Part 1—Plenary Sessions
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for 50 cents I recall), an exchange that my parents would not allow, since it was obviously a “Catholic image” (but what they said was they didn’t want him to get into trouble with his parents). But I was undeterred. Now it so happened that at that time my mother was the Sunday School Superintendent at Trinity Lutheran Church, a congregation of what was then known as the Augustana Synod, and what this meant is that in our home there were recent church and Sunday School supply catalogues from the Augustana Book Concern, the publishing house of the Synod. Paging through one, there it was it in plain sight in a Lutheran church supply catalog: “German Wall Crucifix, $4.95.” Even Ralphie, eagerly longing for and receiving his Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Ranger Model Air Rifle in A Christmas Story, could not have been more excited than I was. I still have that crucifix, by the way, the first of a still increasing collection. But if the crucifix was my first crossing of the border between Lutheranism and Catholicism, only to discover even then how “Lutheran” the crucifix actually is, the specific liturgical dimension was to come later. And my first venture into that, into what I would later come to recognize as Liturgiewissenschaft or “Comparative Liturgiology,” happened in my Junior High School years where I would occasionally sit and compare the texts of my family’s 1958 Lutheran Service Book and Hymnal (SBH),6 the “Red Book,” with the English translation in my Latin-English Maryknoll Daily Missal of the Mystical Body, which had been given to me by a friend’s very Irish-Catholic mother (who, by the way, liked to point out in her later years, “I gave that kid his first Missal”). Although at that time the only Mass I had attended was a funeral, including the televised ones for Pope John XXIII and President John F. Kennedy, I was struck by the parallels between these liturgies and the discovery that at least Lutherans and Catholics were saying basically the same things in their worship with the SBH even retaining the Latin titles Kyrie, Gloria in Excelsis, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei of the chants of the “Ordinary of the Mass,” as well as the Latin titles for the Sundays of the Liturgical Year, at least, from Septuagesima Sunday through Exaudi, the Sunday before Pentecost. Even Lutherans thus had Quasi Modo Sunday and could thereby understand Victor Hugo’s reference. And I should also mention, in passing, that the SBH, already in 1958, had restored three readings to the Sunday Lectionary, including the first reading taken from the Hebrew Scriptures. Together with this, under the able baritone leadership of my confirmation pastor, Robert A. Olson, the liturgical settings of the SBH, the first based on Anglican chant and various Plainsong settings, and the second a wonderful Plainsong setting of Missa Orbis Factor and other Gregorian melodies taken from the 1942 Swedish Mässbok, completed at least once a month on “Communion Sundays,” with Pastor Olson chanting the Gregorian dialogue and the Proper Preface leading into a tenth-century chant of the Sanctus, which everyone knew by heart, was a strong part of my formation. Of course, we were Swedish Lutherans, and we loved our pastors chanting the whole liturgy. But if the comparative study of rites and the very performance of the SBH liturgy were already forming this crucifix-venerating Lutheran into the ways of the liturgy, it
