And God Chuckled

A Sunday or two ago, we had a replacement priest for the weekend Masses.  Our permanent pastor was away leading a pilgrimage and this retired priest was kind enough to help out by celebrating Mass with us.

He has a very loud voice and oh my!  He was just so enthusiastic about God.  He boomed out his sermon and the prayers of the Mass - no sound system needed.  It's two weeks later and I do believe my ears are still ringing!  It was a different way to worship, perhaps a little more distracting, since in our parish we're used to Father Gerry's more serene and reflective style.

But "Father Replacement" kept us alert and just waiting to see what would happen next.  For example, at the Prayer Intentions he jumped in ahead of the reader of the prayers and prayed a long list of his own, which more or less anticipated the prayers written for that Mass.  When the reader finally got her chance to speak the prayers, Father chuckled at each one, as he realized what he'd done.  Eventually, we were all laughing with him as the reader began each new prayer and barely able to give the response, "Lord, hear our prayer."

The best incident though was when Father began to chant a prayer and realized he'd forgotten to wait until the altar server had brought forward the Sacramentary with the words.  Without missing a beat, Father sang, "Oh God, Almighty Father..."sweetheart, could you bring me the book because I'm not sure what comes next."  The altar serving was grinning from ear to ear as she brought the Sacramentary forward and the rest of us were laughing out loud as Father grinned and sang the correct words to the prayer.  When he had intoned the ending and we had all chanted the appropriate, "Amen," Father grinned at us and continued chanting, "Thank you, sweetheart, I don't know what I would have done without you!"  And now the poor altar server was giggling out loud as she returned the book to its place on the altar.

And I suspect that God was chuckling with us and pleased that we were enjoying Mass in a different way.  Laughter can be prayer.  If all of life is to be prayer, then laughter and weeping and anxiety and surprise and gladness have to be part of that.  Even anger (righteous anger, that is) and disappointment and sadness can be prayer.  We human beings with all our variable emotions are created in the image of God, as the bible tells us.  That makes me believe that God also has those emotions and is happy (another emotion) to share in them with us.  Even babies show emotion:

It's anybodies guess what Kara is feeling here but we know, because she's a human being, that she's feeling some kind of emotion.

Sometimes we're quite certain we know what emotion baby Kara is feeling.

I suspect that on the Sunday in question, Kara would have laughed out loud with us, had she been able to understand what was happening.  I'm willing to bet that "Father Replacement" had God in stitches, too!