Serving at Mass

Liturgy Reflection

On the first day of November our school community had its Liturgy prayer service in the gym. As it is a tradition to open up classes, a service, or any other religiously linked activity with a prayer, our school does the same. However, in added a bit of a twist of excitement to it, there was sign language that corresponded to the words. Since the students were the first to have been introduced and taught the sign language, three students in her class came through to be examples in front of the entire school. At first, many people said that they would do this, but when it came down to it, only three stuck to their word in saying they would be models. Many of the people who bailed probably did so because of the bravery and courage it takes to stand in front of 2000 or more students and faculty to be an example of something very important.

After much practice and preparation from the three students, they were informed by their teacher that the faculty had decided to keep the sign language to the prayer out of the liturgy because too many students weren't participating. However, in my opinion, almost all the students were following along with the leader and at least attempting to sign the prayer. The faculty may have also decided to exclude the sign language from the liturgy because it may have been offensive to some people in whatever manner. But as our goal is to make everyone feel comfortable, those few people make the difference in whether the sign language is kept of not. In my eyes, I believe that the faculty decided not to include the sign language to the prayer because it has been a tradition to just simply say the words and they didn't want to break it. If they broke it, they may have felt like they were disobeying or degrading the beliefs from when they first existed until modern day.

As a result, the sign language was indeed kept out of the liturgy with the prayer, but was an experience that I may not forget for a while. The reason being is because I have always had a fear of presenting or talking to large crowd people, but in signing the prayer, I was attempting to break this fear by doing just what my fright was. This may have benefited me in the future by when I have to go up in front of the class for a presentation, by not being scared after being in front of over a thousand people. In that aspect, I was disappointed that I wasn't quite able