Pacific Ocean

Attended my first shipboard mass within memory this morning. Held outdoors on the after end of the promenade deck under a gray sky, that favored us with a momentary drizzle, and a gusty wind which snapped the surrounding shield of signal flags. I have a feeling that God, or better, Spiritus Sancti, was back on land somewhere. Something in me longed for the pomp and majesty of high mass at Notre Dame de Paris, or Stephens Dom in Wien, or the Kolner Dom, or even St. Patricks. What a horrible loss it must be to some Protestants never to have experienced such magnificence.