Saint Frances de Sales, Abingdon

I reached an even 2000 page views today!  I could say I was waiting for that before my next post, but I've just been more on the lazy side than usual this week.  That's one of the deadly sins.  I should be more careful.

Saturday and Sunday were jam packed fun in  too much sun days for me.  I have a dwindling number of available Sunday evening masses and somehow everything on Saturday always seems too early.  I decided I could squeeze in a trip to Sam's Club and make it to St. Casimir's for 5 pm mass.  I couldn't.  The sun must have gone to my brain.

Then I thought I would skip a new church and visit an old favorite.  I'm already behind, and was thinking of an installment that's called "Who goes to weekday mass anyway?"   Turns out, said old favorite doesn't have mass on Sunday afternoons in the summer.  Yeah, that's right, during the summer, I want to give up sleeping in.

So I did some frantic searching and somehow got it in my head that mass at St. Frances had a 6 pm mass.  It doesn't.  It's at 5:30.  It also escaped me that it is a Byzantine mass.  Ironically, I was trying desperately to remember who has a 7 pm mass in Spanish to buy myself some more time.

Instead of being 15 minutes early, we were fifteen minutes late.  There were 9 or so cars parked in the driveway in front of the small stone church.  Mass had started when we walked in.  There are twenty pews arranged in two columns of ten.  There were about a dozen people there, and all but one was sitting in the back three rows.  Blending was definitely out.  A helpful gentleman brought copies of the Divine Liturgy so we could follow along.  In chant.  Was it changed to reflect the New Roman Missal?

There were icons and incense.  We made the sign of the cross a lot and right to left.  We called Mary Theotokas.  Communion is dropped from a gold spoon into your mouth.  And just like the little Episcopalians, little Byzantine Catholics take communion.  There is also prayer for people celebrating birthdays, which is harder to google than I thought.  I thought it was kind of cool, especially since my birthday was this week.  

Here's a helpful FAQ from St. Michael's parish in Toledo about being a Byzantine Catholic.

http://www.stmichaelstoledo.com/index.php?name=FAQ&id_cat=1

I haven't made up my mind for this week yet.