What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • The Past Tense

    Sometimes museums are terribly annoying. I found myself getting all worked up about this thurible.

    image

    Well, It wasn’t exactly the thurible that got me worked up but the card next to it.

    image

    The caption uses the past tense. “Censors were used…”

    Censors are used. It somehow felt so frustrating to look at an object that I could pick up and use in my daily work and which seemed to me to be in as good a state as when it was first made and yet see the caption speaking about the use as being something in the past.

    As I looked around the same gallery, all the references to anything liturgical were expressed in the same way:

    “Music was important in the Christian liturgy…”

    There’s no was about it.

3 responses to “Recorded music in the liturgy”

  1. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Re: Recorded music in the liturgy
    Dennis Potter has an awful lot to answer for.

    Reply
  2. Avatar
    Kelvin

    Re: Recorded music in the liturgy
    After the death of George Harrison I was at a Sunday Eucharist where the Rector played a tape of My Sweet Lord and based his sermon on it. Don’t think it was really appreciated but I didn’t hear any complaints either.

    Reply
  3. Avatar
    Kelvin

    Re: Recorded music in the liturgy
    The only time I can remember this really working was when the Piscy College was at Coates Hall and after the Friday evening Eucharist the student who had been leading that week’s services, Kevin Bean, turned on a cassette of Boney-M singing Rivers of Babylon. I still recall the surprised grins on people’s faces and Gian Tellini practically skipping out of the chapel

    Ian Burdon
    (Coates Hall 1977-79)

    Reply

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