Die naar mensenlijke gewoonte = According To Human Custom, 1975 - 1997

Western theology has traditionally referred to God as Who. The collect prayers of the Roman Missal, would usually begin, Almighty and ever-living God, who..... followed by some descriptive phrases about God's faithful presence among us. Oosterhuis uses this subordinate clause as the subjective phrase of many of his songs and tableprayers. A tableprayer or tablesong is an alternative name for a canon, anaphora or eucharistic prayer. In the Jewish tradition, tablesongs accompanied the blessings, courses and post-prandial thanksgiving festivities of the chaburah or friendship meal, which became known as the agape in the Greco-Christian tradition. These special meals with accompanying blessings, acclamations and songs, were the predecessors of the Christian eucharistic prayer. In the Early Church, table liturgies were accompanied by eucharistic (thanksgiving) songs of blessings and acclamations in which the entire assembly took an active part. It was only by the beginning in the 4th Century that these tables hymns disappeared, to be replaced by spoken monologues by the priest as presider, with only infrequent acclamations for the choir. The assembly's role virtually disappeared, reduced to silent observance. Oosterhuis, with Huijbers has restored this tradition of the tablesong belonging to the assembly.