So I went to Mass this morning - and no this is not going to be me reflecting on the homily or the Scripture readings. I'm reflecting on the fact that about two thirds of the way through I realized that I was pretty much just phoning it in. I blanked on several lines in the Creed, and my mind was wandering more than usual. It happens to all humans, so if this kind of thing doesn't happen to you, you might be a robot ;^)

Anyway, I was thinking about how some of the more self-righteous Christians in some of the more self-righteous Christian denominations have a habit of criticizing the ancient or more liturgical communions for having reduced worship to "going through the motions," as though ritual and memorized prayers automatically become empty after the first time they're done.

And yet, here I was "going through the motions." (Don't worry I snapped out of it by the end, and in any case, I don't think it's necessarily a sin for your mind to wander - it all depends on what your mind wanders to! But I digress.) I had to admit, I was "going through the motions."

But it occurred to me, this is not the fault of the liturgy, and it doesn't happen every time, as if it's built into the ritual - this is on me. I wasn't fully invested, I wasn't hanging on every word of the prayers and the homily - in short, I wasn't "all in." So that's on me.

If you saw a ball player phoning it in, making a lot of errors, you wouldn't say, "Well once you have the same number of innings in every game, and follow the same set of rules every time, then it's inevitable that everyone will just phone it in." That would be ridiculous. And we could come up with an endless number of other analogies to make the same point. If you saw a ball player phoning it in, you would blame the player, not the game.

So if some of us Catholics do "go through the motions" sometimes (or admittedly, maybe a lot of Catholics, a lot of the time), that's not because there's something wrong with the ancient liturgy. But there are people who leave the Catholic Church (or Greek Orthodox, or whatever ancient tradition) for one of those auditorium churches because somebody told them that if they were only going through the motions it wasn't their fault (the subtext, of course, is that they weren't being entertained enough to keep their attention). Instead someone should have told them - that's on you - try harder next Sunday.