IrvingD

The cloying perfume of incense had barely left my clothing, when the sharp smell of sauerkraut and steamed sausages suddenly invaded my nostrils with a command jolting me out of heaven and back to earth. My friend, Evan, and I attended the 5:30 P.M. Vespers service at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection on 2nd Street in the Lower East Side. Once an enclave of Eastern European immigrants, this area still boasts of a number of Ukrainian, Russian, Georgian, and Carpathian communities represented by the various churches bearing those names. Holy Virgin Protection Cathedral actually belongs to the Orthodox Church in America, the most assimilated of these communities, formerly known as the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in North America. Most all of the 105-minute long service was conducted in English, with just a few dollops of Old Church Slavonic thrown in as perhaps a reminder of the community's heritage. Every word was sung--chanted actually--includin...

Seemingly endless hours of diagramming sentences on the blackboard may be the reason why I love to teach English grammar and usage. I wouldn't have thought so at the time. I remember fighting afternoon grogginess as I tried to follow a tangle of words and lines sprawled across the board in my fifth grade class. I remember the teacher explaining the differences between a predicate nominative and a predicate adjective, a coordinating conjunction and the proper use of the semicolon. My thoughts at the time must surely have been anywhere but on the fine distinctions of prescriptive English grammar. But something stuck. Maybe it was the delicate balance of words separated and connected by lines, large and small, dashed and dotted. Maybe it was the beauty of the language displayed under the blinding light of analysis. Just maybe the dissection of sentences did for me what the dissection of frogs did for future medical students. I ended up an English teacher, but not just any English te...

Today I led worship and preached to the congregation of the Steinway Reformed Church in Astoria, New York. All seven of them. We did not even have enough men to form a minyan  for a prayer service in a Jewish synagogue. Three men, four women, and myself. We did a full Service of Worship according the liturgy of the Reformed Church in America. We approached God in prayer and praise, confession of sin, assurance of pardon, the reading of the Law, and a responsively read psalm. Following my role as minister, I read the Scripture lessons and preached a full sermon based on the texts of the day. The third, and last, part of the Service included the receiving of an offering, the prayers, and the benediction. Each of these three parts contained a full hymn sung to the accompaniment of a piano. The entire Service lasted about 45-50 minutes before we retired to the church hall downstairs for coffee. I could have said the experience was depressing. I could have lingered on the sad shape ...