The Goal

Hi! My name is Greg, and I live in Providence, RI. If you're reading this, I'm assuming you know me well in real life, so I'll skip any other autobiographical details.

I have decided to try to go to mass at every Catholic church in the state of Rhode Island. The 150 is not a rounded number; by my count, that's exactly how many there are. I just know that at some point, I'm going to find out about another one, thus ruining both the perfect roundness and the title of the blog. I was going to keep a journal or diary about this for myself, but a couple of friends have expressed interest in reading about it, so I'm going to take a stab at writing about it. Blogging is something that I never imagined myself doing for any reason, and I have no idea how it's going to go or whether I'm going to keep up with it. I'm operating under the assumption that about one or two other people (besides my parents) are actually going to check it regularly.

I am excited about trying to do this for a bunch of reasons. First and foremost, this will make me go to daily mass as much as possible this summer, which is something I should be doing anyway. I hope the experience will deepen my prayer life, and that a lot of graces will flow from it. I also love exploring churches, and going to Mass guarantees that I can always get inside them and have time to look around properly.

On a selfish level, this will also help me make the most of my summer - if I'm getting up early every morning to go to Mass, I get the whole day ahead of me to do other things, instead of falling deeper and deeper into the "stay up late, wake up late" cycle. I also want to do as much of this on foot as possible, which will get me outside and exercising instead of spending the summer on my couch. Finally, I'm going to enjoy exploring the state a lot more, whether it's on foot or in the car. And who knows? Maybe some cool, interesting things will happen, and I'll get a lot of good writing fodder for this blog.

In the absolute best case scenario, I won't be able to do all 150 churches until the end of next summer - August 2016. We'll see how this goes. Maybe a month or two from now this will all be abandoned, but I hope not. I can't do all that much until my school year ends later in June, but there's about a dozen churches where I've already been to Mass in the past, so I'll start writing about those soon.

Thanks for reading!