Sunday, June 13, 2010

Curmudgeophan's "12 Things" #6 - What to Kiss and When


True story:
When a Bishop is serving the Liturgy, just before the Great Entrance (the procession through the congregation with the chalice and bread) he stands at the table of preparation and finishes his prayers of commemoration.  Everyone serving in the altar comes up to him, kisses his right shoulder and says their name, the Bishop prays for them and then they line up in their place for the procession.  

The clergy and altar servers were lining up and kissing the Bishop's shoulder.  The youngest altar server was a boy about 5.  He walked up to the Bishop and without hesitation, because he couldn't kiss his shoulder, kissed him where he could reach... on the right cheek of his butt, then said his name and took his place in line.  The Bishop looked over and smiled and said, "That boy is going to go far."

12 comments:

Benedict Seraphim said...

Life is better than fiction!

Larry Anderson said...

Classic! You can't make this stuff up...

(If this doesn't make it into the next version of Orthographs, I shall be severely disappointed.)

Fr. Christian Mathis said...

What if the bishop has his ring in his back pocket?

Steve Robinson said...

Fr. Christian, LOL! That's one of the nice things about the Orthodox bishops... no rings, we kiss the hand that blesses us, not the "symbol of authority" whether it's on the hand or elsewhere :) ... And we don't have back pockets in the vestments, maybe that's why the Byzantines designed them that way, although it doesn't seem to keep people from kissing the back pocket of clergy too :)

Anonymous said...

Wow. That is so unreal that you know it really happened. You just might have snopes investigating ;)

Steve Robinson said...

PH, Ohhhh... "Ortho-snopes". I feel a blog post coming. :)

ryan said...

Terribly funny. I usually refrain for LOL-ing. But in this instance, I LOL-ed.

mike said...

that iss awesome

Chocolatesa said...

Lolll!

Anonymous said...

I love this story!

Fr Nathan Thompson said...

I heard the story the Bishop said that the boy would go far in life, or something to that effect

Fr Nathan Thompson said...

I should have said, the way that I heard the story... Either way, it's hilarious.