Father X discussed “what Mass is all about” in the parish bulletin, namely our coming “with full hearts to thank God.”

Moreover, it is “truly alive . . . when we bring to Mass the everyday things of our lives.” Some of his best mass-time experience, he confessed, has been when he is “truly bringing what was in [his] heart to God.”

The time-honored but now little-used phrase “sacrifice of the mass,” he said “refers to our self-offering to God”! [It does?] This self-offering “feels good” to him because it reminds him that “God is taking care of” his various problems. That’s it?

Nothing in what he said is about Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross and its redeeming value or its being re-enacted in the mass, whatever we bring. He speaks only about what we bring. Apart from his belief in God as protector, it’s as if there were…

We are almost done with the penitential season, but it’s not too late to take note of what happened to the ages-old message that came with the ashes . . .

In the spring of ’02, I dropped in at Old St. Pat’s on Ash Wednesday for my annual reminder that I am dust and unto dust will return — good to keep in mind when I am tempted to take pride in my considerable accomplishments — only to be told by a feverishly smiling 35-ish woman-with-ashes that God loves me, or something like it. She did not tell me to have a nice day, I’ll give her that.

I believe God loves me and can hardly object to being reminded of it. But what about paths of glory leading to the grave and all that, in this case the time-honored “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou…

What kept running through my mind at mass today was the Suscipiat, the altar boy’s prayer of many decades ago, which goes like this:

Suscipiat Dominus sacrificium de manibus tuis, ad laudem et gloriam nominis sui, ad utilitatem quoque nostram, totiusque ecclesiae suae sanctae.

Englished:

May the Lord accept this sacrifice at your hands, to the praise and glory of His name, for our good and the good of all His Holy Church. [“All” is omitted from the currently approved version.]

The meme (“Suscipiat”) came to me at the “Pray, sisters and brothers” part — formerly Orate Fratres, or “Pray, brethren” — when the pew-sitter in front of me gave her clearly heard response, as did others, with a slight change, one of dozens that identify a person as true-blue post-Vatican 2 Catholic, substituting the above sui, “his,” with “God’s,” so that it became…

This fellow gives a brief history of drug abuse and confessions of addicts from DeQuincy to Baudelaire and beyond, then gives his horrifying account of his own addiction:

To the best of my increasingly fallible memory, it started with small indulgences—dabblings—such as the sign of the cross and the Jesus prayer. A mild and tentative usage of something powerful, as De Quincy discovered, can prove a gateway.

Pretty soon I caught myself saying Ave Marias and Pater Nosters. There were other steps along the road, but, after some time, I was fumbling the beads once a month and then weekly. Pretty soon, the rosary became a daily habit. I felt restive without it.

I even prayed while driving. It’s not yet a felony, but I dread to think how many PWDs the traffic cams have been recorded. [!] When, as sometimes happened after a hectic day, I fell asleep without…