Ernie wrote: ↑Fri Oct 06, 2023 3:44 pm
Recently I was introduced to the term, "Mennonite music". It refers to the rustling of Bible pages throughout the sermon. I'm sure other churches have the same music. I would hate to part with this as it signifies something Anabaptists consider important.
I never thought of this, but I listened yesterday and yes, there's a lot of that sound during the sermon.
It's a modern phenomenon, right? What do you think it was like in churches when copies of Bibles proliferated in the pews for the first time as the printing press made them cheap enough for the average person? Would the novel sight and sound of all those books have been distracting?
To me, the sound of all the pages turning has value beyond just sentimentality in that it shows people are engaging with the writings being read, at least in outward form. This is different of course from Catholicism where people generally don't carry Bibles, and engage the scriptures being read by listening to them. Catholics would likely argue that this is a superior and more time-honored way of engaging the scriptures; maybe they would think everybody carrying their own Bibles and all the sound of pages shuffling is a distraction itself.
As one Catholic
writes,
When I was a teenager our Catholic Youth Group had occasional ecumenical meetings with a Protestant Youth Group nearby. One day our leaders decided that a fun thing to do would be to have a Bible based quiz night. We Catholics were all quite worried because we had been told that the Protestants took their Bibles very seriously and we did not often read ours outside church.
As it happened, we wiped the floor with them in the quiz and I wondered why. It turned out the Protestant Youth knew very little of the Bible outside of their minister’s favorite texts, whereas we Catholics, who attended Mass each Sunday had had, over a three year cycle, every principal story from the Old Testament and nearly the entire New Testament, read and explained to us at Sunday Mass. On average we had been through five or so of those cycles since our birth and so the Bible was pretty familiar to us (I’m showing my age, but now it’s more like twenty, and that’s not counting the readings at daily weekday Mass, in which the entire Gospels are read each year, and the Old Testament and other New Testament books over a two year cycle). Taking Bibles to church is superfluous for Catholics, because the priest comments on the readings that have just been proclaimed rather than choosing his favorite texts and having you look them up. If you must follow the readings rather than listen to them, most Catholic churches provide the printed readings of the day in one form or another too.
The myth among some Protestants that Catholics do not take their Bible seriously arises from a misunderstanding of how we approach our prayer and liturgical life. No, most of us have not read the Bible end to end (I have but this is rare), but nevertheless Catholics have a deep appreciation of the Bible through our liturgical life and the priests’ explanations of pretty much every important aspect of it. Personal prayer and lectio divina (a method of deep meditation on scripture passages) deepen the understanding of the more devout, but even the most casual church-attending Catholic will know their Bible well.
If you want a glib answer that sums up the above, it is because the Bible is impressed on our hearts through weekly (or daily) familiarity, that we don’t need to carry it around.
Remember the prisoners, as though you were in prison with them, and the mistreated, as though you yourselves were suffering bodily. -Heb. 13:3
