Church is "the house of prayer" from which "preaching may be left out" but never "the house of preaching" from which "prayer may be left out" . . .

That is, you can do without the sermon but never without the prayer.

That's from a John Donne sermon, 17th century, found in Prayers, selected and edited by Peter Washington, Everyman's Library, Pocket Poets (Knopf), 1995.

Not to downgrade the sermon, but this advice I found helpful. The Mass has both prayer and sermon, or homily, of course, with its essence the Eucharistic Prayer serving as climactic.

It has the moments of consecration, when everything shuts down, except the bell-ringer, and the priest says the sacramental words -- formula, if you will -- and people have nothing to do but watch. And pray.

Before and after these solemn moments, however, there is lots going on, intended to foster prayer and prayerfulness but sometimes, I think, preventing it. These are busy moments, serving to keep people on their toes -- and successful in that, at least in large part.

My own experience, which I generously share with you, gives the lie to that scenario. I have kneeled for the canon, for instance, that crucial part of the whole event, and awakened for the Our Father, when all rise to say or sing the words. And I with nothing to account for from the previous ten minutes.

What to do? Distraction preventive time, yes. Keep yourself from floating away. Read from Psalms, I have already mentioned.

But something more radical than that: Keep yourself to yourself, which is heresy in today’s Catholic standards — dating from 1969, by the way, supplanting how many centuries of the divinely tried and proven? — which call for responding, kneeling, standing, sitting — until you’re worn out keeping up.

Some of you anyhow.

To give your heresy a name, call this your private mass.

Protect yourself from distractions, which abound. Concentrate on yourself, your own prayers which add to the community’s spiritual life, even it takes from its visibly liturgical mass-attendance life.

Think about it. . . . .