I'm preoccupied, for example, with smoking my six pipes in the order in which I obtained them. Similarly, if I dwell on Religious garb, I shield myself from dwelling, perhaps, on the sorry state of institutional religion today. And we sometimes fret about the small things to avoid the painful burden of fretting about the big. You went there to pray. Now churches are just like meeting houses.
People carry on long and loud conversations.
It's impossible to concentrate or pray. Again, some socializing and talking in church is not the atom bomb that will destroy the Church as we know it, but, for a person who remembers a different kind of reverence in the past, this talking portends a total loss of reverence, not just a different emphasis. C. D. of Vermont has the cure, it seems, for those of us who fixate on the apparently unimportant, like pipe sequence and nuns in street clothes. It's easy to complain that the choir is lousy, the lector bumbling, the church nursery understaffed. Pew warming for one hour a week may meet your basic moral obligation, but Christ was constantly exhorting us to go beyond our comfort zone to meet the needs of others.