Gratuitous Post-Christmas Rumination

I have to admit that as important as Christmas (and Easter) are to me from a religious point of view, the actual physical celebration of these holidays in church typically leaves me feeling rayther flat, and is not nearly so spiritually satisfying as an ordinary Sunday's worship.

I suppose this is due primarily to the influx of the C&E crowd, those people who only attend church at Christmas and Easter, and often do so only because they're tagging along with relatives or friends, because they want to show off or because they retain a faint, vestigial sense that it's the right thing to do. It isn't just that such people don't know the drill. It isn't just that in order to accomodate them the clergy have to juggle worship schedules and generally dumb down the services. It isn't just that they typically have very bad manners, gabbing, fussing and strutting all the way through. Instead, it's a combination of all of these things, coupled with an admittedly unworthy sense of resentment on my part, that often times hopelessly distracts me from the things on which I ought really to be concentrating.

Typically I find the need to slip off on my own after such a service and spend a little time in solitary devotion to, as it were, make up for what I've squandered in church on cranky fuming.

Of course, I've always witnessed this in the context of TEC, which is notorious for this kind of thing. (It has been my sense that the C&E phenomenon is largely a mainline Protestant issue, although I could be quite mistaken about this.) It will be very interesting to see if my perspective changes once I've completed my swim of the Tiber (which will occur at Easter, btw, and which promises to be a veritable cornucopia of distractions as my family comes face-to-face with things).