Read Kate’s latest for The Tablet – The still small voice of God
A church musician speaks out on the unsettling problems with some of our translations
It’s holiday for the choir this month, which means I am much less busy than usual during Mass, and I don’t need to spend time in the week checking through the readings and choosing appropriate hymns. This is probably good for me, as it means I don’t start fretting about what is wrong with the new translation, but simply experience it on the fly like most people. I am already used to the St Paul reading being difficult to understand, even though I have the text in front of me, and I quite often have to look up the old version to check what it’s aiming at, but the first/Old Testament reading is usually not too bad. And yet I was jolted to hear the First Reading on the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time just recently, which is the beloved and familiar story of Elijah going off to Mount Horeb to wait for God to come and talk to him.
From inside the cave where Elijah has spent the night, God tells him to come out and stand before him (this is a wonderful and most exciting story, but a lot of it is missing from our Lectionary; it’s really worth looking it up). Elijah hears a mighty wind, then an earthquake, then a fire, but he doesn’t even come out of the cave for those, and the narrative says clearly and repeatedly that the Lord is not there in those mighty and loud events. It is only when he hears a “gentle breeze” (Jerusalem Bible and the RSV, that’s the words we are used to), that he comes out to encounter God.
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