Why Do So Many Hate Things Roman?

[Alexander_Roman]

This was on a Sunday.

Yes, it is done by the elderly at my former parish. A pious way to receive the Word of God Who is Christ.

A much better tradition, entirely Eastern, which isn’t as widespread as it is in Orthodox Churches is the practice of people lining up to go to kiss the Book of the Gospels after the Gospel reading.

This is considered almost a form of Holy Communion, one should also fast the night before if one intends to reverence the Book of the Gospels during the Liturgy.

As one approaches, one Crosses oneself and bows twice and then kisses the middle Icon of Christ and then the icon of the Evangelist on the lower right, saying the Jesus Prayer. One then crosses oneself once more with the Jesus Prayer and bows before leaving.

In one parish, I saw all the young people line up for this and somehow the people thought this was a quaint thing for the “youngins” to do. I went into the line myself and when I was asked later why I did that, I told the person, “Because I consider myself to be young at heart . . .”

The problem with renewing this tradition is that there will be people, upon seeing this, that will start to look at their watches in anxious fashion (as I’ve seen when the sermon is longer than they thought it would be).

If those people have something else better to do than “waste their time in Church” on a Sunday, then they should just leave and go about what they feel they must do that is “more important.”

A friend of mine, a married Greek-Catholic priest, visited the Cathedral of St George in Lviv in Ukraine. The parish priest introduced him and spent 25 minutes talking about him.

The priest, being from Canada, looked at his watch and thought, “Hmmm… twenty five minutes he’s been speaking and so I should just speak for another five to make the half hour (that people normally tolerate).”

And so he did speak for only five minutes.

After the Liturgy, the parish priest came to him, visibly upset and said, “Don’t you EVER do that to me again! What do you mean? You come here all the way from Canada and all you can do is a five minute speech?!”

Then my friend explained his reasoning about the half-hour time limit . . .

The parish priest retorted, “Look, people here LOVE one hour sermons and longer. When they come to Church on Sundays, they stay for hours. In fact, if you were a priest here, your day would begin at eight in the morning and end twelve hours later. You would have barely enough time to eat during the day as people would be bothering you for baptisms, funerals, blessing of their rosaries and homes, asking you to say Molebens and Akathists, endless Confessions, begging you to visit their sick and dying etc. etc. Then you would know what priestly work is all about and you would really FEEL like a Priest!”

But I digress . . .

Alex

 

[Alexander_Roman]

One time I was at a Ukrainian liturgy, and I saw something I never saw before or since. About a quarter of the parishoners knelt for the reading of the Gospel. Wish I had asked someone the reason behind it.

In his memoirs, the Blessed New Hieromartyr Basil Velichkovsky, C.Ss.R. wrote about how he would tell his Orthodox converts to the UGCC NOT to kneel so as not to give offense to the Orthodox re: Latinization.

As he wrote, “But did they heed my admonitions? Not at all! The Orthodox converts were especially keen on kneeling before the Gospel, at Holy Communion, at the Our Father etc. They just loved that practice and nothing would stop them from doing it.”

(Bl. Basil was obviously a great spiritual leader and two Orthodox professors of theology and three monks of the very Orthodox Pochaiv Lavra became Greek-Catholics, being received by Bl. Basil. They were all martyred by the Bolsheviks and when Bl. Basil was released - after the KGB injected a slow-acting poison into him that killed him when he was in Winnipeg in 1973 - he introduced the Cause of all five of these martyrs at Rome.)

Also, the Ukrainian Greek-Orthodox Church in Canada, which was formed entirely of Greek-Catholic converts from the early part of the 20th century, officially allows kneeling twice on Sundays and all days, at the Great Entrance and at the Eucharistic Canon. I’ve read this in their pew-books and this was written by their great Metropolitan Ilarion Ohienko who said that only monastics who attend Divine Liturgy daily could be “exempt from kneeling during the Divine Liturgy.”

Kneeling is done in the Russian Orthodox Church for prayer on days other than Sundays (and one does not kneel or make prostrations after Communion on any day).

But St Seraphim of Sarov prayed for 1,000 days and night kneeling on a rock in the forest before his Icon of our Lady of Tenderness and kneeling as a sign of penitence when saying the Jesus Prayer is entirely appropriate (as are many prostrations).

But the Old Believers refuse to kneel and consider it foreign to the East. Also, in Ethiopia, standing as a symbol of the Resurrection of Christ and also of ours, is the preferred prayer position and to this end, many have their “prayer staff” or “miquamia” which is a T-shaped staff (although any staff will do) to help them stand and shift their weight to remain standing.

For them, penitence is to pray WITHOUT benefit of staff . . . And one Ethiopian monk holds the record for the longest time standing in prayer with staff in hand - a total of 17 consecutive hours!!

I don’t know if we in North America would “stand” for that . . .

Alex