Pick a Pericope

"To pick a pericope."

Ha-ha! I said that to my husband the other night, "I still have to pick a pericope."
And I started laughing at the tongue-twister. "To pick a pericope."

Now you must understand, pericope does NOT rhyme with periscope. It is from Greek, and, much like "Hermione" and "Socrates," it keeps its long ee sound at the end.
puh-RICK-oh-pee.
"Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pericopes...."

I am learning so many strange and fancy words. I guess every area of study has them, but good grief. My Doctrine professor says that we have them just so we can trot them out from time to time and impress people.

Hermeneutics. Homiletics. Ontology. "Semi-Palagianism," which I tried to make a pun out of last week, but it was too early in the morning. It was something about how Palagianism is a big problem in universities these days.... The prof mmm-hmm-ed and blended it into his lecture.

Oh well.

Oh yeah, In Greek last week, I started humming "Hagios" (a hymn with Greek lyrics) toward the end of class. I couldn't help it. It was running through my mind. So I mentioned how my church had had Greek and Hebrew hymns when I was a kid.
The professor looked tickled, "No kidding?"
So I mumbled out a bar or two.
Professor Hegedus grinned and said something like, "That's kinda neat," and looked thoughtful. Then he said, "It shows a certain reverence for the ancient texts."

Suddenly I was rather proud of my strange heritage. How many other kids did I know who had learned the ten commandments by heart in Hebrew? I held my head up a little higher.

The next thing I know, I'm humming old Hebrew hymns I haven't thought of for years.
The last time one was hauled out and dusted off in church I thought it was the stupidest thing ever. Now, I'm actually feeling grateful some of my weird chilhood.
So, once I was home, I dug out our old litugies. Sure enough, there was the super purist edition that printed the music backwards so that it ran the same way as the Hebrew writing. No English pronunciation offered to help anyone either. I guess that's when they suddenly stopped using the Greek and Hebrew hymns. The Greek hymns went left to right at least, but was still written only in Greek script.

So much for purism.
I showed the music to the Hebrew professor just to see what she thought. She was curious about maybe showing one or two to her class.
Too bad I couldn't come sing some to them, she said.
Hah! Right.
"Sorry, Greek teacher, I won't be in class today. I'll be down the hall, assisting the Hebrew teacher...."

Still, it was nice to feel special.