Yesterday I was at Mar Thoma as usual, but I was giving out questionnaires on Qurbana experience to the youth. I got 62 surveys back and did one interview of a young CCD teacher who got so emotional talking about the East Syrian rite that she started trembling and forgot about the meeting she was supposed to go to.
A girl in my friend's 9th grade class diffidently asked me for my autograph after she had filled out the questionnaire. Bemused, I ended up writing in the front of her CCD notebook thanking her for her help with my research and invoking God's blessings on her. Her answers to the questionnaire were really wise and beautiful.
A young man who just got back from five years in India started teaching me Malayalam. (I had to work hard to make him believe I actually planned to learn it, first.) Nandi!
Today I'm tabulating the results and looking for correlations between the young people's birth place, command of Malayalam, and preferred mass and their way of speaking about the experience of worshiping in the Syro-Malabar rite. I'm having a blast.
I actually think that the reason I'm enjoying this so much is very similar to the reason that Michelle likes washing mugs: each questionnaire, with its handwriting, its unique phrasing, its biographical information, and its futile attempt to constrain the spiritual life to a few brief lines, gives me some insight into the complexity of the wonderful people I've met at Mar Thoma and their relationship to their unique and beautiful liturgical tradition.
1 comment:
Wow, Kim, an autograph? You're awesome! :)
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