After 4 masses on Sunday, I go home tired to the bone - some Sundays even they hurt. I nap, read, relax and don't deal with people for the rest of the day.

JulieCol:

Reminds me of Mount Tabor... "Gosh, Jesus. I think we should build tents and stay here! We really don't need to go back down there!"

I wish I HAD a Mount Tabor. Count. Your. Blessings. All I have is the Tetons here, and they pale in comparison to what you have in your back yard.

I'm an MC in my parish, but yes, I often feel that way after our Masses, which are a 7th heaven for us as well, only they are in the in the OF (but done right: ad orientem, polyphony, chant, sung dialogs, incense, etc).

Imagine having to memorize them because staff lines hadn't been invented yet.

In a related matter, after 5 years, for me, the calendar has become somewhat internalized. I don't think in terms of months and vacation days, but in terms of seasons and propers. Weird!

Ditto to the last two comments. My calendar revolves around the liturgical year. We get to relive so much with our Lord that way.

The "theme", if you will, of any given mass has become the introit for me. Hard for me not to think of a Sunday and not hear the introit.

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Hehehe! PGA, I know that feeling well. ROFL.

When I go to my Mum's parish I have to wait around after Mass for the Divine Office to finish before she comes out. I try remember to save her a piece of cake.

Sometimes I'd like to have something like that straight after Mass, but maybe wait until my little kidlets are a bit more grown up.

Stimson, thanks for the reminder about this great story! It's in Katherine Le Mee's book, Chant. I'm looking at it now; it occurred at a Benedictine monastery in France in the early 1960's. After the elimination of chant from the Divine Office, the monks became extremely tired and prone to illness.

The abbot allowed them more rest, but they became even more tired. They even switched to a meat and potatoes diet although vegetarianism had been their rule for 700 years.

In February, 1967, Dr. Tomatis was invited to see if he could help. He said that when he arrived, "seventy of the ninety monks were slumping in their cells like wet dish rags." He found that they were not only tired, but their hearing had declined.

His solution was to use a device called an Electronic Ear for several months and to re-institute daily chant immediately. Within nine months, the health of most of the monks was returned to normal and they could resume their regular regimen of long prayer sessions, few hours of sleep at night and demanding physical work.

Dr. Tomatis' theory is that a well-tuned ear is able to stimulate the brain---but not all sounds are beneficial.

Modern research identifies two kinds of sounds, known as "discharge" sounds which tire and fatigue the listener, and others, known as "charge" sounds, which give energy and health and which have the power, like his Electronic Ear, to re-awaken the hearing and recharge the mind and body with energy.

Thinking?
They weren't.
It was a Robespierrean liturgical reign of terror.
Out with anything that smacked of the ancien regime.

Gorgeous altar missals were thrown into garbage cans. (Yes, really! they actually were.)
Priceless vestments, thuribles, monstrances, and other such were thrown out, sold to antique dealers, or given to the Episcopalians who were thrilled to have them. My own Episcopalian parish at that time was the recipient of solemn sets of vestments in all liturgical colours that would make you awe and gaze unbelievably at their beauty and workmanship.

We know what happened to music. One day the guitarists showed up and usurped the place of music at mass. They just took over one day... sort of like those green men in the Crimea. Even those few priests who thought that their music wasn't appropriate didn't have the backbone to tell them so, much less forbid them. Such backbone is to this day reserved only for saying 'no' to lovers of chant and real church music, ancient or modern. I have met priests who went through those times who said they had begged to be taught to sing at seminaries and were told in no uncertain terms 'no, we no longer have any use for that'.

Statuary was tossed out in a manner that would have pleased the Puritans of England's inter-regnum. Beautiful marble sanctuaries were white-washed, frescoes and mosaics painted over. The altars were dis-used, and in their place was, again, a shabby communion table that would have made the Puritans' day. These poseurs of progress are now much older and occupy positions of power and influence in our seminaries and universities, or as important pastors, or as bishops yet, and they are still at it. They will manage with all the artifice at their disposal to make life difficult for any whom they regard as undoing their revolution, bringing back anything at all, no matter how meritorious, that they got rid of.

But, much good was done in spite of this cultural suicide, not the least being that we can worship in our own language as well as in Latin (and, it really is meant to be 'both/and'). And, while we work hard to recapture that of our heritage which was discarded with too little thought by personages too immature, and to achieve an evolutionary continuum instead of a revolutionary rupture, the air is different, and, I think, more congenial to us. We (most of us) would not want things to be exactly as they were. For one thing, the laity are no longer the ignorant peasants of yore, and it isn't seemly that they should be regarded as such. There was a very oppressive facet of clericalism that we have, I should like to think, outgrown; though there are certain clerics, regarding themselves as a sort of privileged caste, not altogether unlike the Indian Brahmins, who yet think otherwise.