Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.
Houston, TX: In the Latin Extraordinary Form of the Mass the sprinkling rite, known as the Asperges (sprinkling) begins with this verse from Psalm 51, well known to Laskoski’s students at WCC as the “hide thy face from Lasnoski psalm” for its length and the fear that we would all have to memorize it in class.
But in the verse itself, the idea of hiding one’s face goes quite well with the latest liturgical innovation IIT has taken note of, using a water gun to spray holy water rather than the aspergillum or “water-flinger-doohickey” whatever they call it.
“How can you ever get accuracy with that thing anyway?” asks our staff Average Muslim Liturgist of the past use of the asperges “Rather, with what Fr. Ferdy (Ferdinand) has been doing you can get the level of control over the distribution that every priest has been secretly craving their whole life. Get the sinner who needs it on the back of the head, wake up the teenager who’s a’dozin’ hard core, or scare one of your scrupulous parishioners by secretly ignoring them.”
As our Average Muslim Liturgist saw and recounts Fr. Ferdinand has thus introduced the use of a SuperSoaker(TM) this Easter season for the sprinkling rite at his Texas parish.
“It was a spur of the moment idea,” he admitted in an exclusive IIT interview, but “after reading Guardini’s Sacred Signs and the now-popular sequel Sacred Trends I realized that using a gun in this moment of the liturgy would do more than just entertain the children, it would symbolize that we’re taking the faith seriously again.”
Seriously, with “a press of the pump and a finger on the trigger,” he continues. “I’m thinking of using fireworks instead of incense next year to better represent the Resurrection.”
IIT fully supports this innovation after we discovered that this story is actually and literally true in the sense of being based on solid fact (the photo we reference of a priest in fact using a water-gun).
At press time, Fr. Ferdinand’s diocese is investigating reported injuries from his Easter Vigil bonfire, which was “innovatively” set as a full-size forest fire to “allow the full forest to give glory to God in elevating its nature.”