Mass Chat: Ordinary time.

The lounge singer.
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My parish is having it's annual Fall festival this weekend, including an outdoor Mass - why outdoors? I don't know.  Anyway, I went to another church for confession and Mass Saturday evening.  It was at a first tier suburban parish.  A really ugly church, but the priest is very good. 

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The church was packed - with seniors - like really old people, not just retirees.  I sat in back of the semi-round gathering space.  All I could think about is how close to death many of us could be, some apparently closer than others.  I think about that a lot, death I mean, and so I wondered if the people at Mass do so as well; obviously many of them have been retired for an awful long time, it just seems it would be a natural thing to contemplate.  Or is it?  Maybe we can't allow ourselves to think about the reality of it?  Whenever I think of death these days, I catch myself wondering things like, 'why do we live so long anyway?',  'what if there is nothing on the other side?', 'what's the point?',  and that kind of stuff.

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If it hadn't been for the pianist and cantor, I would have been terribly depressed.  The church was just so ugly and the liturgy so ordinary.  But the singers had really interesting, smokey voices, and they were rather good entertainers.  No lie, they actually sang the same way as lounge singers do - like in Vegas or some hotel bar, they had a distinct style.  Seriously, the hymns sounded like piano bar songs, I never quite heard hymns sung like that before.  As I was leaving I noticed the one female vocalist looked a lot like Liza Minnelli, she appeared to be the same age too.  I had to smile. 

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That said, I am so very grateful to have been able to go to confession and assist at Mass and receive Holy Communion.  It is all I have.