Tag Archives: church

A Catholic Tradition Honoring My Mother

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Mobile Phone Salesman
Residence: New York, NY
Performance Date: 4/13/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Nationality: American

Primary Language: English

Other Language(s): Spanish

Age: 20

Residence: New York City, USA

Performance Date: April 13, 2017 (Skype)

 

Mike is a 20 year old man, born and raised in New York, who is a mobile phone salesman in New York City. He is a high school graduate whose family is of Puerto Rican Heritage.

 

Interviewer: Good Afternoon. You mentioned that you follow a tradition your Mom taught you. Could you explain please?

 

Informant: “Ya it is like I am Catholic you know you know and we really go by this Catholic thing like every time I do the cross. Every time I pass a Church, I do the cross. And I feel if I didn’t do the cross that I would feel different.”

 

Interviewer: You mentioned you would feel different, why?

 

Informant: “Like this was a thing, you know the do the cross, that I use to ah see my Mom do every time, you know, we were passing a Church. Like it ah didn’t matter if youse was on a bus or a car or like just walking down a street, um she would always cross herself.  Then… then I was, you know older then a little kid, ah every time she crossed herself you know and if I was wit her, she would stare at me if I didn’t cross myself.  So I guess, like um I would um feel different like I wuz disrespecting my Mother, you know.  So like , I am a Momma’s boy, she is very close. And um I don’t want to, you know give her anything that wouldn’t be very respectful. Does that make sense to you?”

 

Interviewer:  Yes it does. It is a very nice thing to do. Do you do the sign of the cross even when she is not with you?

 

Informant: “Of course, it’s like so deep in my bones and mind that it is like ya I am like a robot! When I see the church, like I have to stop and do my cross, you know.  It is so beautiful cause I see my Mom smiling a lot every time ah um I do that.”

 

Thoughts about the piece:  

Devoted Catholics worldwide have been making the “sign of the cross” since the 400s: http://catholicstraightanswers.com/what-is-the-origin-of-the-sign-of-the-cross/

Here is a demonstration of how to do this movement prayer properly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpRzqXG1dhc

 

 

 

 

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Nationality: Scottish-American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Milton, MA
Performance Date: 3/25/17
Primary Language: English

Context: Gathered from one of my roommates once he found out about my collection project.

Background: My roommate has never had a set religious background, and was always in something of a melting pot of faiths when he went to churches like the one described here.

Dialogue: So, I don’t know exactly how Unitarianism, like, started, but… At some point it was just this sort of culmination of, like, various Christian sects, like Episcopalian or Protestant or whatever was around Massachusetts going on. Just a bunch of them sort of, like, coalesced into one group that’s like… “You know what, Trinity or Unity, doesn’t matter! We all have spirit!”

Analysis: The intereseting thing about this piece of folklore to me is how much is blended together in a church like this. It’s not only a mixing of various religious sects, either: at one point, my roommate sang a song he was taught as a kid, about the “Seven Guiding Principles of Kindness.” He remembers only these lines:

One, each person is important
Two, be kind in all you do

The song, interestingly enough, is set to the tune of “Do-Re-Mi” fromthe mucial The Sound of Music. So we have a mashup of popular culture, religion, and folk belief, all in this single church.

Church Joke

Nationality: Canadian
Age: 64
Occupation: Mom
Primary Language: English

Main Piece: Joke

 

“So this man gets up Sunday morning and is getting ready for church. He looks everywhere in his apartment for his hat but can’t find it. He decides to go to church and possibly steal one from the cloakroom.

When he gets to church, he sits through the service and afterwards as everyone is leaving, he goes up to talk to the priest.

‘Father, I was really inspired by your sermon today. I couldn’t find my hat this morning and I was prepared to steal one from the cloak room and your sermon on the 10 Commandments really helped me.’

The priest said, ‘Yes, thou shalt not steal is a very powerful commandment.’

And the man said, ‘Oh no no no, it wasn’t that one. When you got to the one about thou shall not commit adultery, I remembered where I left my hat.’”

 

Background:

 

My mother told me this joke, and she was originally afraid it was not appropriate enough but I told her anything goes. This is one of her favorite jokes she heard from growing up, as it was told to her by her great grandfather. He used to tell them jokes when they would have birthday celebrations for him, and he ended up living to be 104.

My mom likes this joke because it is one of those that you do not really know where it is going until the punchline, and she has used it many times before. My family would attend church every Sunday, so I think of it as a sort of comical approach to a more serious matter, which is important to have with every aspect of life.

 

Context:

 

The first time my mom told this joke my family and I were headed to brunch on Sunday after church as we always had when my siblings and I were kids. My parents would always ask us what we had learned that day in church, and this day was based around the ten commandments. My mom, being the jokester that she is, decided to whip out this joke in the car afterwards and it aroused a lot of laughter from my brother, sister, and I while my dad was slightly less impressed, but still chuckling.

I asked when else my mom would bring this joke out and it generally was along the lines of conversation based around church and religion, although it was more so when the environment was more loose and it wouldn’t offend anyone who was more so of a traditional religious person.

 

My Thoughts:

 

I like this joke in that when I first heard it I kept trying to figure out where it was leading from the beginning and it having to do with church and all. I also like that there is some sort of intelligence needed in the sense that if you do not know what adultery is, you probably won’t understand the comical aspect to it.

I’m also a fan of comedy that relieves some level of seriousness to certain subjects. Most people will generally think of church and religion as a fairly serious topic, and this being a play on one of the major teachings in the Christian religion definitely gives a sense of comic relief.

Like dogs in church- “Como perros en misa”

Nationality: U.S.
Age: 47
Occupation: Outreach Counselor
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 3/3/2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“Como perros en misa”- Like dogs in church. This saying is used when one is having the worst day possible where you feel attacked from all sides with no warning. Back in the day in Colombia, churches used to have their door always open and on hot days, stray dogs would sometimes seek refuge inside a cool tile church only to be physically kick out by a variety of feet, leaving what should have been a sanctuary, bruised and confused. So when you ask someone how was their day and they answer “Como perros en misa” you now know that they have had a surprisingly terrible day. The correct response is “I am so sorry, that sounds horrible” as you would expect to react to a puppy being kicked without reason.

Analysis: There have been times this semester when everyday for a whole week I felt like a “perro en misa” because everything would go wrong and an undesirable event would happen like surprise reading quiz. The American version would be something like “ when it rains, it pours” but that along with “Mercury is in retrograde” seem more impersonal and generalized, while “perros en misa” is more specific and means that you are personally are being brutalized, not the whole world.

Snakehandling

Nationality: Salvadoran
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 4/21/2016
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

Background: E.M. is an 18-year-old student at USC studying Cinema and Media Studies. She is Salvadoran but as lived all over the US, so she has picked up folklore and customs from a lot of different places. For a while, E.M. lived in Kentucky and this is a story that she heard there.

 

Main Piece:

E.M.: So when I was living in Kentucky, I… one of my friends… when we were young children… one of my friends said that um said that she knew that one of my neighbors did snake uh would do snake rituals in church and that she heard that from her parents. So she was kind of scared of this lady, um, and when I asked my parents about it, um, I I found out that that lady was a Pentecostal, and that basically in her church they believed that snakes couldn’t hurt them or that that the venom of the snakes couldn’t hurt them, if they believed in God. Um so they would use the snakes during sermons, even, they would handle them quite dangerously, and that even people would get sick or get hurt I guess, but it was an important part of their religion because they said that in the Bible, it says that if you’re a true Christian, snakes can’t hurt you and they belong to you to use them as you see fit.

 

Q: Did you ever see this practice live?

 

E.M.: I didn’t ever see it in person. It’s not something commonly done, but it belonged to this particular church that was a very old church, and they had been doing it for a really long time. I heard it from the other kids, and it kinda became a rumor or a scary story we would tell each other that turned out to be true. We were scared of it because it was very different from our own religious practices, like this would never happen in our own churches or anything like that.

 

Q: Where did you live in Kentucky?

 

E.M.: I lived in Louisville Kentucky, but this lady was from… I, I believe she was from Appalachia and she had moved there and there were rumors about her, showing there was this big divide between city life and country life in Kentucky.

 

Performance Context: In Pentecostal churches in some areas of Kentucky.

 

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting how people interpret the Bible in different ways though they all read the same words. In particular, it is intriguing how people make folklore and folkloric practices out of religion. However, the folklore is an extension of the religion and not a true part of the religion itself. Many subtleties in the Bible are interpreted by different sects of Christianity to mean certain things, however, they are never explicitly told to perform these practices (such as snakehandling).

For more information, please see Chapter 3 (Religious Folklore) of Elliott Oring’s book Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction, in which snakehandling is mentioned.