33 SOCIAL EVENTS/RELIGIOUS/CHRISTENINGS

Not the friendliest of introductions to a religion. A strange man, wearing a dress, smelling of wafers and wine, pours several ladles of water over a baby’s head. No wonder they cry.
These ceremonies can go on a bit too. But the Hymns do relieve the tedium, particularly ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. In the third verse the lines ‘The purple headed mountain, The River running by’ are guaranteed to elicit schoolboy sniggering from even the weariest congregation. Baptisms have the widest range of ages of any religious gathering. Because of this a very rare type of dissonance occurs during the singing. Various styles of music compete to be heard; operatic soprano with crooning with rap with beat poet with lip sync. The cacophony is not unlike the augmented fourth or a diminished fifth. Not so much a tritone as a try tone, an acute straining to achieve tone. Not Diabolus in Musica but diabolical music. The only resolution this dissonance achieves is when the song finishes. To endure this every weekend is widely consider in ecclesiastical circles as the ultimate test of faith.