(This is the seventh and final in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the Traditional Latin Mass—why people will drive a hundred miles to get to one, or spend a lot of time and money bringing it to their area. I’m trying to answer that from my perspective in this series.)

Photo from Flickr.com

When people talk about why they like the Latin Mass, lots of reasons come up: organ music, no one wearing shorts or tank tops, the beauty of the language, etc.  But one word comes up more than all the others combined: reverence.  We seem to be starved for a sense of reverence, a feeling that we’re in God’s Presence with a capital P, not hanging out with our buddy Jesus.  The dictionary says reverence means “a feeling of profound awe and respect and often love,” which sums it up pretty well.  That’s the feeling I think we get from the Latin Mass, that was hard to feel at Ordinary Masses.

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New Latin Lesson #5 is up, covering:

• Second Declension, Neuter Nouns
• Ablative of Motion Away
• Accusative of Motion Toward

This reminded me that, believe it or not, the American Diabetes Association still recommends the USDA’s high-carb Food Pyramid diet.

XKCD.com

Believe it or not, the Internet used to be fairly organized.  If you wanted to exchange or download files, you did it on FTP servers.  Text documents and small bits of information were on the web, or before that, on gopher.  Long-term, BBS-style discussions were on Usenet, which was organized into a simple hierarchy of groups, so everyone on the net who wanted to discuss Cardinal baseball subscribed to alt.sports.baseball.stl-cardinals. For real-time discussion you went to IRC, which had a channel for each topic. Everything had its place.

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Yesterday’s post kind of drained my writing energy, so to paraphrase Mike and the Bots, today’s entry will be an anthology of short, plotless posts.

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(This is the sixth in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the Traditional Latin Mass—why people will drive a hundred miles to get to one, or spend a lot of time and money bringing it to their area. I’m trying to answer that from my perspective in this series.)

I’ve been trying to keep this series positive, focusing on the pros of the Latin Mass (also known as the Extraordinary Form) rather than the cons of the Ordinary Form (aka the Novus Ordo), which is used in most churches today.  To avoid that topic completely, though, would be ignoring half the story, because my dissatisfaction with the implementations of the Novus Ordo was part of the process that brought me to the Latin Mass.

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Jason wrote about the first night of the Quincy Pool Tournament, so I might as well add my two cents.

We went back this morning to continue our March Toward Destiny, but it was cut short.  After I won (4-0, thank you very much), we were down two matches to one, and it was lunchtime, so I left.  They didn’t call me back for the next round, so I guess our last two players didn’t continue the comeback for the 3-2 win.

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Latin Lesson 4 is posted, dealing with the second declension masculine and the genitive case.  This is shaping up to be a busy day, but I’ll try to come up with a more substantive post for here later.

My attempts to keep a food journal came screeching to a halt when the Christmas parties started.  Not because I blew my diet; I actually did better than ever this year.  But it’s impossible to know the nutritional values of everything you eat when you’re eating lots of homemade stuff prepared by other people.  I know I kept my carbs low enough not to trigger any high blood sugar symptoms or cravings (but not low enough to lose any weight).  That’s pretty good, for this time of year.

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One thing my web server tracks is what search terms people used when they found my site through a search engine.  These are kind of interesting to look through.  Sometimes they can provide writing ideas, like if searchers are interested in a topic I named but hadn’t written specifically about.  (“Hey, other people want to know all about lard too?  I thought I was the only one!”)  Sometimes they’re just funny.  Here are a few search terms that have brought people to this blog recently.

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