From one of our local church bulletins this weekend:
Bang the drum slowly or quickly, or in syncopation, loudly or softly!! (parish name) would like to incorporate percussion into some of our music at Mass. We have some instruments available: bongos, conga, cymbals and timpani… now we need the hands (and arms) to play them! See (so and so) after Mass, or call at … or email…
“The Mass is ended … Thanks be to God!” BAH-DA-BOOM! –TSSH!
|
Too bad we can’t embed images in the comments because this would the perfect time for Grumpy Cat captioned with NO.
Percussion at Mass is certainly not my style, but someone will surely argue that there are a fair number of mentions of banging timbrels (Hebrew tambourine) and cymbals in the Old Testament especially, as here:
“Begin ye to the Lord with timbrels, sing ye to the Lord with cymbals, tune unto him a new psalm, extol and call upon his name.” — Judith 16:2 Douay-Rheims
Of course, I counter this myself by submitting:
1. Those instruments were what they had to work with in those days. If there had been a nice pipe organ or string quartet available, things would have been different. 🙂
2. In any event, the Israelites were not playing hippie folk music or the banal “praise songs” of David Haas, Dan Schutte, and Marty Haugen as will likely be the case at this unnamed parish (St. Tom-tom?).
And I think the ‘noise’ in the Old Testament was ‘outside’ noise (not in acoustically challenged modern church architecture.) Shouldn’t we have a little discretion about where play-ground voices are used? I hope there will be warning signs posted.
The Psalms are not, and never were, a litirgical manual. See Msgr. Pope’s article: http://blog.adw.org/2015/06/on-reverence-and-reserve-in-the-holy-liturgy-a-meditation-on-an-instruction-by-st-cyprian/
Good point, militia!