At Your Service

By Volodymyr Kish

This past Easter Weekend, I did something I hadn’t done in many years – I went to the early morning grand Easter Sunday Solemn Divine Liturgy service at St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Orthodox Church here in Oshawa where I live.  Early meant 5:30 a.m., which on most mornings I would be tempted to characterize as an “ungodly hour”, though obviously on this occasion, the term would seem somewhat inappropriate.  I suppose night and day, and the need for sleep, are thoroughly human notions of little consequence in the realm of the Divine.

The service, as is typical of high religious holy feast days, was a lengthy one, lasting some three hours and incorporating the full spectrum of Byzantine rituals, prayers, chanting, biblical readings, incense, and processions.  Somehow, I was not particularly aware of the passage of time, my consciousness being carried willingly along in the pleasing flow of sacred music and the sensory experience of the event. As I have come to realize, going to a church service is one of those events where you need to turn your mind off and surrender yourself to just feeling the present moment.  As hard as it is for most of us, we need to turn off our mental clocks, forget the past and the future, and give free reign to our feelings and emotions.  Spiritual awareness cannot be gained through conscious thought, but only experienced through our inner senses.

I should stop at this point, as I am treading on dangerous ground here.  Despite a lifetime of research, I am painfully aware that I have but a neophyte’s knowledge of the spiritual and the Divine, and am in danger of sinking into the philosophical quicksand of epistemology. 

I am on safer ground in returning to the original subject of this column, namely the Mass or Liturgy as it is more commonly known in Orthodox circles.  Church services, including the Orthodox version, have been established in their current form for a very long time.  For the first four centuries after the death of Christ, services were fairly free form, though in general they incorporated many elements of the pre-Christian Jewish services which included readings from the Scriptures and the singing of hymns and Psalms.  They also incorporated some form of the symbolic recreation of the Holy Last Supper, the sharing of bread and wine, which evolved into what we now know as Holy Communion. 

Priests and bishops wore the robes traditional of the educated classes of their time, which eventually evolved into the more ornate ceremonial vestments we see today.  The various roles of priest, bishop, deacon, etc. were not well defined until the Third or Fourth Century A.D.  The same can be said for many of the practices surrounding baptism, the sacraments or “mysteries”, the use of incense, the liturgical rituals and even the canon of accepted scriptures and gospels.

For the first several centuries, most services were conducted in Greek, that being the universal common language of the Mediterranean world of that day.  When the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as the state religion, Latin came to dominate the Church in the West.  In the East, the various churches were more apt to adopt the vernacular language where they were situated. 

Starting in the Fourth Century A.D., the basic form of these services and church practices were formally established into a recognized canon.  The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the form of service most commonly used by the Eastern Orthodox Churches, dates back to the Fifth Century A.D.  The Eastern Orthodox Church also has several other recognized liturgies including the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil the Great (dating back to the 4^th Century A.D.), and the Divine Liturgy of St. James (1^st Century A.D.) the early predecessor to the previous two.  There is also a special Liturgy used during the season of Great Lent served on weekdays known as the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts.  This last form is essentially a Vespers service with Communion added.

The Orthodox service itself is divided into three parts – the Liturgy of Preparation, the Liturgy of Catechumens and Liturgy of the Faithful.  The first part consists of the entrance of the priest, the veneration of the icons, the putting on of vestments, and the preparation of the bread and wine for the communion.  The second part consists of blessings by the priest, the chanting of Psalms (Antiphons), and the procession and reading of the Holy Gospel.  The third part consists of the singing of hymns, reciting the Nicene Creed and Lord’s Prayer, the offering of Holy Communion and dismissal of the faithful.

What is most remarkable about all of this is that most of what we see and experience in a church service has remained relatively unchanged (at least within the Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox faiths) for over a thousand years. Whether one accepts the spiritual relevance of this religious tradition in our day and age is a subject for another day.  Nonetheless, it has a beauty and power that is unquestionable.