This morning, Where's Teddy? asked me where I was going. I said, "To church." He looked crestfallen & said, "You go to church every day." What in the high holy heck? In the first place, he said it the same way a son would to a parent who had missed yet another T-ball game for a work meeting, "You go to work every day." In the second place, he almost never sees me go to church, because the Sundays I skip Mass are often those that find me down at Xanadu with his family. It's my birthday & if I want to receive the Eucharist on my birthday that's what I'm going to do, by Jove!
This morning, I attended my fifty-second Mass of the year, meeting this year's quota before the end of the seventh month. Of course, quite early on I knew fifty-two Masses wouldn't be a problem, but even I am surprised at the way summer has accelerated the pace of Mass-attendance, whereas normally summer is the period when I most frequently miss. The number of Masses is not what's important, but rather the faithfulness they engender. So, I've got that going for me.
4 comments:
Now that it is no longer your birthday and I can go back to picking on you. I just want to say your yearly mass count goal was too low to start with. It should have been around 58 times to start with. You didn't count Holy Days. (I didn't bother to see if any are on a Saturday this year and so get moved to Sunday and it is probably only 57 as Lansing moves the Ascension to Sunday too.)
Let me suggest, my Pharisaic sister in Christ, that you judge the quota too harshly because of a certain lack of appreciation of from whence it springs. The goal was set at fifty-two to reflect the fifty-two weeks in a year, so that if I attended Mass fifty-two times it would be as if I'd attended every single Sunday of the year. Never in my life, not one single year, have I been to Mass on every single Sunday (though regarding this year, so far so good), so fifty-two was chosen knowing that I would miss a few Sundays, & hoping that I would make up their number on the Holy Days of Obligation.
There is no "making up" for missing Mass on a Sunday, "the day we cannot live without," but then there is also no inherent efficacy in attending any given number of Masses. What matters is the faithfulness engendered through Mass attendance. I've noted that the more frequently I attend Mass, the ever-so-slightly-better a Christian I am. I attended Mass sixty-plus times in 2013, even missing a few Sundays. I did not change the quota for this year because I was confident I would exceed it easily; the central goal, then, was not to miss Mass on a single Sunday. I do not know if I will even set a Mass quota for next year, though I will probably still note when I pass the fifty-two Masses mark, to contrast the way I am now with the way I was not so very long ago.
God willing, I'll post again when I exceed your suggested quota of fifty-seven or fifty-eight in a few weeks' time.
Actually I just like messing with you.
Good on you, Mrs. Brother Nacho. Keep up the good work!
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