So What's With That Liturgy?

24 January 20120 5:24 PM

Yesterday, oh yesterday.  As I sat down to write this I thought, “What’d we do yesterday?  We went to the soccer game.”  Yeah, that we did.  I was up early and it was very quiet and nice before breakfast.  We had breakfast and then helped with the dishes as we are apt to do.  During the dishes Pedro talked to Stefanie and I heard and understood “songs” and “five” and “six.”

Stefanie asked if I’d gotten that and I thought we were doing the song service at 5:00.  No, we were doing the service at 6:00.  I found out today that she tried to explain to him that Dori was going to do a service this evening, but he said that yesterday was the Lord’s day and we were going to have church.  Sooooo we washed dishes and got our computers.  I said, “To the Liturgy Lab!” which is also the English classroom/room we’ve worked in.

We contemplated lots of things and weren’t really sure what to do.  We settled on modifying the Order of Worship for Evening.  We though about doing the liturgy of the word from Rite II, but we didn’t think that the BCP imagined us doing that without a priest.  We didn’t want to do Evening Prayer because they don’t have Prayer Books.  They have copies of the BCP in Spanish for Rite II.

We decided to use the assigned Isaiah lesson in place of the suggested short reading since it was about light and it was the same number of voices.  Poor Stefanie was trying to make sure her sermon made sense and Google translated it and then had three readers go over it.  Since we didn’t have Prayer Books and chapel is new to them, we added some things and subtracted some things.  I said the Prayer for Light then Stefanie used the Collect for the Day.  I put together the liturgy with her input and approval and such.

The psalter we used the assigned psalm.  The psalm isn’t a reading, so we tried to make it more interactive between the people and the lector.  Since it was like an office service we had one of the kids read the gospel lesson and didn’t have a epistle.  We added songs they knew and some that we knew and could teach.  For the responses we had me que the people and them repeating after me.

We worked on that most of the morning and into the afternoon.  We got content with it and then went to the soccer game.  Fabian, one of the German volunteers, was headed to the Hogar as we were leaving, so he came with us.  The game was sloppy and could’ve been better. They played really well and then just stopped.  It got hot and they got tired, too. 

The service went well.  Pedro came and demanded respectfulness.  Stefanie did a great job and our musician was extremely helpful.  He played songs that he knew.  We used the tools available to us in crafting a liturgy and in executing it.  I got some of the stuff from St. Lydia’s and did a paperless song.  It’s hard to use the liturgy as part of catechesis when the congregation has only assembled three or four times and the people don’t have Prayer Books.  

We tried not to trample rubrics.  We tried to do some stuff that was familiar, but we weren’t doing a Eucharistic service.  We worked hard on it and were intentional in our decisions.  In an ideal world we would’ve been able to do some things differently, but we weren’t in an idea situation.  We were given a task and we completed it, I think.  And it went well.  We got together to rehearse it, too, so that was helpful, too.  Later in our ministries we’ll say to one another, “Remember that time we planned and executed a liturgy in Spanish when neither of us was really fluent and one of us wasn’t functional? Yeah, that was fun, right?”