Friday, October 15
See Sacrosanctum Concilium, Par. 121
I was recently at a mass away from my usual parish, and the offertory (I think) was a hymn singing in pleasantly autumnal tones thanking God for mown hay and the harvest and all those wonderful things Martha Stewart dries and sticks up on her front door like headhunter totems around this time of the year. It was a nice hymn, even edifying, but not very substantive. Three things occurred to me: 1) Most of the people here probably have never even seen a scythe outside of a field trip to Old World Wisconsin. 2) How is this superior to getting whatever scriptural tag would have been in the mass propers? And 3) You should be focusing on mass, so darn it, try and be edified anyway! But the point remains: how is this any better? I've noticed when away from either the "Reform of the Reform" mass I got when I was in New York, and the Tridentine liturgies I attend regularly here in the Land of Encheesement, how little scripture (even allowing for the daunting infodumps of the 3-year cycle, which cannot be digested quite as smoothly or as naturally as a nice Gradual) I actually get by comparison. We can do better than this, folks.
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
