Wednesdays take their toll…

I am now much more than 24 hours removed, but I still feel it in my bones.  On Wednesdays during Advent at St. Stanislaus Cathedral, I wake up at a little after 4 in the morning to make sure the church is unlocked and warmed for 5am Rorate Mass.  Yeah, until a couple of years ago, I didn’t know there was a 5am either. 

Cathedral lore has it that this Mass was always at 5am so the coal miners would be able to go to church on their way to work and still get there on time.  Makes sense.  It is a Mass in honor of the BVM and if you were to attend Sunday Mass and Rorate Mass during the Advent season, I would have to say between the prayers and the readings, you would get a pretty good idea of what Advent was all about, as well as hear the prophecies of Isaiah and early gospel accounts of “How the birth of Jesus Christ came about.”

St. Stan’s has been having Rorate Mass for…I’m going to say at least 100 years.  Here is a site that speaks about how it is coming back into the fold again under the current leadership in the Roman Catholic Church.  The site is only someone’s blog, so take it for what it’s worth (hahaha I know). 

To tell something quick about myself, I had to wake up for high school before six in the morning to get ready to leave at 6:39 to catch the bus.  In college, it was a treat to have class every day, albeit not starting until 8:30.  By the time I was a junior at University of Hartford, I manipulated my schedule enough so that I was going 3 days a week, not starting until 1pm, and by the time I was a senior, my schedule was Monday and Wednesday 1-10 pm, 15 credits.  Which means my bedtime was 3am(ish) and I did beautiful work between the hours of midnight and 2am. 

I entered seminary in September 2004 and had to be at morning prayer at 7:15.  Needless to say, that is when I began to drink the good stuff.  I maybe had 64 ounces of coffee in my lifetime up until September 2004.  I never thought I could drink it, especially after I had a business class guest speaker at UofH who claimed to drink between 15-20 cups of coffee daily…which he proved by refilling his huge thermos and downing it over the course of an hour lecture.  I tell that story sometimes and jokingly say that I now pray for his prostate.  Sounds funny in person, creepy on a computer screen. 

My point is, Rorate Mass is nice…almost a surreal experience given that you go to church when its dark, leave when its dark, and then enjoy like another hour of morning darkness.  (Unless you go back to sleep.  I did in between Rorate and 8am Mass yesterday, let’s just say the sleep gods didn’t agree with that decision and made me feel like garbage all day.  So, give it Rorate a try, come to St. Stanislaus in South Scranton on Wednesday the 17^th, or encourage your priest in your parish to have it at 5am.  Don’t tell him where you got the idea though.