I Don't Understand
non intellego
TEACHING / PRESENCE
In my life, I have had the opportunity to present to all sorts of audiences. I really enjoyed classroom training for example, both presenting and receiving. I have also done both pre-sale and sales presentations associated with products my company at the time sold. Judging engagement in the topic, whether the audience “gets” what you are talking about, and especially the firm understanding of how much talking and how much listening each of the types of presentation requires was very important.
For those that know me personally, a dedicated sales career would likely have led to my family going hungry. I have a healthy respect for the field as it requires a lot of active listening. This is something I really have to work at and I exert more effort during exchanges that require it. As we have progressed in this modern world I now host a couple of Zoom and Google Meet events. These present unique challenges as being aware of whether people “get it” depends upon how often you can scan the greater audience. Being in person gives you that opportunity and is one of those things we have all missed during the pandemic.
One of my first experiences of this sort was being a lector at my church while growing up. I think that I started doing that around age fourteen or so. My parents were active members at the Church and my Dad was a church lector. For the uninitiated, the lector is the person who might read some announcements or scripture reading at certain times in a service. While the celebrant (priest, deacon, or rabbi) would perform the majority of the service, the lector does a bit of the service. My faith tradition is Roman Catholicism. The biggest challenge of being a lector at a Polish-American parish was getting the pronunciations correct of some of the Polish surnames. We all have an affinity to our own names and I think it important when you meet someone for the first time that you pay attention to how THEY pronounce their name. Since it is the only one we have, I can understand why people appreciate it when people make the effort to get it right.
While it seems ridiculous to me, the complete service for a Catholic Mass was spoken in Latin from 1570 till the mid-1960s. In a tribute to how long change can take, the shift away from Greek toward Latin started in the year 190 AD! I was so fortunate to have been born amidst those reforms. There are so many times that I feel fortunate to have been born when I was in 1960. The Mass shifted to English around 1964 and before then I don’t remember anyhow! The policy reform led to a rapid change in how the message was transmitted. It is hard to imagine what the service was really like before that. I wish I had talked to my parents about it. Absent any direct experience, it seems ridiculous to me. I assume the sermon HAD to be in English or there would have been no chance on the drive back to say “that was a good sermon today”. There were times when paying attention and being present is hard enough without the presentation being largely in a “dead” language.
Tradition is important to many things including religious practices. It just seems to me that practices that stand in the way of reaching others seem a strange approach to teaching. While there are still places you can attend a Latin Mass, the church has guided for the late sixty years that it should be presented in the local language. The Church is a place where lots of specialized words, helpful if you are a crossword puzzle fan, still are used. The actual term the Church uses for the prevailing language is “vernacular”. Wow, even if you know English, that is not a common word. Many years ago during a period when I was working on a major project for the US Treasury Department, I found myself in Washington D.C. with some frequency. I ventured out on a couple of occasions and attended a mass in Latin at The Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle. That was always something I wondered about and I would finally experience it. Here is their website. What a beautiful church it was. I remember walking around it afterward. They definitely know their audience as St. Matthew is apparently the patron saint of civil servants. What a simultaneously calming and unusual experience. For a guy who really likes to take the time to understand how things work, the idea of speaking to a large audience in a language they don’t understand, with your back facing them from behind a railing seems like madness. There are many conservative Catholics who regret many of the reforms of the 1960s and yearn for the “good old days”. I would love to engage and discuss with a couple of them but I would implore them to try and make eye contact and don’t speak Latin.
So what is today’s post really about? I am really enjoying the Newsletter writing. What I do not know is whether I am reaching anyone. Since these are not even video calls, there is no opportunity for eye contact nor dynamic pauses for questions. This means the writing really needs to be sharp, clear, and relevant. I am left to determine this by seeing how many people read it, how many people “like” it, and how many people comment on it. In the now 40+ days of writing, I have tried to cover a range of topics. Some of that is for me as I settle into a daily process. As a person who has always been interested in a lot of things and how they work, my head is full of ideas. I am quite sure that some of them are bad and some are better than that. I hope that each of you, at least at times can share whether you are “bored with it”, “enjoyed the topic” or “think it would have been better if I talked about ???”. Thanks for your consideration and hope to see you tomorrow. For the record, I don’t think I really enjoyed the Latin Mass. It seemed strange to go to a place where I would feel comfortable and welcome and then not be able to understand what was going on. I think if I had the opportunity again, I would take a pair of Google buds that can do on-the-fly translation. I would be interested to see if they could handle Latin. Here’s a song about lots of things but one take is that a one-way conversation is really just like silence for many. I would imagine that folks for generations sat silently amidst the Latin chatter. What a lost opportunity to reach people I am afraid. The last comment for those still wondering, today’s subtitle is Latin for “I don’t understand”.
19+
I was an altar boy for many years and because I am considerably older than you, the Masses were all in Latin. I never understood that until the History Book Club chose a book that explained it all. The early Church did not want the common man to read the bible and interpret on their own. They, in their divine wisdom, would translate and explain it to them. That way, they stayed in control. One of the many "mysteries" of the church.