If that's my wife, tell her I'm not here
Sure, it can be distracting, not to say annoying, when someone’s cell phone rings at the highlight of your sermon, or during the holiest action of the Mass when the people are meant to look up at the elevating Host not looking round for the perpetrator; but the word is agape and the deed is forgiveness and the call may be one of life and death, so don’t mind, never mind.
My cell phone problems are other though: (a) my phone is usually not on my person but laid down somewhere “safe” so I can get it soon as I finish with this task, but then I forget it altogether and can’t find it later; and (b) when I turn off the sound I can never remember to turn it back on later. Thus, here we are Tuesday morning and I just came across my cell phone, which has been sitting here in my “den” where I never would have looked for it, with the sound still turned off from Sunday morning before the 8:00 o’clock service, and missed several calls and texts those days.
One of these days I’ll have enough sense to just leave it on during church on Sunday morning and if it rings it rings. If it rings during the rector’s sermon, I’ll just turn round and glare at the acolytes.
Our first mobile phone was one I gave Tass for Christmas, one of those big handsets you plug in in your car and sit it between the seats. It was actually for my peace of mind. That would have been December 1990 when she was a freshman at her college in Virginia. I had bought her an M-B 300SD: did you know it costs more to keep a Mercedes running with monthly trips to the shop than it does to pay for the damn thing in the first place? Let the reader pardon the language.
The thing that actually annoys is a swinging rope. There’s a movement in the corner of your eye, especially when you’re the Celebrant. At a slight pause between sentences you glance quickly and there’s an acolyte swinging his/her rope. Cincture is the ecclesiastical term, or girdle. I’m with rope because girdle is stupid, archaic and Victorian, and when you say cincture the kids start giggling. Anyway, with naught to do while you stand there, you absentmindedly stare out at the congregation with your mouth open and your eyes glazed over and you swing your rope. When I was an acolyte at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church it wasn’t a problem, because we didn’t wear alb and rope we wore red cassock and white cotta, no rope. Seems to me we even wore a black cassock until we were trained and qualified at which time we graduated to the honored red cassock. But no rope to swing.
When I was a boy the acolyte knelt at the end of the Altar as the priest said the magic words, and sometimes the boy keeled over. That never happened to me, I never fainted, but I think it happened to Tom, maybe Jimmy or Julian.
In those days The Peace was not community commotional, but quietly between priest and acolyte. At the end of the consecrating prayer the celebrant quietly murmured “The peace of the Lord be always with you,” and the acolyte responded “And with thy spirit.” The people didn't even get into it.
Low Church, raised slightly by Father Tom Byrne who shook the heavens by wearing the first chasuble, we never had incense. No ropes to swing. No bells.
And sure as aitch no cell phones.
TW+