Bloom’s Daily Offering<\/strong> for Friday, and the Lesson ends this morning the way it ended on Sunday and twice since: with a prayer that you may abound in hope. Not hold on to some. Not keep enough to be going on with. Abound. This is the Feria VI after the Second Sunday of Advent, third class, and the vestments are violet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is no saint on the calendar today and no commemoration in the Mass. There is a Friday in the second week of Advent, and the whole of Sunday’s Mass handed over again, entire. That is how the ferias of Advent work: the Mass of the preceding Sunday is repeated, which is why this week has already told us to receive one another<\/a> on the seventh, and why last week’s ferias kept telling us to lift up your heads<\/a>. Four Masses in, the instruction is unchanged: abound in hope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So there is nothing new to announce. What there is, is the same closing petition arriving for the fourth time inside one week, and I want to spend the morning on the word in the middle of it. Paul asks that the people reading him abound in hope. He could have asked that they have it, or keep it, or not lose it. He asks for more than they need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One thing before we begin. Nothing here is going to ask you to justify what you are hoping for. The Epistle does not ask it either, and that turns out to be the whole of the argument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today is a genuine repeat, and it is the fourth in one week, so I would rather say it plainly than dress it up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Mass of this feria is the Mass of the Second Sunday of Advent, entire. Every proper of it has already been prayed this week: on Sunday at receive one another<\/a>, on Tuesday at written for our learning<\/a>, and again on Wednesday<\/a>, where the same Collect stood at the head of the Mass with a pope commemorated after it. Even yesterday<\/a>, which had a feast and a Mass of its own, kept this Collect inside it as the commemoration of the feria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Epistle is Romans 15:4-13 and the Gospel is Matthew 11:2-10, both read in full on Sunday and both printed in full in that morning’s offering. They are not reprinted here. The citations are given and linked, the Introit, Collect, Gradual and Secret are printed as the Mass prints them, and the homily is written fresh. Nothing is dressed up as new that is not. What is offered again this morning is the instruction to abound in hope, and it is offered again because it was never withdrawn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is no Alleluia this morning. On Sunday the Gradual ran on into one; on the ferias that repeat the Sunday it does not, and the psalm verse stands by itself. That is the only place all week where this Mass and Sunday’s part company, and it is a subtraction rather than an addition. A quieter Mass is not a smaller one, and it still asks a room to abound in hope.<\/p>\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 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 antiphon promises a coming and gives no date for it. Four Masses into the same week, that is the shape the days are in, and it is the shape of a room told to abound in hope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 before anything travels along it. Roadmending in advance of traffic is what it looks like to abound in hope.<\/p>\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 The Lesson closes: Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing; that you may abound in hope<\/a>, and in the power of the Holy Ghost.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n That is the last sentence Paul writes before he stops, and every clause in it is a quantity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\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 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 The gladness in that last verse is not about arriving anywhere. It is gladness at a sentence somebody said, which is a small and exact picture of what it is to abound in hope.<\/p>\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 John the Baptist, in prison, sends two of his disciples to put a question to Christ, and Christ answers by listing six things that have happened to other people. Then he turns to the crowd and calls the man in the cell more than a prophet<\/a>. The title is given while the prospects are at their worst, which is the only way anybody ever gets to abound in hope.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Begin at the end of the Lesson, because the end of the Lesson is a prayer and prayers are easier to read than arguments. The prayer is that you may abound in hope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing; that you may abound in hope, and in the power of the Holy Ghost.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Read the verbs. Fill.<\/em> Abound.<\/em> Both of them are words about amount, and neither of them is a word about likelihood. Paul is not telling the Romans that things will probably turn out. He is asking that a quantity be put into them, and that the quantity be more than the container.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is what the sentence does not contain, and the absences are the argument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It does not say abound in hope if your situation improves<\/em>. It does not say in proportion to what you can reasonably expect<\/em>. It does not say within reason<\/em>, or as far as your circumstances allow<\/em>, or once you have something to go on<\/em>. It says abound in hope, and then it stops. There is no clause anywhere in it making the hope answerable to the odds, and Paul was perfectly capable of writing one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He had just spent the whole of the passage on a room with two kinds of people in it who did not agree, and he did not resolve their disagreement. He told them what to do while it lasted, stacked four quotations from their own scriptures showing that the outsiders had been promised in from the start, and then asked God to fill the lot of them so that they might abound in hope. Not the ones with grounds. Everybody in the room, on the same terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that is a much stranger prayer than it sounds. Most of what we call hope in ordinary speech is a forecast with the confidence turned down. I hope so<\/em> means I think it likely and I am hedging<\/em>. Paul’s word is not doing that work at all, because to abound in hope is not to raise an estimate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So the question the morning puts is not whether you have any. It is what anybody thinks it ought to be weighed against. To abound in hope is a claim about the scales, not about the mood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because hope does get weighed. Somebody is always holding the scales. A person says out loud what they are hoping for, and there is a pause, and in the pause a calculation happens: is that proportionate? Is that realistic given where they are? Should somebody say something, kindly, before they get their expectations up?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to be precise, because I am not arguing for the unmeasured. Paul’s hope is measured. It has an external reference and he names it in the same breath: the God of hope<\/em>. The whole petition runs from a source outside the person and lands inside them as an amount, and to abound in hope is to have that amount from that source.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What the Lesson refuses is not measurement. It is one particular yardstick\u2014the yardstick of prospects. Hope in this sentence is not generated by a person reasoning their way to it, and it is therefore not refutable by somebody else reasoning them out of it. It is put in. To abound in hope is to have been handed more of something than your situation would have issued you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That distinction matters enormously in practice. A hope you argued yourself into can be argued out of you by anybody with better figures. A hope that was given to you does not answer to the figures at all. That is the whole difference between wishing and being made to abound in hope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I owe you a clarification here, because this Mass has already carried one argument this week and I am not going to make it twice. Tuesday’s offering and this one stand on the same Lesson, and only this one is about what it costs to abound in hope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Tuesday the same Epistle was read and the question was about return\u2014what a text is the second time it reaches you, and whether needing something again is a report on you. That reading turned on Paul’s word patience<\/em>, and it was called written for our learning<\/a> after the sentence that opens the Lesson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the other end of the same passage and it is not that claim. Tuesday asked about frequency: how many times you may come back. Today asks about amount: how much you are allowed to want. A person can be entirely welcome to return as often as they like and still be quietly rationed once they are in the room. To abound in hope is a question about the size of the portion, not the number of visits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is the harm, and it usually arrives dressed as care. It is what a room does in the moment somebody decides to abound in hope out loud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a habit, in churches and hospitals and families and every room where somebody’s future is being discussed, of treating a person’s hope as a thing that ought to be sized to their prognosis. Hope past the prognosis gets a name. It is called denial, or unrealistic, or setting yourself up. And the person doing the naming is very often being gentle about it, which is what makes it so difficult to answer. Permission to abound in hope is withdrawn without ever being formally refused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am naming who this lands on hardest, and it is disabled and chronically ill people. Not because today’s texts mention them\u2014the Gospel that does is not even read out this morning\u2014but because they are the group most reliably handed a calibrated allowance of expectation and told it is for their own good. The permitted hope is the modest one, and the plans are supposed to be proportionate. To abound in hope gets received as a failure to accept something.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA Word on Today’s Propers<\/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<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The petition has no conditions in it<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What hope is measured against<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Not the same claim as Tuesday’s<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Who this lands on<\/h3>\n\n\n\n