A few months ago I began helping in the church service as a lay reader. The Episcopalians being a bit on the high-church side, this calls for learning a lot of ritual. There's candle-lighting in a particular pattern and order to start with, then a procession (with hymn), with various people carrying various things in a particular order. Next there are readings by a couple of different laymen interspersed with the priest's parts in the Book of Common Prayer, now and then joined by the choir and the congregation, as we sing together the Gloria, the Sanctus, and the Lord's Prayer. Then the sermon, more speaking parts by laymen, a complicated hand-off of offering plates and the elements of the Eucharist among the ushers, the acolytes, the lay readers, and the priest. Then the serving of the wine and bread, which in itself is an intricate minuet involving three people (plus the communicants at the rail) and lots of spoken parts. Finally, announcements, special blessings for birthdays and anniversaries, extinguishing the candles in reverse order, and the recession (with hymn).
Today was complete discombobulation. Our rector had been called suddenly out of town and replaced by a sweet old visiting priest who does things rather differently--lots of things are optional--in addition to being just a bit forgetful today. He forgot the Gospel lesson altogether, together with perhaps half of the order of communion, and started the announcements early in the service when the ushers were standing near the front door, ready to bring up the elements and trade them for the offering plates. (An old hand suggested tactfully from his pew, "Maybe now would be a good time for the Offertory." The priest gratefully agreed.) Our young acolyte suffered a bout of stomach upset in the middle of the service and left the altar, returning quickly, but still distracted enough by her physical distress that she never quite got back into her groove.
I'm still new enough to have trouble remembering my lines and my paces at various points. Reading the lessons is easy, but there are stock phrases at the beginning and end that aren't on the hand-out, as well as times when I need to stand here and do this, or stand there and do that, which is particularly challenging when the visiting priest is used to something different--will he pour the wine or does he want us to?--and doesn't offer quite the cues I'm used to. In the end we all more or less flubbed everything, but the important thing is that communion got served and we all tried not do anything too distracting or irreverent, so I don't think anyone's worship was hampered. I try to concentrate on not fidgeting or drifting, and on thinking about what needs to happen next, in case somebody gets shot out of the saddle and another of us needs to pick up the slack seamlessly.
Our altar guild director has been urging me to read more slowly. Today my first lesson was quite long, the whole opening section of Genesis, all seven days of creation. I felt I'd be at the lectern reading all morning, but I concentrated on slowing down. After the service, a parishioner congratulated me on reading quickly. "It was such a long passage," she said, "we'd still be in there if you hadn't picked up the pace." "Cap'n," I wanted to say, "I canna rrread any more slowly than that!"
When I was participating as a member of the congregation, I scarcely noticed all the choreographed movement in the sanctuary. It's almost like putting on a short musical. I look forward to getting so comfortable with all the parts that the whole team can respond flexibly and serenely to the unexpected, whether that's a lay reader who forgets to show up or a blessing inserted into the "Prayers of the People" that includes a reference to a perfectly unpronounceable church and pastor in Myanmar (as happened this morning). Luckily, no one in the congregation knows how to pronounce Burmese, either. Just sound confident and move on.
Some years ago, when life seemed quite unbearable, I concluded that what I needed in my life was more music, more ritual, and more animals. It's been just what the doctor ordered.
7 comments:
There's something powerful about ritual. It is a thing I picked up on reading Chesterton, who uses words in a ritualistic way at times. I could see the power of the words came from the ritual itself, even ones we repeat just now and then, like singing Christmas Carols:
The giant laughter of Christian men
That roars through a thousand tales,
Where greed is an ape and pride is an ass,
And Jack's away with his master's lass,
And the miser is banged with all his brass,
The farmer with all his flails;
Tales that tumble and tales that trick,
Yet end not all in scorning-
Of kings and clowns in a merry plight,
And the clock gone wrong and the world gone right,
That the mummers sing upon Christmas night
And Christmas day in the morning.”
There's another purpose for ritual, too, and it's illustrated by the troubles T99 experienced when those rituals...fell apart. It's the same purpose as the ritualization of the epics that Homer recited: a memory aid.
The mnemonic nature of ritual, in addition to ritual's power, helps the participants remember a complex sequence and "get it fight" in a time when much of the sequence wasn't written down in any convenient fashion.
Eric Hines
That was a long reading, wasn't it?
I sing tenor in my choir at an Episcopal parish in the Diocese of Chicago. Yesterday was our last service of the season. We stop after Trinity Sunday and pick up again in September. Between that and my service as an acolyte when I was a boy I've noticed that serving the Lord can often be distracting - you're thinking about what you have to do next instead of concentrating on worship, sometimes. It doesn't help that we have a small parish and I'm called upon to do the Prayers for the People as well. Our unpronounceable parishes are in the Diocese of Renk in the Sudan.
But for me, the singing makes up for it. When we get it right, when it's beautiful, then I know what worship is. We have a choir director that challenges us. Tallis, Palestrina, Handel, Bach, Rutter, Beethoven - thrown together with spirituals and contemporary praise songs and anything else. We've sung in English, French, German, Latin, Spanish and even Hebrew. The key is to practice enough that you don't have to think too much when it's time.
I envy you your choice of music! And yes, the effort of sight-reading uses up all my concentration, as does remembering to wipe the chalice and turn it a quarter-turn and so on. Luckily I don't serve every Sunday! And I hope that more of it will become automatic soon, so I can worship again. It's tricky learning something that I'm going to be called on to do only every few weeks. It takes a lot of repetitions to get it down.
In theater, the hardest thing to teach the young is to pick up the cues very quickly, almost overlapping on the other speaker, but speaking slowly. A variation of this is possible in reading and liturgy. Have little gap between parts of the liturgy. Save your meaningful pauses for places in the readings themselves. Choose those judiciously, to hammer home a main point. In the rest of the reading, overdo the consonants and speed right along, with tonal variety to give the listener an aid.
Good advice, AVI.
Yes, I concentrate on every sound in every word, making the consonants crisp and explicit, especially at the ends of words, and differentiating the vowels instead of inserting a lot of schwa's, which I think helps the hearers take in the meaning. No mumbling! I also consciously exaggerate the pauses between clauses and think about where to put the stresses and the varied intonation so that the sentence makes sense. When each section ends with a short, dramatic sentence, like "And God saw that it was good," it's nice to mark it with a pause before and after.
Even doing all that, apparently it strikes some people as "reading fast." But other parishioners say the pace is just right (not just for mega-passages!), so I must be somewhere near a happy medium. The two women who think I'm fast both speak so slowly in conversation that I'm tempted to go refill my coffee while I wait for the next word. I must be very citified, because I speak quickly for a Southerner born and bred.
I think I read the lessons at something like half the speed I'd normally read something aloud, and certainly half the speed I'd normally use in conversation. I've had more than one court reporter ask me to slow down when I was testifying. One said she could transcribe at 250 words a minute, but I was testing her limits. So I'm kind of a motor-mouth when I'm excited and engaged.
Post a Comment