Tale of Two Synods: Ladyaphora Edition

In a recent post, I pointed out that sometimes there is a superfluous ritual of laying on of hands during installation services. This one goes even further by including a lay participant in the extraneous rite of manual imposition.

A few years ago, I took part an ordination in which a vicar inexplicably participated in the laying on of hands - which was weird given that vicars have not received ordination to the Holy Office themselves, and this layman was thus purporting to give a gift that he himself didn’t yet possess. Even his lack of wearing a stole was a visual clue virtually screaming out to anyone with eyes to see that this was incongruent - like the old Sesame Street jingle, “One of These Things is Not Like the Other.”

The following video is a recent installation of a pastor that includes one of those laying on of hands scrums, with all the clergy huddling around the man being installed. There are also individual blessings given by the pastor’s peers in the office, spoken with a laying on of hands of each man individually.

Only this one includes the laying on of hands and a blessing given by a lady layman.

As the late Reverend Professor Kurt Marquart was wont to ask rhetorically, “What can one say?”