I had an incident last year where I missed Mass. I was taking my oldest son on a Cub Scout camping trip, and had actually located the neared parishes, both of which were an hour from the campground entrance. This meant three hours for Mass, which is a lot, but I kept remembering hearing about those people in South American villages who walk for hours and hours just to get to Mass each week, and then walk back.
I thought, “Well, I’ll just be driving for an hour each way – that’s certainly less of a sacrifice.”
But then I found out that, after entering the campground, there was an 11-mile, windy dirt road which on which I drove for another hour, and I was cruising pretty good at 10 miles per hour. My son was getting nautious as we drove in. I thought, with the additional windy 1-hour drive in each direction that allowing five hours for Mass – at which we would be extremely dirty and underdressed – would really be a big burden on my son.
We ended up attending a Greek Orthodox “sevice” since there was no Catholic Mass at the site, and the alternative was a service that was not only non-demoninational, but supposedly “appropriate for all faiths” (including non-Christian). I figured that the Greek Orthodox service (they didn’t have a priest available for Mass) would at least be Christian.
Since then, we’ve joined a pack that is affiliated with our parish. One of the benefits is that we can tie such concerns into our planning, to make sure we aren’t keeping the boys away from Mass.
