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To: SuziQ

My parish has the traditional Mass at 11:00 a.m. also and then, in evening at 5:30, they have what is called the "Teen Life" Mass and that includes contemporary music. It's nice too, but I am SO traditional.

I was raised in the American Baptist Church, which is vastly different from Southern Baptist. It is (or was) High Church compared to most Protestant denominations, except perhaps Presbyterian.


965 posted on 01/02/2007 9:57:42 AM PST by La Enchiladita (People get ready . . .)
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To: La Enchiladita

I live near St. Benedict Abbey in Still River, MA. There's an old joke about three Catholic orders: What are the Jesuits up to? How many Franciscan monasteries are there? And what do the Benedictines do? (At all! Well, they live by St. Benedict's Rule.) They say/sing the daily Offices of the Liturgy in Gregorian/Latin plain chant, and the public is invited to chapel. They do this as their gift to God, to make it a little piece of Heaven on earth -- and they've succeeded.

Their setting is amazing, a wonderful old Federal mansion with a cloister, barns and outbuildings, great view over the river valley, bucolic. But they could be in a slum and you'd have the same feeling of blessed peace. They live by the rule of poverty, manual labor, and Church Liturgy done in plain chant. But people fall in love with them and the chapel and give them things. Oriental rugs, silver, relics, Mack trucks, to name a few.

They used to have dairy cows, (during one of their annual Christmas dinners with hundreds of people invited, the septic system clogged and monks were out in the driving rain and dark digging a series of trenchs in the leaching field, so one of the elderly monks threw up a window, poked his head out and yelled, "What a time to bury a dead cow!" They had horses, too, even pigs and peacocks. I remember driving by years ago...seeing peacocks on the roof of the Chapter House and thinking I was 'seeing' things. They changed my life, gave me back the spirit of Christmas...a gift totally unexpected. The gift of simplicity, the gift of faith. I wish that for everyone here at FR in the New Year.


1,015 posted on 01/02/2007 10:19:15 AM PST by hershey
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