This morning, I went to daily Mass at a parish close to where I am currently house-sitting.\u00a0 As the Mass began, it became vaguely apparent that something was not quite as expected.\u00a0 A bit of a pause just before the sign of the cross, and a longer one between the Son \u2026 and Holy Spirit.\u00a0 I actually wondered for a minute if the priest had momentarily forgotten who the third person of the trinity was.\u00a0 And then I noticed him intermittently moving his jaw, mouth tightly closed, as though\u00a0chewing on\u00a0the next word \u2013 and it suddenly dawned on me that he was struggling with a speech impediment.<\/p>\n
To my chagrin, my first thought at this realization was, \u201cHow did this guy make it through seminary?\u201d\u00a0 Then my mind\u00a0strayed a little further down that path and thought that he must, perhaps, have some remarkable pastoral gifts \u2026 still a little condescending in my thinking, maybe.\u00a0 But then something else happened: I found myself hearing<\/em> the collect like I\u2019ve never heard a collect before.\u00a0 And thus proceeded what must have been the most simultaneously halting and transcendent Mass I\u2019ve ever attended, full of pregnant pauses culminating in words like mysteries \u2026 petitions \u2026 Jesus Christ \u2026 bread of life \u2026 majesty \u2026 memory \u2026 salvation \u2026 worthy \u2026 mercy \u2026 words made fuller and weightier in the anticipation, each culmination its own miniature eschaton.<\/p>\n I had come expecting food for the journey, and in addition to that received something else I wasn\u2019t expecting: a lesson in the meaning of beauty.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This morning, I went to daily Mass at a parish close to where I am currently house-sitting.\u00a0 As the Mass began, it became vaguely apparent that something was not quite as expected.\u00a0 A bit of a pause just before the sign of the cross, and a longer one between the Son \u2026 and Holy Spirit.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2932,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[149,740,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beauty","category-disability","category-liturgy"],"yoast_head":"\n