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Memory and Attention
I wonder if we might discuss the use of memory in the Christian life, and especially in worship, as well as means to increase attention in the services of the Church.
In my evangelical youth we always learned memory verses at Sunday School, and it was in my evangelical congregation that I can remember first learning the beginning of St John's Gospel.
I wonder, because I do not know, do Coptic youth learn passages of the Scripture by heart in Sunday School? Are there any Coptic Orthodox competitions organised around learning passages of Scripture?
I wonder how hard it would be to learn the Gospel of St Mark off by heart? There are 678 verses and 16 chapters. Would it be possible to learn 13 verses a week? Just about 2 verses a day? I wonder how our ancestors memorised Scripture, and I wonder what methods have been proved to work?
Father Peter
In my evangelical youth we always learned memory verses at Sunday School, and it was in my evangelical congregation that I can remember first learning the beginning of St John's Gospel.
I wonder, because I do not know, do Coptic youth learn passages of the Scripture by heart in Sunday School? Are there any Coptic Orthodox competitions organised around learning passages of Scripture?
I wonder how hard it would be to learn the Gospel of St Mark off by heart? There are 678 verses and 16 chapters. Would it be possible to learn 13 verses a week? Just about 2 verses a day? I wonder how our ancestors memorised Scripture, and I wonder what methods have been proved to work?
Father Peter
Comments
I have ten Psalms memorized. They help me in the most difficult moments. It can be done, but it requires a great deal of effort.
There are competitions, but they are just that--competitions. The impetus to learn is for competition's sake and not the spiritual full regard (at least in my feeble opinion).
I learned the given Psalms because I felt a need for it in my life. It is no different than memorizing things for my given vocation.
It has to become a necessity.
Learning the Gospel of St. Mark sounds difficult and rewarding. Can we start a memorization club on the forum? Each week we learn 13 verses and you can give us electronic candy as encouragement :)
It should take about 52 weeks (13 months). I'm excited!
I have 8 psalms memorized. I don't know why I said that. I like to piggy back on ilovesaintmarks posts.
I am not in favour of competitions from the point of view of them being engaged in for the wrong reasons, but I suppose that on balance I would prefer anything which encouraged youth to memorise Scripture so that as they grew older it was hidden within their heart and ready to be drawn upon.
Since the Ethiopian tradition seems even now to be very much rooted in memorisation and oral instruction I wonder when the Coptic tradition ceased to be? Would it have started to decline with the introduction of mechanical printing?
How many hymns does an average servant have off by heart? And how many did your grandfathers and great-grandfathers? And how many those who lived 500 years ago? I would appreciate your opinion. Has there been a decline from a Golden Age? Was there never a Golden Age? Is the present widespread interest in hymns the same as the attitude of previous generations?
Father Peter
I bet Thoxsasi has an app for it too.
Kidding!
I wonder if we might discuss the use of memory in the Christian life, and especially in worship, as well as means to increase attention in the services of the Church.
In my evangelical youth we always learned memory verses at Sunday School, and it was in my evangelical congregation that I can remember first learning the beginning of St John's Gospel.
I wonder, because I do not know, do Coptic youth learn passages of the Scripture by heart in Sunday School? Are there any Coptic Orthodox competitions organised around learning passages of Scripture?
I wonder how hard it would be to learn the Gospel of St Mark off by heart? There are 678 verses and 16 chapters. Would it be possible to learn 13 verses a week? Just about 2 verses a day? I wonder how our ancestors memorised Scripture, and I wonder what methods have been proved to work?
Father Peter
Yes - of course.
Learning the Psalms off by heart is HUGE in the CoC.
Its taken very seriously in fact.
Those who won the competitions for learning them all off by heart are extremely successful in life.
Memorising the Psalms only does you a world of spiritual and mental good.
Memorizing the Bible is brilliant also - but.. its not that easy.. is it?
What does it mean to 'know' a hymn?
These are open questions not statements.
Father Peter
Relative to a question you posed about the printing of books in Egypt, and as a direct response on this thread, the printed book was introduced with the Napoleonic Invasion of Egypt. The first printing press was brought in by his generals and it was greeted at the train station by deacons, priests, and bishops with chanting and hymnal heralding. It was is if a Feast Day had arrived. I am privy to this description, since my dad had allowed me to help him with the preparation of his Doctoral Dissertation which was entitled: The Role of the Press in the Politics of Egypt (from the Napoleonic era to the time of Sadat). With the advent of the printing press in Egypt in the very ending of the 18th Century there came newspapers and periodicals.
In the regard of books, they were written and copied by hand. Unfortunately, many were destroyed relative to the monks lacking firewood to make the bread for the sacrifice for the Liturgy. Many ancient works were lost because of this simple act.
My parents learned their verses purely by repetition and the difficulty in procuring copies of the Holy Bible. Again, necessity dictates the path towards memorization. Many of the sermonists were engaging to the congregations in order to have them complete Biblical verses as they were rendered in sermons and homilies. It was a way of keeping the attention of the people.
I have memorized different things relative to interest and necessity.
I can chant the Matins Doxology as I prepare the Altar for the Raising of the Incense--as an example. This came from necessity. I had to do this to be able to have everything ready for the start at 5 AM.
If I were to give an opinion and devise my own superlative, I would say that the 3rd and 4th centuries were the "Diamond/Platinum Age". We are fortunate to be living in the Golden Age of the Church under the Papacy of Pope Shenouda. There are many difficulties, and I have pronounced many of them in my frustration, but under his fatherhood we are seeing a revitalization that has not been seen in 16 centuries. The Islamic Invasions, literally, buried us in the sand. The door to the Golden Age was heralded by Pope Kyrillos VI (of thrice blessed memory) and the march through the doorway by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III (God grant him many a peaceful years).
As it is I can copy anything and everything electronically in seconds, and print anything in minutes, and I wonder if I value texts that are produced in such a way?
Father Peter
Would you mean learning caligraphy and scribe effects or just direct penmanship copying?
There are 3,779 verses in the four Gospels. If a person took four years to carefully copy the Gospels then it would be 2.5 verses a day.
What a wonderful thing if this were to be the fruit of several years of care and devotion for many Coptic Orthodox.
Father Peter
But I think that it is possible for anyone to write 2.5 verses with great care, in a consistent round hand. Such a volume should not be written like lecture notes, but as if we were writing down the most important words that had ever been spoken - as indeed we would be. The very practice of creating such a volume, and of taking great care over each letter, would be an aspect of our spiritual ascesis, and would create an almost priceless spiritual object which would bear within itself the hours that had been spent prayerfully in producing it.
Father Peter
Guess what? The Chinese are taking over the world. So brush off and clean those plumes to write Chinese characters. While they are out, try a verse or two (in English would be okay).
Oh sorry, for those of you that don't speak Chinese, I said: I heard that when the Bible was being translated to Greek, the Fathers would stand up and use a different pen to write God's Name.
Fr Peter,
I would say that with the introduction to technology(its best use in the church) that alhan and the hymns have had a re-birth so to speak. More so in the diaspora than in Egypt. In Egypt each church has a cantor or teacher and its their job to keep the hymns and know whats going on so the interest may not be there so much. In the diaspora on the other hand, I would say that for people my age(20's) to around 18-16 is where the peak of hymn interest and passion is. It is reaching a peak here as well where the kids aren't taking as much interest as my generation did simply because there is no need.
A lot of youth and young men around my age + or - a few years almost had to learn hymns because there was no one else to lead. This "forced" learning simply for the sake of being able to carry a liturgy or service without any hitches probably brought on the passion. I have yet to meet someone who takes the time to learn a hymn long or short and say that they don't love it.
As far as memorization goes, you will find that its hard to not memorize our hymns. The long melismatic hymns for pascha you have to memorize simply because thats the nature of the beast. Other hymns are memorized due to repetition, such as the hiten's or other simple hymns in the liturgy. Same thing goes with the midnight praise although that is tougher because of the huge amount of tunes and hymns so you will probably find a book always open even if you have 80% memorized just as a safety net.
Pray for me
Memorising Mark: I started to memorise the first 13 verses last night, and by the time I went to sleep I had the first 8 verses pretty well remembered, and whenever I woke in the night I recalled these verses. This morning I have added the other 5 verses, so that I can now recall the first 13.
I was reading some material last night on memorising Scripture and it seems that a passage must be recalled 100 times or so to become really fixed. I am recalling this weeks passage many times. It seems better to me that having been able to remember these 13 verses I now stick with them and really seek to memorise them. 10 times a day over a week is 70 times. It should be fairly well stuck in there by next Wednesday!
I have chosen the NKJV version. My research suggested it is best to stick with one version.
When I start next week's 13 verses I will also continue to intermittently recall this week's.
It seems to me that it might be easier for me to learn a chunk of 13 verses a week rather than 2 a day. Since I will then be recalling a whole narrative section. This first chapter may take 3 or 4 weeks since it is 3.5 * 13 verses long = 45 verses.
There are 15,000 words in the Gospel of St Mark. This means about 2.5 hours worth of speaking. It seems to me that it would be a wonderful, wonderful blessing to be able to recall a whole Gospel and have 2.5 hours of Scripture to draw on. It does not seem to me that this is a difficult challenge, but it is a very hard one that requires a great deal of effort.
One thing I have been deliberately doing is asking the intercession of St Mark before I begin each period of rememberance and recall, and I have been praying for grace to accomplish this work. It seems to me that it must be set in the context of spirituality and prayer if it is to truly succeed and be a worthy offering of time and effort to our Lord. It seems fitting that as a priest of the Coptic Orthodox Church I should make this effort to memorise the Gospel which was written by the Apostle to Egypt. It must have been especially well known and much loved in the earliest years of the Coptic Church, as belonging to the one who brought the Gospel to them.
Father Peter
For example, I know roughly that John 17 is about the vine dresser and the vine.. (I think).. but I don't remember at all the verse.
Also, there's a Christian Apologist called Dr Michael Brown who is in fact a Messianic Jew. You have to hear this man talk. He's stunning.
The way he manages to throw in a Bible verse (quoting chapter and verse) in an argument or in defence of Christian beliefs, is truly amazing.
There's a lot of skills you can adopt to help you retain Bible quotes. I'll post them later if you want.
I remember him saying how difficult it was but I don't know if he was a believer or whether a believer would find it more meaningful and therefore easier to memorise.
There is a 2 page interview here with him about it...
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/18/theater/theater-the-gospel-according-to-alec-mccowen.html
Here doesn't appear to be a believer. A deist of sorts. But he shows that it is possible to memorise the whole book and recall it in an entirety since he did it regularly.
Indeed until the advent of printing this is pretty much what everyone did. The story tellers, the minstrels, the bards, the recorders of important events. It was all stored in the heart and mind. I remember reading somewhere that to become a Pharisee you had to learn all of the Psalms by heart. Certainly it seems to me that in the old monasteries at the long night-time services the monks were not using books. There were too few and it was too dark to read. So it was all by heart. And part of the apprenticeship of the novice was learning all of the spiritual craft by heart.
The pagan druidic class in Britain wrote none of their lore down. It was all remembered and took years and decades to learn.
Father Peter
http://markompany.org.uk/alec mc.htm
He says it took him two hours a day to learn three verses a day.
At six o’clock in the morning, on 17 August 1976, I started to learn St Mark’s Gospel – sitting up in bed in my new flat. I learnt three verses. It took about two hours.
And I continued to learn an average of three verses every morning. And it usually took two hours.”
“For some reason, I remember vividly certain solitary lunches during this period – on what I called St Mark days. Because once the Gospel had hooked me, I would often work on it during the day as well as early in the morning: reviewing the chapters already learnt, and reading to find out what was ahead. I started to buy books about St Mark; commentaries on St Mark; other translations of St Mark; commentaries on St Mark; other translations of St Mark. And I would have lunch in a workmen’s café in Earls Court, and drink rough red wine, and I remember feeling blissfully happy.”
It seems to me that it is well worth following his example and studying St Mark's Gospel as well as memorising it. Indeed this is one of the reasons to want to memorise it.
Learning St Mark took me sixteen months and, for the most part, was a great pleasure. It was a pleasure because, as I have already written, until I learnt the lines, I didn’t fully understand them. Until I was forced to examine each sentence with the utmost care, I didn’t understand the choice of words or the construction.
At first, for instance, I was depressed by the continual repetition of ‘He said unto them’ or ‘He answered and said unto them’ or ‘And Jesus answering saith unto them’, until I realised that there was a pattern to the choice of these phrases; and that Mark used the first phrase in an ordinary exchange, the second phrase if Jesus was making a particular point, and the last phrase is usually spoken when Jesus completely routs his questioners. Then, later I discovered a further reason to love the constant repetition of these prosaic phrases and to gather enormous energy from them.
Learning St Mark was a revelation. A revelation of an extraordinary man; of extraordinary events; of extraordinary hope. And learning St Mark in the King James Version revealed a blunt and direct, almost naïve style, which is sometimes consciously humorous, and often impressively particular in detail. Whether or not you are ‘a believer’, it is impossible to study St Mark carefully and not know – without any shadow of doubt – that something amazing happened in Galilee two thousand years ago.”
If a man who is not entirely a believer, and certainly not Orthodox or even orthodox, can find such value in learning St Mark's Gospel by heart, how much more should we?
In fact I have just bought a cheap second-hand copy of this actor's autobiography because I wanted to read more of how his learning St Mark's Gospel affected him.
Father Peter
It would be very interesting to learn how the Ethiopian community memorises the texts you describe. What techniques are traditionally used?
God bless you
Father Peter
I wish there was a standard, agreed translation of the scriptures.
When I became Orthodox I used the HT monastery translation of the psalms and memorised a few of those except psalm 22(23) in the AV (KJV) which I learned as a small boy.
I personally think the NKJV is good because it modernises the KJ and keeps some of the rhythms of the original.
However, my church continues to use the AV when using English. I see nothing wrong with the dignity and modernity of the NKJV. I do feel that without an agreed translation I am less motivated to commit myself to memorisation on the scale you are talking about.
Aidan, most materials produced by the Coptic Orthodox Church in English seem to use the NKJV, so it is pretty much a defacto standard. The books of the Katamarous that I have in my own congregation are all NKJV. My bishop prefers the KJV, but I think that the NKJV is a reasonably good compromise between the rhythm and cadence of the KJV and ease of comprehension and memorisation.
One of my fellow BOC congregations has just bought lots of the HTM Psalter, so I imagine that this will be our preferred use of Psalms and will appear in our prayer books over time. I agree with you that a great variety of translations in liturgical use is not helpful, I am always concerned that a weak version be adopted as authoritative. Throughout Orthodoxy it sometimes seems that English translations are never shown to a proficient native English speaker before being printed.
Father Peter
As for Psalms we had one nice idea from one of our priests. He wanted to have all the kids remember one psalm every month for ALL the sunday school classes. It was a huge succes.
We made up tunes to fit the words and all the kids learned about 4-5 psalms in that year. They got little presents if they knew it, and by the end of the year they got an extra gift if they remember everything they learned that year. Memorizing psalms is an amazing thing, and a catchy tune makes it ten times easier, especially for young kids.
We tried to do at least one psalm for every agpeya hour so that they would be able to pray the majority of the canonical hours throughout the day by knowing the intro (thanksgiving prayer + psalm 50 are generally known) + 1 psalm + the absolution for every hour). It's a huge blessing to have these prayer in your memory, and by praying them daily you don't forget them.
My priest is very focussed on learning large amounts of verses from important chapters in the bible, and he tries to have the servants learn to do the same. I remember once we were doing a bible study on Ephesians and he made us memorize about 1/3 from each chapter (the so called "golden sections"). We had a few months, and the way I learned them was by printing it out, having it in my pocked and read it a few times a day.
Repetition is a great way to learn. I think we all know this from the agpeya gospel parts. The majority of people I know have the 3rd and 6th hour gospel memorized due to the many times they hear / read it.
Just my 2 pennies