{"id":7620,"date":"2003-08-24T20:20:00","date_gmt":"2003-08-25T01:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/2003\/08\/24\/invasion-of-the-liturgy-snatchers\/"},"modified":"2003-08-24T20:20:00","modified_gmt":"2003-08-25T01:20:00","slug":"invasion-of-the-liturgy-snatchers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/2003\/08\/invasion-of-the-liturgy-snatchers\/","title":{"rendered":"Invasion of the Liturgy Snatchers"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Barbara Nicolosi excellent blog Church of the Masses she posted<\/a>:<\/a><\/p>\n

The pews were mostly empty. Only a few of us suffering stalwarts would trickle in week after week, staring blankly ahead, victims of the liturgical beauty lobotomy.<\/p>\n

Liturgical beauty lobotomy that explains it. Today my wife and I went to a church we don’t normally attend, for reasons that will become evident. Their choir contains an electric bass player, guitarist, and drummer along with the Gather hymnal, a normally toxic combination. The music was sung in that sixties style which was probably popular in hippie communes. The air was electrically charged with that potential kumbaya moment which could breakout at any time. They also used the Agnus Dei 2.0 “Now with extra verses”, though they were nice enough to leave in the Lamb of God part. Since they were using non standard refrains they had to mention them before the next verse in that “all together now” kind of voice. I am just glad they didn’t ask for verse requests. I thought that it couldn’t get worse, I was mistaken. The maracas unrestrainedly used during the Communion song put me into a musical meltdown, my core had gone critical in this percussive attack.<\/p>\n

I pondered how is it that all these people appear immune to the musical shenanigans. Was my wife and I the only ones bothered? Did all of these Church members have, to steal Barbara’s words, liturgical beauty lobotomies performed. Or is it more insidious than that. What if there are alien liturgists slowly taking over the world. One day you go to bed hating the OCP and GIA hymnals and while you sleep a giant vegetable pod placed in your proximity slowly assumes your features. You wake up humming “Gather us in” and suddenly develop an allergy to chant. The liturgical pod people are all around us and we must do something now. I know that I am going to be extra careful to make sure there are no six foot vegetable products around my house before I sleep. I also have visions of one day walking into one of these churches and having the congregation turn around and point at us making the “HSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS” sound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Barbara Nicolosi excellent blog Church of the Masses she posted: The pews were mostly empty. Only a few of us suffering stalwarts would trickle in week after week, staring…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liturgy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7620\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}