{"id":33185,"date":"2007-09-28T05:03:48","date_gmt":"2007-09-28T05:03:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2007\/09\/28\/church-words\/"},"modified":"2007-09-28T05:03:48","modified_gmt":"2007-09-28T05:03:48","slug":"church-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2007\/09\/28\/church-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Church Words"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you were to search the archives for &#8220;Church Voice&#8221;, you&#8217;d find quite a number of tales. There&#8217;s something about the particular combination of various social, parental, and priestly pressures on little kids that causes all sorts of bizarre things to happen.<\/p>\n<p>Not long ago, I was in church with my five year old. He was being extraordinarily attentive &#8211; even singing along with the songs. I was extremely impressed.<\/p>\n<p>When the passing of the peace arrived, however, things returned to normal. This is a part of the service where you are supposed to shake hands with everyone around you and say &#8220;peace be with you.&#8221; Of course, lots of people relax and say other things, but when the people around you are strangers, you really can&#8217;t go wrong by saying &#8220;peace be with you.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The big guy&nbsp;usually gets shy for this. He hides his head against me or says &#8220;hi&#8221; and attempts to wave instead of shaking hands. <\/p>\n<p>This time, however, he went for it. He nodded solemly to each person, shaking hands and saying in a very clear voice &#8220;Priest be with you.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>Oh well. That&#8217;s close enough, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you were to search the archives for &#8220;Church Voice&#8221;, you&#8217;d find quite a number of tales. There&#8217;s something about the particular combination of various social, parental, and priestly pressures on little kids that causes all sorts of bizarre things to happen. Not long ago, I was in church with my five year old. He [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,118,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-8Df","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}