**I had been aware of tertiaries but it was hard to leave being a clergyman to become an RC**
Didn't know this about you! Prayer will lead you. Holy Spirit be with Mad Dawg.
I'm goona post a Holy Spirit Prayer that I love for you, OK?
This is going to sound all precious and pseudo pious: I count it all as dross. Yes, I long for the leeks and garlic and fleshpots. I am not better than the ungrateful children of Israel.
But God slaps me upside the haid and brings me to my senses, and I look around me and, well I am just so happy to be here! Sure I would love to preach again and to preside at a Mass. And I was "high" in my Eucharistic thinking, and I think God mercifully accepted my devotion and intention and brought me home through it.
But, and I'm serious here, I'm in church. I'm hearing the Gospel, I'm living in the Sacrament. The children are making noises like exotic birds or mischievous monkeys. The older hard of hearing couples are "whispering" so that they can be heard 5 pews away, and a miracle is all around me! I can't spend to much time in self-pity in those circumstances, now can I?
Life long RCs get all bent out of shape (and I understand) over liturgy or whether people are standing or kneeling or holding hands during the Lord's Prayer or whatever. I personally would like to have a chance to speak, uh, firmly, yeah, that's it, firmly, to the yahoos that did the NAB translation. It's like English wasn't their native language!
But, come ON! There is this torrent of Love here! And nothing can hold it back except my own frozen heart. And it's a WARM torrent and my heart is thawing!
I quite understand, I think, the concern of our protestant brethren -- in the sense that it would be such a shame when people are bathed and born up and swept along in such a river if they ever thought they had to earn it. But I end up just wanting to say, "Shut up and jump in! Put those worries away!"
So it's a loss, yeah. But a little one. A tiny one, and it has been made up a thousand times over.