Liturgy and the Microphone Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Liturgy and the Microphone - Coursework Example Experience would tell me that an effective sermon touches certain domains of the mind and the heart and provokes past as well as present personal issues. These issues may refer to encounters of pain, happiness, or grief. Most of all, they refer to matters pertaining to spirituality and how it can be strengthened. Eliot describes such a phenomenon as the workings of the â€Å"auditory imagination† in which the mind seems to travel back in time and results in a merging of earlier and current times (qtd. in Mcluhan 107). As the words lull in the distance, a kind of progression takes place especially when the message is relevant to what has happened or what is presently happening in the person’s life. The microphone then is like an instrument in neuro-linguistic programming that is often used as a therapeutic intervention to deal with various psychological problems. By listening to a psychotherapist, the person is being guided to a particular place in his consciousness that will give him access to personal issues and gradually attempt to resolve them in the same plane. However, the depth of mental and emotional processing that will take place is still dependent on the listener’s willingness to focus on what is being said. If the person is not really interested in the message or is too distracted by other thoughts to allow anything else to sink in, the volume and quality of the sound produced through the microphone will not matter to any extent. As such, the microphone may involve a public address system during the mass, but the overall experience in consciousness is still private and individual. Similarly, I disagree with Mcluhan’s contention that the use of the vernacular pace through the microphone discourages meditation unlike what is happening during a relaxed Latin Mass (Mcluhan 110). Among all the church goers, only a few could comprehend Latin and cannot start then to