{"id":90024,"date":"2025-12-09T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bloomministries.org\/faith\/?p=90024"},"modified":"2026-09-20T13:23:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T20:23:39","slug":"written-for-our-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloomministries.org\/faith\/written-for-our-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily Offering: December 9, 2025 | Written for Our Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Opening Address<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Bloom’s Daily Offering<\/strong> for Tuesday, and today the Church gives you a text you were given two days ago, on the grounds that it was written for our learning and learning is not a thing that happens once. This is the Feria III after the Second Sunday of Advent, third class, and the vestments are violet. There is no saint on the calendar this morning and no commemoration in the Mass. There is a Tuesday, the second week of Advent, and the whole of Sunday’s Mass handed back unchanged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is not an accident of the calendar and it is not the Church running short of material. On the ferias of Advent the Mass of the preceding Sunday is repeated, so this morning’s Introit, Collect, Epistle, Gradual and Gospel are the ones we prayed at receive one another<\/a> on the seventh. Last week the ferias did the same work for the First Sunday, and told us again to lift up your heads<\/a>. The season is built to say things twice, and today the thing it says twice is a sentence about why anything was written down at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yesterday took the whole day for the Immaculate Conception, first class and white, and this morning the violet is back and the ferial Mass resumes exactly where Sunday left it. So there is no new reading to announce. There is only the old one, offered again, written for our learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One thing before we begin. Nothing in the next quarter of an hour asks you to have got anywhere in particular. If you are here again with the same question you brought last time, you are in the right room, and the Epistle will say so out loud before I do. It was written for our learning, and the word for how that works is patience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Word on Today’s Propers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Today is a genuine repeat and I would rather say so than dress it up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Mass of this feria is the Mass of the Second Sunday of Advent, entire. The Epistle is Romans 15:4-13 and the Gospel is Matthew 11:2-10, both of them read in full on Sunday and both of them printed in full in that morning’s offering, which you can read at receive one another<\/a>. They are not reprinted here. The citations are given and linked, the homily is written fresh, and nothing is dressed up as new that is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is what a ferial continuation is, and there is nothing thin about it. The same words, written for our learning, offered to a smaller room on a working morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One thing today is different, and it is a subtraction rather than an addition. On Sunday the Gradual ran straight on into an Alleluia and an Alleluia verse. On a feria it does not: the psalm verse stays and the shout does not. That single small silence is the only place where this morning’s Mass and Sunday’s part company, and it is worth hearing, because it is the sound of a text being said again more quietly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

(Isa. 30:30; Ps. 79:2. The antiphon’s opening clause is not in the chapter: the Missal’s own text runs<\/em> Populus Sion, ecce Dominus veniet ad salvandas gentes, and only the second half is drawn from the verse. The Douay of Isaias 30:30 reads “And the Lord shall make the glory of his voice to be heard, and shall shew the terror of his arm”\u2014where the antiphon stops at the voice and adds the joy of the verse before it. The liturgical text is printed here and the verse is linked.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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People of Sion, behold the Lord shall come to save the nations: and the Lord shall make the glory of his voice<\/a> to be heard, in the joy of your heart.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u2123. Give ear, O thou that rulest Israel: thou that leadest Joseph like a sheep<\/a>. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The promise is a voice. Not a sight, not a proof, not a document\u2014a voice, which is a thing that has to be heard, and which can be heard more than once. Everything after it this morning was written for our learning on that assumption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Stir up our hearts, O Lord, to prepare the ways of Your only-begotten Son, so that through His coming we may be able to serve You with purified minds. 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

The prayer asks for a road to be made ready. Roads are not made ready once, and the prayer for them was written for our learning in the plural.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Epistle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

(Romans 15:4-13<\/a>, Douay-Rheims. Read in full on Sunday and printed there; today the Mass repeats it and it is not reprinted. The full text stands in Sunday’s offering, receive one another<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Lesson opens: What things soever were written, were written for our learning<\/a>: that through patience and the comfort of the scriptures, we might have hope.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Gradual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

(Ps. 49:2-3, 5; Ps. 121:1. The response joins the whole of Psalm 49 verse two to the opening clause only of verse three; the rest of verse three, “our God shall come, and shall not keep silence,” is not sung. On Sunday this section carried the Alleluia and its acclamations; on the feria they are omitted and the verses stand alone.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Out of Sion the loveliness of his beauty: God shall come manifestly<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u2123. Gather ye together his saints to him: who set his covenant before sacrifices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2123. I rejoiced at the things that were said to me: we shall go into the house of the Lord<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

(Matthew 11:2-10<\/a>, Douay-Rheims. Read in full on Sunday and printed there; today the Mass repeats it and it is not reprinted.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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John the Baptist, in prison, sends two of his disciples to ask Art thou he that art to come, or look we for another?<\/em> Christ sends back six clauses about what has happened to other people, and then turns to the crowd and calls the man who asked him more than a prophet<\/a>. That exchange was written for our learning too, and it is being read out again today for the same reason.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Begin where the Epistle begins, because the Epistle begins with the reason you are hearing it a second time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What things soever were written, were written for our learning: that through patience and the comfort of the scriptures, we might have hope.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is the first line of Sunday’s Lesson and it is the first line of this morning’s, and of all the days in Advent for it to come back on, it comes back on the one where its own claim is being acted out in front of you. The Church is not reading you something new. She is reading you the sentence that says why she reads at all, and she is reading it again, which is precisely what the sentence says the reading is for. Everything was written for our learning. Learning takes more than one pass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mechanism is patience<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Now look at what Paul names as the means, because it is not the word anybody would choose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He does not say the scriptures were given for our insight. He does not say they were given so that a sufficiently attentive person would get it. He says they were written for our learning through patience<\/em>\u2014and patience is not a word about intelligence at all. It is a word about time. Whatever else that sentence is doing, it has built a long stretch of time into the middle of it, and it has put the long stretch on our side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think about what that concedes. Written for our learning, through patience, means the text expects to be slow going. It is not an apology for the reader; it is a description of the method, written into the sentence by the man doing the writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the second of this month we sat with a psalm calling the commandment thy commandment is exceeding broad<\/a>, and the point there was dimension\u2014how much ground the thing covers. This morning the measurement is different. Written for our learning is a claim about duration, not extent: not how large the text is, but how long you get with it. And the answer the calendar gives, wordlessly, by handing you Sunday’s Mass again on a Tuesday, is: as long as you need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to be exact about the difference between that and yesterday. Yesterday we asked where a sentence had been before it was said here, and called the day the glory of Jerusalem<\/a> after a line borrowed out of Judith and handed to somebody else. That was a question about origin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This morning’s question is about return\u2014not where the words came from, but what they are the second time they arrive. A sentence can have a long history behind it and still be brand new to the person hearing it today, and it can be word for word familiar and still not have landed. Written for our learning covers both, and the Church’s answer to both is the same: say it again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Said out loud, and said together<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Here is the part I do not want treated as a private exercise, because the Epistle will not let it be one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two verses on from the sentence about learning, Paul says what the patience is for: that with one mind, and with one mouth, you may glorify God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ<\/em>. A mouth is a public organ. Whatever this repetition is, it is not a discipline you go away and perform quietly by yourself and report back on. It is a room saying the same words again, aloud, at the same time, in front of each other. Written for our learning is a plural sentence from the first word to the last\u2014our<\/em> learning, not mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that matters for how a second hearing works. If the words were given to individuals to master, then needing them again would be a report on you. Because they are given to a room to say, needing them again is just Tuesday. The Church does not take a register of who has understood the Epistle before reading it out. She reads it out, written for our learning, to whoever is in the building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would go further. A room is the only place a second hearing can honestly happen, because a room is where you find out that the person beside you needed it again as well. Written for our learning is how you discover you are not the slow one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is also why the Gospel this morning is the one it is. John the Baptist had already seen everything there was to see. He had stood in the river with the man he is now asking about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And from prison he sends two of his disciples to ask the question again, out loud, through other people’s mouths, in the most public way available to a man with no liberty\u2014and the answer comes back the same way, carried by messengers, in front of witnesses. Nothing in that exchange is done quietly. The whole of it is conducted in the open, which is where the things written for our learning are meant to be handled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who this lands on<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Here is the harm, and the Epistle exposes it in the space of one word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a way of running a church\u2014running any room where people are trying to become something\u2014in which needing a thing twice is filed as evidence that the first time did not take. The person who comes back to the same ground is met with a slightly lower grade of attention than they got the first time. It is never said out loud, and it does not have to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It shows up in the tense. They were starting out<\/em>, and now they are back again<\/em>. The first telling was an occasion and the fifth telling is a disappointment somebody is being gracious about. Written for our learning has no room in it for that arithmetic, and neither does a calendar that repeats itself on purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am naming who this lands on hardest, and it is people in recovery. Not because the day’s texts mention them\u2014they do not\u2014but because that is the group for whom the sentence you have been told this before<\/em> does the most damage, and because Paul has just made it impossible to say. If the scriptures themselves were written for our learning through patience<\/em>, then repetition is not the confession that the method failed. Repetition is<\/strong> the method.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A church whose entire calendar is built on saying the same things again, every week and every year, for two thousand years, has no standing whatever to treat a person’s second time round as a lapse in seriousness. Written for our learning is the ground the whole liturgy stands on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And weigh that habit by what it grows, since our own record is the record we are obliged to examine. It grows rooms where the beginning of something is celebrated and its continuation goes unremarked. It grows people who would rather stop coming than be seen needing the same help in the same room a second time. It grows a vocabulary in which someone is spoken of warmly, in the third person, as having been through this already. And it grows congregations that have quietly stopped believing their own liturgy, because a place that genuinely thought the scriptures were written for our learning would expect the learning to take years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the seventh we asked whether the act of asking forfeits a person’s standing, and the answer the Gospel gave was no. This morning the question is one step further on and it is not the same question. There the issue was whether you may ask at all. Here the issue is whether you may ask again<\/em>\u2014whether a need that recurs is a need that has disqualified itself. A room can be perfectly welcoming to a question the first time it is put and still let a person understand, without a word, that the second putting is an imposition. Written for our learning closes that gap, because it makes the second putting the expected thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the test I would put to any room, including this one, is simple. Not whether it is kind to a person arriving, but whether it is the same when they arrive again with the same thing. Written for our learning is a standard the room has to meet, not only a comfort the person gets to keep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A cake on a Thursday table<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

There is a story sometimes told of a man in his fifties whose family had stopped speaking to him, and a woman two doors along the same landing who told him, one November, that he ate at hers on Thursdays now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He did not come. She told him again the next week, in the corridor, out loud, in front of whoever was passing. She told him again the week after that. The number usually given is eleven weeks, and the detail the story keeps is that she never varied it and never made it a question\u2014the same short sentence, said to his face, on the landing, until the eleventh Thursday, when he came and sat in the chair nearest the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He sat in that chair for two years. He brought the same shop-bought lemon cake every Thursday and was never once told he did not have to bring it. Twice he stopped coming for a month, and both times the invitation was simply given again, in the corridor, in the same words, as though the month had not happened. That is the whole of it, and it is written for our learning as exactly as anything in the Epistle: a sentence repeated without impatience until it was heard, and repeated again after it stopped being heard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three things I want to be honest about. He never went back to his own family. She died some years after that and the Thursdays stopped with her, and there was never a name for what the arrangement was\u2014she would not have called it anything, and neither did he. He still uses her surname when he mentions her, which after all that time tells you something the story does not otherwise say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am not going to tell you it turned into a family. What there is, is a corridor in which a sentence was said eleven times without being sharpened, and a chair by a door, and a cake in a cardboard base that arrived every week for years. Written for our learning, in a housing block, on a Thursday, eleven times before it took.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One mind one towards another<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Now back to Paul’s own phrasing, because the Douay keeps something most modern renderings smooth away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grant you to be of one mind one towards another.<\/em> Not of one mind<\/em>, full stop. One mind one towards another<\/strong>\u2014a mindedness aimed at the person across the table, not an agreement reached about them. That is a room where the second and third hearings are ordinary, because the attention is pointed sideways rather than downwards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is possible to be entirely in agreement with someone and not once turn towards them, and Paul’s phrase rules that out. Written for our learning has that direction built into it as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is the shape the whole Epistle is in. Paul is writing to a room with two kinds of people in it, and he does not resolve the difference; he tells them what to do while it lasts. The proof texts he stacks up afterwards are four quotations about outsiders being brought in, and the last of them promises a root of Jesse<\/em> and says in him the Gentiles shall hope<\/em>. Hope, again, and it arrives last, after the patience. Everything written for our learning in that passage is arranged in that order, and the order is not decoration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is why the Gradual this morning ends where it does. Gather ye together his saints to him: who set his covenant before sacrifices.<\/em> The gathering is the verb, and the covenant is ranked above the offerings\u2014the thing that was promised outranks the things brought to the altar. A person coming back for the fifth time is bringing less to that altar every time, by any arithmetic anybody would use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Gradual says the arithmetic is not what the gathering runs on. Written for our learning and gathered without a tally are the same claim in two different parts of one Mass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Alleluia that is not said<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

One last thing, and it is small, and I think it belongs here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Sunday this Mass had an Alleluia in it. Today it does not. The psalm verse is still sung\u2014I rejoiced at the things that were said to me: we shall go into the house of the Lord<\/em>\u2014but the acclamation around it is gone, and what is left is the plain sentence about being glad at something you were told.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would not build much on a rubric, except that it happens to be doing exactly what the day is about. The second hearing is quieter than the first. It carries no acclamation, draws no applause, and is not an occasion. It is a Tuesday, in violet, with the same words, written for our learning, and the gladness in the verse is not about the shout. It is about the things that were said to me<\/em>\u2014past tense, already said, and still being rejoiced over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where this leaves us<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

So here is what I would ask you to carry out of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If there is something you have had to be told more than once\u2014about God, about yourself, about a person you have to keep forgiving\u2014you are not behind. You are inside the mechanism. Everything was written for our learning, and Paul put patience in the sentence because he knew what he was describing. Take the whole of Advent to hear one thing, if that is what it takes; the Church is going to keep reading it out either way, written for our learning, on Sunday and again on Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And take the other half with you too, which is the part you can act on today. Somebody in your own week is going to need a thing said to them a second time, or a fifth. Say it the same way you said it the first time. Do not sharpen it, do not shorten it, and do not let your tone do the accounting. That is what it looks like to treat a person as somebody the scriptures were written for our learning alongside, rather than as a case you have already covered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written for our learning is not a low bar the Church set for weak readers. It is the bar, and it is set at the length of a life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Secret<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Be appeased, we beseech You, O Lord, by the prayers and offerings of our human frailty, and where the support of our own merits is lacking, come to our assistance with Your protection. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The Holding<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

May the God of patience and of comfort, who caused all that was written to be written for our learning, keep you in the long middle of it without shame; may He give you the second hearing and the fifth as freely as He gave the first; and when you come back to the same place in the road for the fourth or the fortieth time, may you find the words waiting there unchanged, and the room still willing to say them with you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if none of that is yours to pray this morning, take it plainly. Learning things takes a long time and takes repeating, and there is no version of being a person in which that stops being true. Not one of us has ever understood anything important on the first pass. Give the people around you the same number of goes you are going to need yourself, and say it the second time as kindly as you said it the first.<\/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 say it again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Frequently Asked Questions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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