Monday is unkind - please send Tuesday soon.

I'm really tired today. Somewhere between the time change and playing a few lacrosse games yesterday, I wore myself out, and I feel pretty exhausted and in a bad mood. I feel a little bitchy. I feel like my brother Phil.

I went to a Catholic mass last night because I've heard the Bishop of Denver is an amazing individual and worth coming to hear speak. Unfortunately, his mother is ill, and so he wasn't there. We went with the newly married Dave and Anne Richardson from GCC. Dave became Catholic while or just before dating Anne, who's been Catholic for a while now.

Mass was fine, but I'm always a little culture shocked in Catholic churches. Everything from the style of building to the dress of the clergy to the smells of the incense contradicts what I've grown up understanding church to be. On top of that, it's wildly anachronistic: the architecture is left-over baroque, the ceremony (from singing to the role of alter boys as 'servants') is medieval, the mood is.....well, medieval, and yet the towering dome of the cathedral is lit by electronic inset skylights, the priest wears a microphone, and the music was piano, guitar, and violin, rather upbeat compared to traditional hymns.

I don't want to criticize any of this - it just struck me as an entirely different culture, coming from a protestant tradition where we threw out the robes and the incense and the baroque when we installed our electric lighting and started using a microphone. We assumed it was okay to modernize a lot of our traditions as long as we were modernizing a few. I think that's fine, though I also think it's okay to keep some of the old tradition, as long as it doesn't take the place of the more important things both branches of Christianity should hold in common, which it all too often does, for both sides.

Another thing that's hard about Catholic mass is that I'm not allowed to take communion. A generalization of my protestant upbringing holds Church as a celebration - a partaking of the abundant life through getting excited about our faith and singing happy songs. Communion is included sometimes at the end as a way of re-stating our commitment to our faith and our community, but it's often done almost as an after thought, and the primary experience we're sharing in as Christians is the service rather than the Eucharist. In Catholic mass, the entire service is extremely somber, and feels more like a funeral than a birthday party - that's the "medieval mood" I referenced earlier. The service seemed to take for granted that I should be miserable in my sin, feeling extremely worn down by life, and that the church was offering solace and at the end would provide a form of renewal. This is a strange thing to participate in as an outsider, because I really don't feel miserably sinful. I was starting to get into it by the end, but then the service leaves a protestant feeling empty, because you're not permitted to take part in communion.

I have to admit I really don't understand this part of the Catholic mass. I haven't grown up in the Catholic church, but it's really sort of a misnomer to call me a protestant. I'm not protesting anything. I probably have fewer issues with the Catholic traditional than I do with the protestant/evangelical branches, and it seemed like there was a lot of stuff following Vatican II which should've opened communion to the sort of Christian I am. But since I'm not Catholic, I don't think I'm supposed to take communion there. Am I right? Why is that?

So that's the way we capped off our Sunday. I think I'm going to try to go again sometime soon, when the Bishop is in town, and see how it goes.

In other news, here's a hilarious video of Patrick Stewart from the British television series "extras". My brother Scott sent this to me yesterday: