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Thursday 9 April 2015

"Ladies and Gentlemen, It's Like I Have a Twin!"

... to quote David Letterman.

Rebecca Hamilton is apologizing to everyone whose stories of Wackadoodle Masses she had doubted.

I've bored people to tears with my mea culpas in that regard.
I had it so good in my home parish, and a local monastery, and finally college years spent in a large city where the general impersonality of most liturgies served to protect them from the peculiarities of even Paulist perpetrators.
Idiosyncrasies are often obscured by the complexities urban life, the sensory overload one experiences in a giant metropolis.

Anyway, I. Also. Had. No. Idea.

But unlike Mrs. Hamilton, boor that I am, I never left my apology at that.
No, I had to say things like, I'm so sorry I just thought all you trads were crazy! or, "Wow, until recently I assumed y'all were making a big honkin' fuss over NOTHING!

Strange.
No one ever seems grateful when you tell him that your opinion of him has improved, that you no longer labor under the misapprehension that he and all those like him are either mentally ill or professional victims.

Go figure.

By the way, there have been a couple of those videos circulating in the Catholic blogosphere lately, one of a couple tangoing about the sanctuary, another of a man in monk's robes twirling around the altar.
I always think when I first see references o links to such that they are either faked, Episcopalian, or a remnant of an older, goofier decade in Catholicism.
But these latest have been real, and not all that old.

Those who have conniptions at the Reform of the Reform movement usually react to complaints about this sort of thing in one of two ways -- first, the complainers are lying.
But if faced with incontrovertible evidence, they suggest that the complainers were looking to complain and to that end went out searching for gotcha moments and should have stayed the hell home in their own parish.

To my chagrin, I sometimes fear myself more invested in weekday Mass than in the Sunday liturgy, since liturgists and musicians usually save their best efforts at crazy for the weekends.

But not always, she realized, after leaving when several couples began waltzing in the aisles.

2 comments:

Mr. C said...

Geri, does Terry Gilliam attend your daily Masses?

Scelata said...

No, but he might as well.... I can hear it now, the ministers processing to "The liberty Bell" march, before a giant cartoon foot comes down and stomps us all.

(Save the Liturgy, Save the World)