Eastern liturgies of all traditions—the Byzantine, Armenian, Alexandrian, and Syrian traditions—have never undergone a massive revision at the hands of experts the way the Latin tradition did in the 1960s. Eastern liturgy today remains stable, traditional, and conservative, with inbuilt structural repetitions that are in fact welcome, healthy, and necessary for they correspond to how real people really pray—by stuttering, stumbling, and starting again and again and again. It was precisely these rich, elaborate, conservative, and repetitive liturgies that were so deeply sustaining to Christians in the catacombs of Ukraine, and elsewhere in the Middle East.
