Priest a no-show, worshiper makes best of it, meditating away

Relishing the peace and quiet

No mass today. Someone didn't show up and know what? I did not miss it. Had been meditating 15 minutes up to the announcement, to good effect I might add, what I could not have done once the yelling and moving about started, the back and forth, up and down of the Mass of Now.

Forget meditating, in fact forget anything personal, you are there as one among many. Do not go it alone.

Forget interior, go external. Collectivism reigns in the Mass of Now.

Just ask your bishop or look at what bishops have called for. Lockstep. Go with the flow. The group's the thing. Yeah!

Au contraire, I prayed today for Trump, asking God to protect us from ourselves. Deliver us from today's pseudo-wisdom, embrace the heavenly sort!

Situation: Deprived as we are of the old, we turn to the day's feast according to the Old Calendar, where we find Eustace, a "distinguished Roman officer” and his wife and their two sons in 120 A.D. refusing to worship the small-g gods of the day, and for that omission tortured and slain, and Ecclesiasticus 44.13-14, reminding us of "the wisdom of the saints" and admonishing, ”Rejoice in the Lord, ye just, let the Church declare their praise: their names shall live through all generations,” not to mention Wisdom 5.16-20 and the 23rd Psalm 123.7-8: "our soul [has been] rescued . . . from the snare of the hunters," which snare "has been broken and we are free." (!)

Also, let us pray, "Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth," we who are rescued.

And: Luke 6.17-23, with Jesus on the campaign trail, from whom "virtue went out . . . and healed all." Yes!

“Praised be Jesus Christ,” we novices used to say, greeting each other, or outside of recreation time, “Laudetur Jesu Christe.”

Old Calendar has all this. Missing out on the Mass of Now, a loss in itself, had its consolations, however. Too bad we don’t have both.