Pious To A Fault?

We went to church this afternoon for the Children’s Mass. Do Episcopalians have mass or is it a service? I needed a voice recorder to take notes because I noticed a whole bunch of stuff, but I’m going to have to rely on my memory. First, there weren’t as many people at there as I thought there should have been. If I’m at church then everybody needs to be at church. I thought people would have been less cavalier about consigning their immortal souls to eternal damnation and woe in the hellfires of the stygian pit. If I get to use damnation, woe, hellfire, and stygian pit in a sentence it’s been a good day. I have some criticisms – constructive I hope – about the service. They told the exact same story as they did last year about a baby being born in a barn. However, there didn’t seem to be as much tl/dr as I remember. I liked that the new dean gave a quick primer on how to take communion or not take communion. I’d never heard another member of the clergy do that, and having been a member of the Anglican Church for more than thirty years, I’ve been to about twelve or fifteen of these things. The lack of instruction about what to do and when to do it during the service is one of my peeves with the Church. There’s a lot of call and response like an old school rap concert, but no album to buy to get familiarized with the show. Communion itself didn’t go well because the Body of Christ (The Bread of Heaven) was more than a little dry, and the guy with the Cup of Salvation was being stingy with the Blood of Christ. It’s a good thing we’re not Catholic because if the communion wafer had started to transubstantiate on the way down I would have had human jerky stuck in my throat instead of whatever communion wafers are made out of, and jerky doesn’t dissolve.

Actually it was a very nice service. LMJ enjoyed herself. My parents enjoyed themselves. And I got to see some people I was hoping to see. But the dude was stingy with the wine, and last place you want to be is between an Episcopalian and his wine. Church is spiritual for us in more than one way.