Taking some heat!

5 settembre
After taking some heat from my good catholic friends, I must clarify our experience of Monday night. 1st, the normal mass which i attend and which was celebrated Monday night and lasted an hour, is enjoyable and similar to what I am used to, with certain differences like the language, of course. But, as Raffaele reminded me, this healing service lasted 4.5 hours, so that was 3.5 hours of rosaries (not an hour as i said before), both spoken and sung, and for me, that was a bit much. Of course, being a quasi-well controlled A.D.D., 3.5 hours of anything is too much. (After thinking a bit and getting breakfast ready for our guests, I must say I would gladly have a 3.5 hour conversation with a beautiful, intelligent woman over dinner)
Raffaele explained to me that the rosary was not a thing heavily contemplated while it was performed, but instead was a way to get a breathing pattern started which helped with concentration, meditation, and get more oxygen to the brain. My friend Kevin, who writes much better than me, shared the following which I will share unedited (although that would have been a fun thing to do. From an email titled Oh You Protestant Heathen:

Re the Rosary,

From your last blog, it is clear that the straight-line, clear headed, literal, work-ethic centric Protestant thinking of your heritage is clouding your ability to appreciate the lyrical patterns of the Roman Catholic Rosary prayer ritual, which are not intended to be a focus just on the simple but sublime messages of the core prayers of the Catholic faith, the Our Father and the Hail Mary, but instead to create a individual meditative environment in which a true prayerful interaction with God can be celebrated.

Another take is the historic one, in which poor medieval Catholics who could neither read nor write used the beads to keep track of the simple prayers they knew, recited en masse in lieu of reading from prayerbooks.

I must say, he hit the protestant thing on the head.
I am off to Divino Vino today, our local wine festival. Today, there will be a tasting of sparkling wines of the world. Tomorrow is the wedding and Sunday is a recovery day, I am sure.
The pictures are of Bacco at 730, ready to play, the drying figs from our trees and Raffaele's "cookies", a new experiment.

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