Many churchgoers must be having experiences similar to this:
the time for the sermon arrives; the priest grabs the microphone and either
stands in front of or slightly to the side of the altar, or ambles up and down
the aisle, roaring informally to the parishioners who are trying to catch the
words in the reverb and end up closing their eyes to be able to concentrate on
what is being said.
After all – so the current dogma goes – you can’t actually
use a pulpit: horrors, it’s elitist, colonialist, what you will, it puts the
priest high above the congregation so they have to look up, how undemocratic!
Away with such relics of obscurantism!
Wrong, Pulpits are what they are for a reason, and
priest-worship isn’t it. They are perched high so that everyone in the
congregation can see and hear: see who is talking and hear what is being said.
Microphones and loudspeakers are singularly ill-adapted to churches: the echo
is far too great, and the sound quality is actually diminished by them. If you
use a pulpit, you do not need a sound system: a pulpit is a sound system. OK, it helps if you’ve had a week of voice
training and learn to throw your voice; but it doesn’t take much.
My clever and eloquent priest says, in her weekly letter to the congregation, that from the pulpit she can see, as we cannot (facing the wrong way and not high enough) the avenue that our church faces and thus can see, at least on occasion, some of the poverty and distress that afflict all American cities of any size. So, from her perspective, she can literally see some of what Christ is talking about. Out there—the real world. I found that moving. And, yes, she’s easier to hear up there.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought of that argument; but it's a contributing virtue of (some) pulpits. Of course, stained glass may get in the way, but then that can edify differently.
ReplyDelete