Ancient & Modern
Sometimes, I crave for a particular religious past, one stated, written and regimented with uniformity.
Sundays with tongue-twisting names like Sexagesimal and Quinquagesimal rather than the well known Palm Sunday where the Common Book of Prayer was opened to a particular page as you followed the vicar in the prelude and response of worship.
The sound of the pipe organ in readiness for traditional hymns in English at times or in Yoruba when I was in Nigeria; the solemnity of it all.
The loud sound of the band
The difference is a band, a keyboardist rather than an organist, two box guitars, two acoustic guitars and the percussionist - a drummer doing the drums.
Cue the music with the beating of the drumsticks and the music begins loud and ready for our voices singing to the text displayed on the screen in the front.
Even in my quiet times, I cannot maintain the consistency of a beat over time, the percussionist starts easy and before you know it, a riot of beats descends on us, I thinking surely this can go wrong but it all works out beautiful.
You are left in awe and praise of the drummer who is quite exposed, almost extrovert to a fault and basically commanding the flow of worship even though you have the lead vocalist and at least 2 backing vocals in the band, none of what might be called free-styling ever comes close to the daring-do of the drummer.
A Protestant to Pentecostalism?
As I grow older, loud is betraying the possibility that I might be able to confidently pass off as youth anymore, the jumping to the beat is almost an excess to the High Church Anglican eye.
The service was enlightening and insightful but we had left behind tradition as I knew it, the Palm Sundays of old where we sat in pews and if I had dozed off as I sometimes have done in church lately, the lovely ushers would have caressed the back of my neck with the exhilarating barbs of a palm frond leaf.
Honestly, I do miss the Hosannas; talk less of the overkill of dramatising Jesus on an ass of a colt riding into Jerusalem.
For all said and done, the journey is mine to travel and in every place, blessed still is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.
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