything and told to put on the armour of light<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What happened on her first Tuesday was very ordinary. The coordinator pulled open the shallow drawer of the front desk, took out a grey lanyard and a blank badge, wrote nothing on the badge because the pen was dry, and gave it to her anyway. She put it on. Then at ten past ten the other volunteer discovered a dentist’s appointment she had forgotten, and the coordinator asked whether she minded holding the front desk on her own until eleven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So she was the museum, to everybody who came in that hour, in her first week. Nobody had established what she knew. Nobody suggested that a person who had been coming for six years hold the desk instead. She had the same lanyard as everybody else, because there was only one kind in the drawer. That is what it looks like to put on the armour of light<\/strong> on a Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put on the armour of light<\/strong>, and be sent out in it before you are ready.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She got two things wrong in that hour. She told a family the mill wheel still turned, when it has not turned since 1974, and she could not find the lavatory key.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am not going to tell you it turned into something. Three years later the museum went to weekend-only opening, the Tuesday disappeared, and she was not asked to a Saturday. There is no record anywhere that the desk was ever hers. What there is, is one hour on one Tuesday when the drawer was opened and nobody asked how long she had been coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So here is what I would ask you to carry out of this room on the first morning of the year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Church says this once more, in a place that is easy to walk straight past. Last Sunday’s Collect and this morning’s Collect begin with the same three Latin words, Excita, qu\u01fdsumus, D\u00f3mine<\/em>\u2014and then they part. Last Sunday the English gave that verb as stir up<\/em> and this morning it gives it as put forth<\/em>, and what changes is what is being asked to move: last Sunday our own wills, this morning God’s power. The old year ended with us; the new one opens with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put on the armour of light<\/strong>, and let that be the order of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And take the fig tree with you, because it is the fruit test in Christ’s own hands. When they now shoot forth their fruit, you know that summer is nigh.<\/em> Not when the tree has been in the ground longest. Not when it has the thickest trunk. When there is fruit on it\u2014which is a thing a tree of three years does as truthfully as a tree of ninety, and which any child could read without being taught how.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Communion antiphon says the same thing on the way out, and asks to be read by your fruit rather than by your years once you put on the armour of light<\/strong>. Our earth shall yield her fruit<\/a>\u2014our<\/em> earth, the ground everybody in this room is standing on, not the well-established plot at the far end. The yielding is promised to the whole field. Put on the armour of light<\/strong>, and stand in your own patch of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sky in this Gospel comes apart, and the sentence that survives it is the one you heard my words shall not pass<\/a> at the close of the old year. What is left, when everything that looks permanent has gone, is a word already spoken to you and a coat already on the peg. Put on the armour of light<\/a>. Today, at this hour, in the size you are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Ps. 24:1-3)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n To thee, O Lord, have I lifted up my soul: in thee, O my God, I put my trust; let me not be ashamed: neither let my enemies laugh at me: for none of them that wait on thee shall be confounded.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n May these offerings, O Lord, cleanse us by their mighty power and thus make us come purer before You Who are their author. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (The Preface, the Sanctus, and the Canon through the Consecration are prayed here, from the Missal, and the Consecration made within Bloom’s own Independent Catholic tradition.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Here the Mass stops commenting on itself and simply proceeds. The words are old and fixed and nobody improves them by adding to them, and they are prayed here as a real celebration within our own tradition rather than a claim on anybody else’s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whatever you carried in\u2014the year that is ending badly, the room you have never felt fully seated in, the thing you have been putting off asking for on the grounds that you do not know enough\u2014set it down here. Bread and wine are the plainest things in the building, and they are what the Church chose to work with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A host cannot travel down a livestream, and that is true of every Mass offered over video by anyone at all. What stands in is the Church’s own long-standing practice, the same one recommended to parishes joining from home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My Jesus, I believe that Thou art truly present in the Most Holy Sacrament. I love Thee above all things and I desire to receive Thee into my soul. Since I cannot now receive Thee sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace Thee as if Thou wert already there, and unite myself wholly to Thee. Never permit me to be separated from Thee. Amen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n If those words are not available to you this morning, sit quietly through them. Being here in a different way is not being here less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Ps. 84:13. The Missal’s own English of this antiphon runs “The Lord will give His benefits: and our land shall yield its increase,” where the Douay of the verse reads as below.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n For the Lord will give goodness: and our earth shall yield her fruit.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Hear what the Church puts in your ear on the way out of this particular Gospel. Not an audit. A crop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May we receive Your mercy, O Lord, in the midst of Your temple, and thus prepare with due observance for the coming festal season of our redemption. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (Given as Bloom’s own pastor, within Bloom’s own tradition)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n So: get dressed, and go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you believe this morning: the year begins with an imperative rather than an examination, and the imperative is to get something on. You are not standing in a queue behind the people who got here first. The hour that has come is the hour for everybody in the room to rise, and the store has your size in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if you believe none of it, take the same thing with the theology removed. Nobody in any room is required to earn the right to be equipped, and the length of time you have been somewhere is a fact about a calendar rather than a measure of what you are able to do there. You are allowed to put your hand up in your first week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May God, whose power we have asked this morning to be put forth, keep your head lifted when it wants to drop, hold you unconfounded through every week of waiting, and bring your own ground to fruit in its season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Go, and open the drawer.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Penitential Rite<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Gloria<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Introit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Collect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Epistle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Gradual and Alleluia<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Creed<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The arithmetic of the eleventh verse<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The armour is issued, not accumulated<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What the frightening Gospel actually tells you to do<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The line the Church sings three times<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Who this lands on<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
A drawer, and a lanyard in it<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Where this leaves us<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Offertory<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Secret<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Canon and Consecration<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Act of Spiritual Communion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Communion Antiphon<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Postcommunion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Closing Blessing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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