Skip to main content

Life and liturgies in north west Quebec!

Fr. Michael Smith, a brother priest of the Diocese of Pembroke and my 'next door neighbor', even though he is an hours drive away on the other side of the Ottawa River. He posted this morning that there was a commotion during one of his masses. When the mass came to an end and he inquired about the source of agitation, he was told that a groundhog had wondered in the door and decided to partake in the liturgy, much to the consternation of the denizen's of those precious pews closest to the exit. He mused that there was probably a joke in there someplace and someone on Facebook gave it a shot.


A groundhog walks into a church on Ash Wednesday. "How long until Easter, Father?" he asks the Priest. "After six weeks of Lent," says the Priest. "And if you had seen your shadow?" asks the groundhog.
It reminded me of the last mass I celebrated as the assistant at our Diocesan cathedral. A bat had awoken in the dead of winter and made his way into the church during the last mass of the weekend. After a number of shrieks and swings, somebody finally connected with the poor bat, knocking him to the ground. With an obviously broken wing, he tried to drag himself along the central aisle deeper and deeper into the Church. As a usher moved to corral the poor critter and give it a quick end outside, I exclaimed in an attempt to bring calm to the situation (and to keep this one particular lady from trying to stomp on the bat so hard that its form would have been imprinted on the rug forever)...


"Be kind and leave the poor bat alone! He's only trying to get into Church because here he believes can he fly again on a wing and a prayer!"
Labels:

Comments

  1. Teresa10 April, 2011

    Great Father! LOL!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JP10 April, 2011

    I'm trying to figure out if there's a connection between Quebec liturgies and why our Francophone priest was wearing rose vestments today...the Fifth Sunday of Lent...maybe a question that shouldn't be asked??

    Glad to meet up with you again, Fr. Tim, even if it's "virtually".

    From Petawawa

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Good will to all men? Not from the grumpy atheists! (Thank God not all atheists are grumpy but there sure seems to be a lot of them)

Why is it that so many in the atheist community cannot bring  themselves to get past their anger whenever they engage in discussions? The language of many of their contributions in public debate is laced with invective and dripping with sarcasm and bile. There are exceptions of course, but they tend to fall more into the category of being the 'exception that proves the rule' when compared to the hostility of many of today's atheist posters. Comment offered by the theists in the public square is often depicted as being 'malicious' or 'venomous' and intended to enslave the 'feeble minded and weak' by those who post. Nothing could be further from the truth. Venom is something that is oriented to death. Christians are oriented in a 180 degree different direction. We speak not to the culture of death  that grips our world but rather for the culture of life and light which ends with the gift of eternal life. For example, the Catholic Church in its hum...
105 comments
Read more