• 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 “So out of touch”

  1. Tim Avatar

    The *other* half of that `presbyterian model’ quote is truly barf-worthy especially given several unpleasant incidents hitting the press in the past 6 months.

    I think `Whenever there are progressive values around’ might be happening at the level of society as a whole, not just in churches, though.

  2. kelvin Avatar

    I’d rather like to think that it would be obvious to people in the various churches that no one system owns a “reflection, consultation, debate and discernment” model. Such ways of working can be found in different churches. Failures to work in such ways call also be found in different church systems.

  3. Rosemary Hannah Avatar
    Rosemary Hannah

    We are hijacked by people who scream and scream until they are sick (they can, you know) and lack the guts to say ‘Here is the bucket’. The attempt to ‘keep all the balls in the holes’ shows a total lack of any grasp of what leadership means.

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