I was reading the Prairie Messenger from a few weeks ago. It's a Catholic newspaper coming out of Saskatchewan. They had a piece written by a lady now living in Edinburgh, in which she was praising the virtues of the "extraordinary" version of the Mass... i.e. the Traditional Latin Mass. My first response was to wonder where the PM is going now!! Who put something so conservative in this newspaper... But then I actually skimmed the article and even read it too... This woman praises the mystery and meditative aspects of the Latin Mass... Now don't get me wrong... I am not an advocate of the Latin Mass but...
I thought... isn't it interesting... today, we so often lament that Catholic spirituality has lost its contemplative/meditative aspects... We are all hungry for spirituality... and we turn to things like yoga and meditation classes... We crave silence and a sense of divine transcendence... We crave something that allows us to let go of all of our worries and enter into a state of contemplation... With silence, and chanting a language we don't understand, with incense and bells... Is it a Buddhist ceremony or a Latin Mass? Maybe we could take a look again and see what we lost when we gave up the meditative/mystical aspects of the Latin Mass... Maybe we need to look and see how we could incorporate a bit more being into our rituals... rather than all the doing...
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