At a wedding reception last night, my husband and I were at the bar, requesting beer and Pepsi. (No, not mixed! How disgusting!) Another guest took a look at me and said, "Oh, so that explains it."
Her statement was met with my raised eyebrows and puzzled expression. She tried to explain further. "Now I know who you are."
I was still puzzled. She didn't explain further, so I asked, "So.... who am I?"
"Well, you're with him." And she pointed to the cute guy next to me in the black shirt and round white collar. "That explains why you knew all the words."
"All the words? What words???"
Just a wee bit more explanation on her part enabled me to discover what it was that we were talking about. She'd sat near me during the wedding. I had noticed during the wedding that nobody but me and my daughter and the bride's parents were responding to the versicles. But, c'mon, how much could we stick out? There was almost nothing to respond to! There were no hymns or canticles. "All the words" that the four of us (afore-listed) participated in were
-- "and my mouth shall show forth Thy praise" and
"make haste to help me, O Lord."
-- the Gloria Patri once
-- "amen"
-- "thanks be to God" in response to
"this is the Word of the Lord."
And of those four things, the opening versicles were printed in the bulletin, with instructions for the congregation to respond. They didn't. Well, there were the four of us, but that's all.
In this day and age, I can understand churched people being unfamiliar with the liturgy. Too many churches have gotten all funky and ditched the liturgy. But for people my age, or a decade or so older, I simply cannot fathom how Christians could be entirely unfamiliar with things like "amen" and the Gloria Patri. That was the first thing munchkins learned in SunSch when I was little. The Gloria Patri was an excellent "first song" because it was used so frequently: it was sung at the beginning of prayer offices, after the Introit and the Nunc Dimittis, and at the end of many canticles. If you went to church at all, you were going to hear "amen" and the Gloria Patri at least once in each service.
Jessen is in second grade. He was in church with his family today, and he spoke right up, clear as a bell, when we got to the Lord's Prayer. Jessen apparently "knows all the words" too. (And he's not even married to a pastor!) Amazing how little it takes to "know everything" these days....
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When we were on vicarage, my husband and the pastor led a Bible study on the liturgy for our senior group. We had 80 year old people say "I've been doing this all my life and never stopped to think about what this means."
ReplyDeleteI memorized the liturgy around the time I had my son (I COULDN'T hold the hymnal). I found becoming freed from the hymnal/bulletin let me actually think about what I was saying, and it wasn't really until then that it became mine.
Now, you can memorize something and not have it still mean anything to you, but when you are memorizing something that you use all the time, I think that ceases to be the case. That "learn by heart" phrase used by CCA really does have meaning to it.