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Starting school from a non-religious background, I found prayers confusing - especially the Lord's Prayer which I learned by rote never having seen it written.
In particular I recall being age five - standing at assembly, puzzling over why the prayers always ended by us saying Our Men.
Questions such as: Who were these Men? Why were they ours? And what was the point of chanting about them?
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I believe that's called Homophone of Oronym
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juncture#Oronyms
Or maybe the mind of young children
are more open to God's revelation?
You mean that you didn't go to Sunday school? Golly, that means that I'm really more Christian than you.
ReplyDeleteAnd it was a chance for my mother to make us wear kilts. And we'd go to visit our great grandmother afterwards. And the nice young women who taught at Sunday school were generous distributors of Smarties and Spangles. Which, when you think about it, was a Christian thing to do.
You missed a lot, Bruce.
There is a song version of John 13:35 which slightly alters the KJV text* to "By this shall men know/Ye are my disciples". As a child, I had a really hard time trying to figure out what a "shalmeno" was, and how it let people know I followed Jesus. I distinclty recall my mother clearly pronouncing it: "shall-MEN-know" and still being thoroughly confused about how saying it more slowly could tell me what it meant.
ReplyDelete* Whole hymn:
As I have loved you,
Love one another.
This new commandment:
Love one another.
By this shall men know
Ye are my disciples,
If ye have love
One to another.
@rb - excellent story!
ReplyDelete@d - sometimes I suspect you don't read this blog with all the attention I think it deserves (as James Joyce said somewhere something like: "I demand nothing more of my readers than that they sped the rest of their lives studying my work"):
I'm sure I have written somewhere at sometime about my secular upbringing, and becoming a proselytizing atheist age six; after which I and a lone Roman Catholic were exempted from RE classes at my C of E primary school (for a while, anyway).
One of the hymns we sang when I was a kid had the line "you who unto Jesus, you who unto Jesus, you who unto for refuge have fled" -- which I always heard as "yoo-hoo unto Jesus."
ReplyDeleteApparently I wasn't the only one who heard it that way, because a later edition of the hymnal changed it to "who unto the Savior for refuge have fled."
@WmJas - 'Yoo-hoo unto Jesus' is all too plausible a phrase for the 'worship songs' written over the past 40 years!
ReplyDeleteI can easily imagine a refrain divided into parts which goes: "He Loves us so let's all? - Yoo-hoo unto Jesus/ Come on Everybody - Yoo-hoo unto Jesus/ Why don't you? - Yoo-hoo unto Jesus/ Want the whole world to - Yoo-hoo unto Jesus/ (etc, until rounded off by a slower sung half lines such as ) Our Heavenly Kyung.
Or something. Argh! I shouldn't have written that.