Resources
Many informative articles were published in our parish newsletters in the years prior to Covid. Email to the friends and faithful of Holy Cross has replaced our newsletters, but we have collected many of the articles here. Use the indexes below to find articles on the topic or the author you’re interested in. (Once you click on a topic or author, scroll to the bottom of the page to see the search results.)
Also, have a look at the Recommended Readings on the OCA (Orthodox Church in America) website for a list of books covering a wide range of topics. Essential Orthodox Christian Beliefs: A Manual for Adult Instruction is also available for free download on the OCA’s website.
(Speaking of our parent jurisdiction, the OCA traces its origins to the arrival in Kodiak, Alaska in 1794 of eight Orthodox missionaries from the Valaamo Monastery in the northern Karelia region of Russia. Today, the OCA includes some 700 parishes, missions, communities, monasteries, and institutions throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico.)
We hope you’ll find these suggested readings to be both edifying and encouraging!
On Standing in Church
It all begins with an idea.
The Very Rev. John Ealy
One of the first things that surprises a newcomer to a traditional Orthodox Church is the absence of pews or rows of chairs. The nave seems so empty. What do people do? They stand! How odd!
Did you know that all Orthodox Christians, east and west, always stood until the 16th century Protestant Reformation? Protestantism replaced the altar as the focus of sacramental life, with the pulpit as a focus of intellectual life. Instead of the offering of bread and wine, there was the offering of a lecture, a sermon. The congregation listens and, for the first time in history of Christianity, they sat down. The Church was transformed into a classroom, a lecture hall, with benches and lecterns. This radical change in architecture manifested a deeper shift in Western Christianity's idea of God and how we worship Him.
In Orthodox terms, worship has always been a liturgical invocation of personal, Trinitarian presence. In Christ through the Holy Spirit we enter the life of the Trinity. God is accessible to the whole man, body, mind and spirit. On the other hand Western worship has become an academic and intellectual discussion, largely dependent on a moral exhortation. In this situation worship becomes an affair of the mind or the intellect. This is not worship because it deals only with the mind.
Western churches that do have liturgy followed the general Protestant example of having pews. In these cases liturgy became not only an intellectual activity of the mind but also a spectator activity of the church goer. Active participation in worship becomes impossible as people become confined to rigid and limited space. Liturgy with all its rites becomes about God and is no longer of God. When this happens Liturgy, according a prominent Western Roman Catholic Liturgical theologian, "shifts toward being some form of education done in a doxological context for ideological ends, then significant mutations begin to occur. Concepts become more precise, the assembly more passive, ministries more learned, sermons more erudite, and pews fixed." (On Liturgical Theology, by Aidan Kavanagh)
Orthodox Liturgy is called divine because it is of God and not about Him. It is the experience of God with us, giving Himself to us through word, hymn, action, rite, etc. All of which are of God because they are inspired by the Holy Spirit. In order for us to participate in this divine action, Orthodox do not merely stand in church.. There is a continuing dynamism, and movement on the part of the congregation. This is often quite distracting to westerners because liturgy or going to church for them has become an educative process that excludes movement. In Orthodox divine services the believer, the total person, worships using all their senses. In other words the total person is involved not only their mind. Orthodox worship is natural, spontaneous, and genuine. There is movement about the temple before and during the Liturgy. People do deep bows and prostrations. At certain points the entire congregation moves forward. during a censing of the temple the people move to the center of the church. During the entrances the priest moves among the people. There is no rigidity here, no confinement, no sterility, only the freedom to involve our whole person in worship. Of course all this can become an idol and done for the incorrect reasons.
Here in America, Orthodox Christians had an inferiority complex and had to imitate and fit in with their Protestant and Roman neighbors. We appeared foreign and tried to imitate their worship patterns. As a result pews became fixed, organs, choir robes etc. appeared on the Orthodox scene. There are definite reasons why they did not exist in Orthodox Worship, just as they did not exist in Biblical worship of the Old Testament. Biblical worship, Old and New Testament of God and not about Him. It is God given.
The real issue is not sitting and sanding. Orthodox Churches always provided places for the elderly, the sick, the infirm and pregnant and nursing mothers a place to sit. At times the congregation is directed to sit outside of non- Eucharistic services for psalmody, scripture readings, and for the sermon. For the reading of the Gospel one always stands. For the healthy standing was always the norm.
Standing is the norm because Orthodox Worship is liturgy. Liturgy means a common work of a group of people gathered together for a common purpose. One when one is involved in a specific work, or even a game such as baseball or basketball, it is impossible to be involved to work at the game and be sitting or even confined to a certain area. One needs the freedom to move around. In worship, if it is really liturgical and done liturgically, one needs this freedom to work or to liturgize. It is hard work and sitting in rigidly fixed pew that confine and do not permit one to work at Liturgy. Our common goal involves work and in this work we ascend to the Father in Christ through the power of the Spirit. Our Liturgy is literally heaven on earth. Christ is truly in our midst and where He is there is His Father. This is not an endeavor of relaxation.
This is true of all Orthodox worship, not only the Eucharistic Liturgy. All Liturgy is work. It is God's work done in His Church.. We enter into His presence and when we are there we stand in awe and respect of His presence in our midst.
On Keeping Vigil
It all begins with an idea.
Fr. Christopher Foley
“Christian Liturgy publicly feasts the mystery of our salvation already accomplished in Christ, thanking and glorifying God for it so that it might be intensified in us and communicated to others for the building up of the Church, to perpetual glory of God's Holy Name.”
- Robert Taft
What is unique about our worship? Why is it so important for us to participate in the liturgical life of the Church? If Robert Taft is correct, then there is something that happens when we enter into the feasts of the Church. There is something that we enter into and are changed as a result. This “something” is an experience of Christ Himself. As we are about to celebrate our patronal feast, it is important for us to be reminded about why our participation is so vital to our spiritual lives.
One of the distinguishing characteristics about Orthodox liturgical worship is its preparation and fulfillment. Every feast has a prefeast, or a time leading up to the feast. Then we have the feast itself, and then the leave-taking , or the conclusion of the feast. This is seen most poignantly in the Vigil of the feast and the feast day Divine Liturgy itself. In the Orthodox Church every Eucharistic liturgy, strictly speaking, should be preceded by vigil and prayer. A vigil consists in our "keeping watch" as the disciples did in the upper room awaiting the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Early Christians spent the whole night in preparation awaiting the coming of the risen Lord. This was a unique phenomenon in Christianity. Fr. John Ealy expresses this important component in Orthodox Christian worship: "The word vigil itself comes to us from the Latin military term it means a state of alarm and of mobilization. It became connected with the night. It became a negation of that which the natural world did. The world slept but the Christian did not do what others naturally did. The Christian was awake and waiting for the coming of the Bridegroom who comes in the middle of the night (See Matthew 25:1-13). While all go to sleep the Church gathers and watches and waits for the coming of the Bridegroom, Christ. All this at night because night is spent in expectation, while others are asleep and weak. The Christian becomes a partaker of a life not dependent upon this world and death.
“The life of a Christian is the new life of Christ, the Bridegroom, the life that will be experienced in the Eucharist. Christians spend that time which precedes the Eucharist in prayer and expectation. What the Christian does in vigil points to the future. It points to the coming of Christ in the Eucharist at the Divine Liturgy, but it also points to the time of the future when Christ will come again in all His glory, in His second coming. This is already experienced here and now in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the experience now of that which is to come. Our vigil of expectation is fulfilled in the Eucharist. That fulfillment is always Christ, being with Him at the table in His Kingdom in the Divine Liturgy. There can be no vigil without the Eucharist and no Eucharist without a vigil."
Clearly our personal preparation encompasses a part of this vigil-keeping, but in our liturgical tradition, there is always a Vigil service on the eve of any major feast as well as on Saturday evenings. In many places the Vigil has been reduced to Great Vespers, or fallen into disuse entirely.
The Vigil, or sometimes called the All-Night Vigil, consists of the combination of Vespers and Matins into one service. The combination of these two services brings us from the night into the day. It is the Light of Christ that begins to dawn in our hearts as the darkness dissipates. It is at this service that the "meat" of the feast is heard in the hymns. This is where we begin to participate in the Life-giving events of our salvation. This is exactly where we, as the body of Christ, come together to prepare to meet Christ Himself in the feast. It is our preparation together, or vigil, that the experience of the feast becomes more intensified and communicated to us in a deeper way. We don't come to Church to fulfill an obligation, or to say "we went to church today." It is much more than that. We come to Church to participate in Christ Himself, who is our Life. It is our secularism that somehow manages to convince us that these are optional if it "fits into my schedule." It is secularism that makes us think that even by going to Church we have fulfilled our religious obligation. We cannot accept this premise as Orthodox Christians. All these things are given to us for our salvation. Legalism should never be the issue when it comes to Church attendance and participation in the services. Christ desires that we be "true worshipers" who "worship Him in spirit and truth" (John 4:23).
We will be celebrating the Vigil of the Universal Exaltation of the Precious and Life-creating Cross of our Lord on September 13. I would encourage everyone who can to come so that together we may enter into the feast. This is our patronal feast. Our Bishop has given us this feast as our name. This means that we will always in some way draw our identity from it. The feast is a wonderful one. We celebrate the Cross of our Lord. We feast Christ Himself and the salvation won for us on that cross. And because of this, our own “crosses,” our daily trials, now have the potential to bring us to Christ who is our Life. The hymns are full of joy and exuberance over the Cross as a “token of victory,” a “weapon of peace.” By spending some time with the texts from this service before attending, our ears and hearts will be better attuned to the message of the feast. You can find them at: http://oca.org/Mdtexts.asp?SID=13.
Scroll down to September 14th to download the texts and try to incorporate them into your own prayers and meditation this month.
Here are a few selections from the Vigil service:
Let all the trees of the wood rejoice, for their nature is sanctified by Christ. He planted them in the beginning, and on a tree was outstretched. At its exaltation on this day, we worship Him and magnify you.
The cross is raised up as a sacred horn of strength to all God's people, whose foreheads are marked with it. By this, all the horns of the spiritual powers of wickedness are crushed. At its exaltation on this day, we worship Him and magnify you.
Not allowing the deadly bitterness of the tree to remain, Thou didst utterly destroy it with the cross, as of old the wood once destroyed the bitterness of the waters of Marah, prefiguring the strength of the cross which all the powers of heaven magnify.
Today Thou hast raised us up again through the cross, O Lord. For we were plunged forever into the gloom of our forefather, unrestrained greed thrust our nature down into delusion: but now we have been restored to our full inheritance by the light of Thy cross which we faithful magnify.
Today the death that came to mankind through eating of the tree, is made of no effect through the cross. For the curse of our mother Eve that fell on mankind is destroyed by the fruit of the pure Mother of God whom all the powers of heaven magnify.
The Cross is the guardian of the whole earth; the Cross is the beauty of the Church. The Cross is the strength of kings; the Cross is the support of the faithful. The Cross is the glory of angels, and the wonder of demons.
The degree to which we are able to spend time personally preparing for the feast will be the degree to which we will be able to experience the joy of the feast. It all takes work, but it is important to remember that the word liturgy itself has a connotation of a corporate work done together for a purpose, and what greater purpose than the glorification of God. We can even attend the services, but never really come to Liturgy because we are not Liturgizing, we are not working to offer a sacrifice of praise. Let us remember how important it is to have a vision of why we do what we do, and work hard to make this a reality in our lives. We come to Vigil, and Great Vespers, in order to prepare ourselves for the Eucharist, for Christ as the "coming one" will rise in our hearts as we partake of Him in the Eucharist. We are then filled with the joy of the Kingdom and bring Him into this world to share with others the joy of the feast. “Rejoice, O Life-bearing cross!”
Today the Cross is exalted and the world is sanctified. For Thou who art enthroned with the Father and the Holy Spirit, hast spread Thine arms upon it and drawn the world to knowledge of Thee, O Christ. Make worthy of divine glory those who have put their trust in Thee.
How We Worship: The Struggle of the American Experience
It all begins with an idea.
Fr. Christopher Foley
December 2006
Fr. George Florovsky once said that “Christianity is a liturgical religion” and because of this “worship comes first.” If worship is primary, then how we worship determines and expresses what we believe, and what we believe determines and expresses how we worship. This is summed up in the expression “the rule of faith is the rule of prayer and the rule of prayer is the rule of faith” – lex orandi lex credendi est. The Church has always understood itself as a worshiping community. We are not a “mystery cult” that does liturgical actions on behalf of itself or to remember certain events from the past. Nor is our worship simply one of many things that we do as part of our weekly activities. The word liturgy comes from the word, leitourgia, which literally means “the work of God’s people.” We come together to be what we can never be alone, the body of Christ, the Church. It is in our corporate worship that we become who we truly are - members of one another in God’s Kingdom (Ephesians 4:4,15,16). From early on in the history of the Church, this corporate worship was centered around Christ’s Body and Blood offered and distributed at the Eucharist.
We live in the United States of America at the beginning of the 21st century. We are a product of a modern secularized society that prides itself on individual rights. There are many wonderful things about being raised in America, but also many problems. As Orthodox Christians living in the West, we are faced with many complex ethical and moral dilemmas. The beauty of our Orthodox Tradition is that it has always engaged the cultures it found itself in always trying to find a way for Christ to be incarnated (contextualized) in a particular culture. This being said, how do we properly engage our culture with the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ? How much do we allow our culture to dictate how we worship, live, and conduct ourselves? Where should we draw the line between “relevance” and drawing people to a "higher" standard. What is the proper balance? This can be a hard road to navigate, but I think there are some specific things we can say that can aid us in contemplating this question.
There are no individuals in the Church. We are not autonomous beings who come to Church in order to get our needs met. This is an aspect of our Orthodox self- understanding that sets us apart in our American Christian culture. We are connected to one another. We worship together. We are saved together in the Church. We are members of one another in the body of Christ. Mainline Christianity in America assumes that we are selfsufficient individuals and all we need is "me, God, and the Bible." This is very different than our historical, Orthodox Christian Faith. The Church is made of persons created in the image and likeness of God that come together to be what they cannot be alone, the body of Christ, which is the one body, confessing the one Christ, celebrating the one Eucharist at the one altar, worshiping with one voice.
What does it mean to be American and Orthodox? Do we have a responsibility to communicate this Faith to an American audience? What does that look like? Yes, we need to be concerned with a uniquely American Orthodox Church that takes the best that this culture has to offer (language, architecture, music, etc.), BUT we need to be very careful to differentiate what in this culture is also at odds with our Orthodox worldview (secularism, individualism, commercialism, materialism, etc.). Our worship should first and foremost reflect this. We are not individuals who come to Church as spectators to be entertained by a talented and aesthetically-pleasing choir (even though we have one). We don't come to Church to watch a spiritual "professional" do the services for us. We don't come to Church as "non-spiritual lay people" that just sit and watch a "spiritual" play and performance. We don't come to hear a skilled orator talk for 45 minutes and give us an inspiring and talented talk. Our worship is quite the opposite. It is communal and corporate. We worship together as the "priesthood of all believers" offering up with one voice our sacrifices of praise, doxology, and thanksgiving, eucharistia. We are all concelebrants in this heavenly worship. We all are participants in this angelic worship around the Throne of God. This is precisely why we stand for worship. We come together to worship with one voice in the presence of God. Scripturally speaking, the two postures for worship are on one's face in prostration or standing with faces turned towards the great I AM with arms outstretched.
Our worship is corporate, free, and involves the whole community. Everyone, including small children, participates for the Eucharist is our family meal. In the early second century there was a document in the Church called The Shepherd of Hermas, in which the Church is compared to a tower built of stone. From far away it looks as if it is built of one large stone, but on close inspection it is made up of little jagged stones all fit together to build one tower. All perfect round stones were rejected because they would not fit together with the other jagged stones. Round stones could represent in our time rugged individualism, or people that are self-sufficient and do not need others. No tower can be built with these stones. The Church is built of persons, or jagged stones, fit together in order to build a strong tower, a beacon of light in this darkened world. The point here is that the tower is not one stone carved to look like tower, but it is many stones that constitute the one tower.
Let us be attentive enough to understand the subtle ways that our culture can influence even how we think of Church, especially our worship. The Church is to change us and provide a place where we realize our true vocation, which is a priest of creation offering the world back to God in thanksgiving, our participation in Christ. The Church is our life in Christ and should shape and inform every area of our life. We are Orthodox Christians who live in North America and uniquely experience the Orthodox Church in an American context. We are not American Orthodox. We are not hyphenated Orthodox Christians who define ourselves primarily by an ethnic identity and then try to fit our Orthodoxy into that designation. The Church has even condemned as heresy the identification of Christianity primarily in ethnic terms - phyletism. There is nothing wrong with saying "American Orthodox Church", "Greek Orthodox Church". etc., as long as one understands that this is the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Orthodox Church as found in a particular geographic area (America) and incarnating itself in that area for the sake of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the people from that area. Thus an American Orthodox Church should be able to bring in things appropriate from the culture in order to communicate the Gospel in a culturally appropriate way. This also means that, prophetically speaking, it would reject anything from the culture that is inappropriate in communicating the Gospel.
Let us be mindful of the subtle ways that American secularism can creep in and influence even the Church. We are to be a light to the culture, not the other way around. On the other hand, we can bless and name Truth wherever it may be found. Uniting our worship to our beliefs is of the utmost importance for what we believe influences how we worship and how we worship influences what we believe. Lord, help us and guide us.
Worship in the Church: The Sanctification of Time
Fr. Christopher Foley
October 2006
“Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”
2 Cor. 6:2
“Oh come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise! Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord , our maker!”
Ps. 94:1,2,6
Why do we go to Church? Why make an effort to attend the services and stand for long periods of time? Certainly there are more entertaining ways to spend a Sunday morning. What is it about our worship particularly that gives one a reason to "go to Church?"
We have been given an incredible legacy of beautiful services that celebrate the sanctification of time. Each year we journey through the cycle of the Church year in order to enter in to the reality of the events commemorated. The Greek word for symbol means just that - "to bring together." We remember these events in the present. There is a technical word in the Greek for this "remembrance" - anamnesis. This word denotes much more than recalling an event from the past, it is a remembrance that brings the event into the present. It is a participation in the event in the present. Many of the hymns for each feast and service begin with the word "Today..." This is the sanctification of the present day in order for us to participate in the reality of what we are commemorating. This is seen in our Divine Liturgy where we thank God for the "cross, the tomb, the resurrection on the third day, the ascension into heaven, and His second and glorious coming." We are "remembering" events from the past and the future at the same time. This sanctification can only happen in its fulness in the life of the Church - the gathered community with the priest around the altar upon which the Gospel, which is Christ, is present. Fr. Alexander Schmemann states, "We can only worship in time, yet it is worship that ultimately not only reveals the meaning of time, but truly 'renews' time itself. There is no worship without the participation of the body, without words and silence, light and darkness, movement and stillness - yet it is in and through worship that all these essential expressions of man in his relation to the world are given their ultimate 'term' of reference, revealed in their highest and deepest meaning." Our worship is our real participation in the future Kingdom. We begin every Divine Liturgy with the words. "Blessed is the Kingdom..." It is in and through our leitourgia, our liturgical work, that we enter into and experience this world as encounter, an encounter with Christ in the midst of "our time."
The secularism in our culture works against this idea of all of creation as epiphany. Secularism is the denial of worship. Symbols are reduced to a means of communicating relevant ideas in order to convince or sell something to someone. Symbols become mere illustrations rather than something that "makes present" a reality. There is a strong preoccupation with "relevant" worship and "relevant" churches. This has led to an implosion of worship. Worship has become so individual centered and consumer driven. One goes to Church in order to "get something out of it for myself." All of worship is to be grounded in the Incarnation of our Lord. He who became matter for our sakes, now invites us to participate in Him through matter. All of creation becomes an epiphany, a manifestation of God to us. Worship is epiphany, it is our tangible experience of the love and mercy of God. Again Fr. Schmemann says, "Being an epiphany of God, worship is thus the epiphany of the world; being communion with God, it is the only true communion with the world; being knowledge of God, it is the ultimate fulfillment of all human knowledge." This is why we place such a strong emphasis on our liturgical worship and try to do everything with a spirit of excellence. This is how our worship is "relevant." It reveals to us who God is, and we participate in Him through matter. Now the world becomes transparent, enabling us to see a glimpse of the Glory of God, rather than opaque, reduced to colorful rites and ceremonies at best, or worldly entertainment at worst.
It is vital for us to catch a vision for this, so that we may know why it is we come to Church. It is not to understand God deeper, or to feel better about ourselves. Church is not an aesthetic experience, or a psychological boost. We don't come to Church to "get" anything. We come in order to participate in the joy of the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom is "made present" in our worship. "The Liturgy, we may say, is something that happens to us," says Fr. Schmemann. It is our entrance into the Kingdom, our participation in the eternal worship around God's throne in the heavens. May God help us to "see" our worship as a participation in the future kingdom surrounded by angels and archangels who unceasingly praise and glorify Him.
