OK, I’ll lay myself bare to the masses: I don’t go to Mass every week. Sometimes I feel as if I should, other times I feel as if sitting on the back patio on a late summer afternoon with a chilled glass of Pinot Grigio staring at a crimson sky under the queen palms as it changes from day to dusk, or staring at the ocean at the shore at North Hampton, NH as it changes from blue to teal to green-gray under a milky sun is a sufficient recognition of God’s awesomeness and my own mortality as anythiong modern religion could conjure up. Does that make me bad?

I guess I’m just dissatisfied with the way modern religion is practiced and how much the worldly – whether it be via fund-raising or the usual parish activities – trump the Mass. It just bugs the sh*t outta me. Maybe I should have been a monastic. Look, you want to have parish announcements and do your collections? Fine, do it at the start of the Mass or (if you’re an Annglican, Episcopalian, Lutheran, etc.) before the service. But for God’s sake, get it out of the way! That way, people can focus on the eternal, which is what the Eucharist is all about, and then leave church with a high and the sense they’ve been changed by the proceedings (which they have!).

Maybe it’s just me, me, but I feel as if the Eucharist has become a sideshow to distractions that should not be so. Whether it be the priest’s or pastor’s homily, or the collection, or the weekly announcements, it just seems to me there’s too much else going on besides why God has called the faithful to church to begin with. Tracey says I’m nuts, but I feel as if when people go to church they should feel as if they’re somehere unique, special, and holy. Otherwise, what’s the bleepin’ point? That’s why I want everything – the bells, the smells, and the ancient liturgy from 2,000 years ago to be the the sole focus on the congregation once you enter a church.

I guess I’m just a dinosaur. See, I want it all. I want church to make me understand just how small and insignificant I am in the grand scheme of things. Because, when one thinks about it, I am. Whether it be my successes or my sins, there is nothing I have or have not done that hasn’t been done or not done by a gazillion others in the past millennia or two. And God, through Jesus Christ, has made the ultimate sacrifice – not for me, not for you, but for humankind. And the awesomeness of that gift should never be diminished by the usual crap that parishes feel they have to go through to make their way in the modern-day world.