Words, Words

It wasn’t the fault of the planning team that the non-eucharistic first-Sunday-in-the-month service had a few issues this week. The order of service was passed to me for setting and printing, I noted the lack of the Lord’s Prayer and popped it in but forgot actually to tell Gisele the lay reader who led the service based on her original notes. Our new sound system still has an annoying buzz on the audio loop for those using hearing aids, so the affected parties tell me – but that’s well beyond my ability to sort out at the moment.

This is the second time the team have led the service, and I offer the following observation without speculation. I notice that while I tend to err on the side of reticence and brevity in liturgical matters, if I hand liturgy to laypeople to devise they seem to prefer lots of words, and making them as lyrical as possible. This isn’t invariably the case (we have some lay intercessors who also keep their words simple and straightforward) but it happens often enough to be remarkable. I’m also nervous about straying too far from Biblical texts, and the language yesterday landed quite a distance from them (‘Early in the morning, in the multicoloured company of your Church’ being the most obvious example): I wonder whether laypeople realise how much of the liturgy is composed of chopped-up bits of Scripture or at the very least imagery and language drawn from it, rather than something someone made up at some point. In hymns, of course, a greater latitude is customary: a theological student once asked Archbishop Ramsey whether there was a readily-available dictionary of heresies, to which he replied ‘Yes, it’s called Hymns Ancient and Modern’.