. . . in the opening of his epistle to all and sundry. Let them with ears hear.

1 Do not be too eager, brethren, to impart instruction to others; be sure that, if we do, we shall be called to account all the more strictly.

2 We are betrayed, all of us, into many faults; and a man who is not betrayed into faults of the tongue must be a man perfect at every point, who knows how to curb his whole body.

3 Just so we can make horses obey us, and turn their whole bodies this way and that, by putting a curb in their mouths.

4 Or look at ships; how huge they are, how boisterous are the winds that drive them along! And yet a tiny rudder will turn them this way and that, as the captain’s purpose will have it.

5 Just so, the tongue is a tiny part of our body, and yet what power it can boast! How small a spark it takes to set fire to a vast forest!

6 And that is what the tongue is, a fire. Among the organs of our nature, the tongue has its place as the proper element in which all that is harmful lives. It infects the whole body, and sets fire to this mortal sphere of ours, catching fire itself from hell.

Few months back — feels like yesterday — I signed on as a reader of Holy Scripture at Holy Mass, and pleased I am having done so. Kept to myself, however, my ordination long, long ago, as a lector (reader), in the conventional batch of “minor ordinations” as acolyte, lector, exorcist, and porter.

Those were the days. Tradition still reigned. It happened in our Southern Indiana stronghold, before the Big Three — subdeacon, deacon, priest, one-two-three.  Business-like. No whole year as a deacon, no. We Jesuits hadn’t time for that. Three years of theology, including moral in years one and two, making us ready to hear confessions, a third for more dogma, rubrics, and the like, and there we were, approved.

“Now go pray the mortal sin off your souls,” the drily humorous veteran Jesuit in charge of us in all things ritual announced in the sacristy after deacon ordination, which imposed our obligation to say the divine office, with priesthood coming the next day.

We’d been, most of us, 13 years in the making — one of us was 14 years, another 16, the first as a nonconformist of the first order, the other as an easy-going fellow, faithful to his calling, never quite on the mark in terms of achievement, eventually given his walking papers by superiors, I do not know why.

As for being a reader/lector in this Year of Our Lord, this is participation indeed, if for very few of us —  a primary goal of liturgical reformers for a very long time. Come on gates, let’s participate.

So here I am, six decades years later, with 20 or so years of railing against the ersatz version of the mass foisted on us by 20th-century troublemakers, now a minister in it — of a sort.

Not quite, recovering as I am from years in a new-mass wilderness, fending off irritation, making odious comparisons between the Latin mass of my youth and this version, I have become a sort of turncoat.

This transition, a turn-around of say, 45 degrees, has been made possible largely by finding new-mass worshipers paying traditional-mass attention and then some to what’s going on up front, a polyglot, technicolored congregation whose attention and reverence is, ah, ministerial.

But how about this reading by volunteers? How does that work? Leaving myself out of it — won’t say nothin’ without a lawyer — except to note that for the past 15 or 20 years I have found myself surrounded by more and more people who do not speak clearly and loudly enough. Top of that, they sometimes get irritated when I say “what?”

Giving into rank prejudice in the matter, I have spent thousands which I got back according to refund rules and hundreds more which I donated to the cause, not to mention countless hours figuring out how to make things work — do not call them solutions — that effectively put the blame on Yours Truly. It’s like learning how to drive a car.

That said, use grain-of-salt business and listen up. Reading by volunteers at mass has been a mixed bag. What isn’t? All in all, kudos to them all, which does not mean I’ve nothing more to say. Except it does.