My apologies, Recon----I had a wedding to attend Saturday, and since Friday things were a tad harried around here. Your concern was:
How would you feel if all your friends got together and said the same thing to you every time they talked to you? No matter how good it is what they are saying, its the same thing every time. Wouldn't you begin to wonder if they have been transformed into parrots or dictation machines or something?
Wouldn't you want to hear what is really on their minds instead of hearing the same thing over and over?
This might be a problem, if all we did was recite prayers with no feeling once a week for an hour and a half at Mass.
However, we don't. I, for one, try to concentrate on the prayers at Mass, in order to derive benefit from them as well as worship Christ. I also believe that God
wants us to have a structured worship environment at Mass; otherwise, He wouldn't have inspired the Church to set it up that way. Try picking up a copy of the
Didache and reading through it. This is a Christian liturgical manual which was written about 60 A.D.; you'd be surprised how similar the worship structure described there is to the present-day Catholic Mass. We haven't changed much over the last 1,940 years, really. Drastic changes in Christian worship styles only got started after the 16th century with the advent of the Reformation.
Secondly, keep in mind that there are many, many types of of prayer, not just one or two. There is the structured worship prayer of Mass, which you seem to object to; there is also devotional prayer, which may also include an element of repetition. There is also intercessory prayer, performed for another's benefit; petitonal prayer, where you ask God for something; and thanksgiving prayer. There are mental prayers which come mostly from the head, usually known as meditation, and there are ejaculatory prayers which come from the emotions.
There is nothing wrong with spontaneous, non-structured conversation with God, and indeed, every Christian should engage in this type of prayer. I do, to some degree, every day. But that doesn't mean that the structured, repetitive prayers at Mass are wrong; it simply means that I am engaging in two different types of prayer at two different times during the week. So I doubt that God is unhappy with me because I say the same things at Mass every Sunday. If that's all I was doing, He might feel a bit slighted, but I also engage in a lot of other types of prayer at various times every day throughout the course of the week----not just the Sunday Mass prayers.
Benedicat vos Omnipotens Deus, Pater, et Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus,
------Wols.
