Ghost in the Projector?
What I got from being a church acolyte that has nothing to do with church
Originally published in Medium in October 2015.
I was an acolyte (altar boy) at my church growing up. Episcopal, moderately conservative, small-town mindset. (The church. And me, too.)
Father Hanner was our rector (head priest). He handled most of the training of the acolytes, teaching boys (we were all boys, this was the 60s and early 70s) how to support the celebrant during a communion service. And how to get up in front of people. And do stuff. Which, when you’re a kid, can be terrifying. Even when your family is there. Or sometimes especially when your family is there.
Even though we were a small church, we still had morning services Tuesdays and Fridays at 7 am. They were almost never well attended. Sometimes not at all. So when it was just the celebrant and the acolyte, it was easier to go over the fine points of the service — how to perform the ablution, when and how hard to ding the sanctus bell¹, when to flit the missal². And how it was never, ever going to be perfect.
Father Hanner didn’t believe in perfect. Father Hanner taught us that there was no wrong way to carry out a worship service to the greater glory of God. But there were ways of doing the service, and there were, um, other ways of doing the service. So if the host was elevated, and there was a pause… pause… pause… and the host starts to come down and then the sanctus bell is dinged, well, that wasn’t wrong, of course, but maybe next time we’ll ding the bell when the host is first raised up, eh?
Acolytes couldn’t mess up. We might think we messed up, but then Father Hanner would put his hand on our shoulder and tell us it was all okay, and tell us we had done everything fine, just different, and maybe next time we’d do it the old way, eh?
The congregation doesn’t pay attention to the fine points of the service. The missal doesn’t get moved from the left side of the altar to the right at the usual time? Nobody can tell, so long as no one makes a fuss or goes dashing up to the altar like there was a problem. The candles should be lighted five minutes before the service starts… or just as the choir processes in, that works too, so long as the acolyte who suddenly realized what time it was proceeds through the lighting as if this was just the normal way of doing things.
This wasn’t about getting every little detail just right, this was about praising God and coming together as a congregation. Big picture. Focus. Keep calm. Don’t sweat what just went wrong, it’s all good, think about what comes next.
By the time I was a senior in high school and had been through my share of services, from unattended zero-dark-thirty communions to high holy days with both choirs plus a bagpiper and folks elbow-to-elbow in the pews, I could handle anything going… not quite usual… right up to the altar catching on fire. (Fire extinguisher was back behind the bishop’s chair. Pull the ring, aim, give the fire short controlled bursts. Never used it, mind you, but everything would have been fine.)
Time went by. Fours years at the Naval Academy, ten years in the Navy. I didn’t go to church so much anymore, having become an agnostic, but I kept in touch with the old hometown. Father Hanner retired, then passed on. I got married, then divorced, then found my first civilian job since getting out of the service. And one day there I was, supporting my boss at an annual presentation to various execs.
I’d put everything into PowerPoint, with animations and builds and transitions and the whole bit. Today? Nobody cares. In 1992? It was pure freakin’ magic. Nobody had seen it before, and it was all projected onto a 30-foot screen. My boss did the talking (he was good at it). He also did the slideshow control. We’d rehearsed. We’d rehearsed again. He had a mouse with just one button, and he had the timing down so he knew when to press the button. It was smooth. It was awesome. We were pumped. We were cocky.
We were not even a little worried when the table on the stage in the auditorium was replaced with a podium on the day of the presentation.
During rehearsals, the table was too low, my boss had held the mouse (old mechanical mouse, the kind with the rubber ball inside). The podium, of course, was just the right height to set down the mouse, right next to the laptop running the presentation. So my boss set down the mouse, started talking, and at just the right moment, pressed the mouse button.
Nothing happened.
Wrong. The pointer jumped on the screen. He was moving the mouse as he clicked the button. PowerPoint thought he was trying to position the pointer. It ignored his mouse click.
Not covered in rehearsals.
Boss is looking at me. I am looking for… I have no idea. All that rehearsal, and now everything is going wrong. It’s all wrong. No way to fix it. All wrong.
And there was a hand on my shoulder, or the memory of a hand, and it’s all okay, and maybe it wasn’t going like it was in rehearsal, but it’s not wrong, it’s just not like we did in rehearsal. Everything is fine.
I stride up to the podium, make a show of picking up the mouse from the podium. I elaborately press the mouse button. The slide advances. The audience laughs.
And I unscrew the bottom of the mouse and remove the mouse ball. Now it’s just a button at the end of a cable.
I bow to my boss and hand him the mouse. My boss laughs and explains to the audience that his lack of technical ability is why he keeps tech guys like me on his staff. I sit down. The show goes on. My boss is tearing through the presentation just right, hitting the timing perfectly, not missing a thing. The audience is wowed.
And there was a hand on my shoulder, or the memory of a hand, and everything was fine, and maybe next time I’ll take the ball out of the mouse before the presentation, eh?
Thank you, Father Hanner.
¹The sanctus bell was (in our church) a five-pound bell that had its own special dinger (using the technical term) so as to achieve a deep, melodious semi-gong sound when properly struck. That went on for half a minute or so. The learning curve involved first, striking the bell properly with the dinger, and then moving a finger from the top of the bell to the bottom to damp the sound rather than suddenly cutting it off.
²The missal was the large-print book with all the appropriate services and readings in it. Sometimes it needed to be on the left side of the altar, sometimes on the right. One of the acolyte’s jobs was to carefully and properly flit — carry — the missal from one side to the other.
