Msgr. M. Francis Mannion writes a question-and-answer column for Our Sunday Visitor. A layman wrote to him, saying his pastor had been complaining that lectors were doing a poor job. The pastor asked the layman to see what he could do to improve the lectors’ training, but he did not know where to start.
Mannion replied that lectors tend to “rush through the Scriptures without pauses, running the whole text together as if it were one sentence.” They should “take the periods, semi-colons, and commas seriously. When a reader has learned to read in a manner he or she thinks is painfully slow and marked by excessive pauses, then he or she is probably getting it just right.”
No, he or she isn’t.
Although I have heard a few lectors read lickety-split, that seems to be rare. Other failings are more common.
Some lectors seem not to be able to locate the microphone. They speak to its left or right or toward the ceiling or the floor but never directly into the microphone. (I even have seen a lector push the microphone away, as though it were intruding on his space.) These lectors’ voices carry to the front pews but not halfway to the vestibule.
Other lectors need to learn the meaning of the word enunciate. They speak as though it is a synonym of mumble. Their voices may carry to the back of the church, but many congregants are forced to reach for the missalettes so they can figure out what is being read to them.
Then there are lectors who need to practice in front of a mirror. They stumble over sentences that are above the Dick-and-Jane level, and they unfailingly mangle Old Testament proper names. They stop mid-sentence, back up, repeat what they just read, and then leave out a few words.
But none of those is the biggest problem I hear. Msgr. Mannion lives in Salt Lake City, and maybe people there speak very quickly, the way New Yorkers stereotypically do. But in the lower left-hand corner of the country where I live, the problem is not lectors who speak too quickly but lectors who speak too slowly.
Their enunciation is fine, but it is easy to enunciate well when sentences are chopped into three-word units and each unit takes five seconds to articulate. Msgr. Mannion says “take the periods, semi-colons, and commons seriously,” but this is dangerous advice to give to people who think a comma is an instruction to pause and take a deep breath.
Sure, listeners can lose the train of thought if a lector speaks too quickly, but they never catch the train of thought at all if the reading is over-dramatized into itty bits, and over-dramatizing is what happens when lectors think they need to sound like Tallulah Bankhead. She could pull it off, breathlessly. Modern lectors cannot, and they look silly trying to.
What they need to do is to read aloud at a normal reading pace, with normal reading pauses (very slight ones). Take it from a professional listener: Too fast is no good, but too slow is worse.