The TYPICON of
the Orthodox Church’s Divine Services
CHAPTER ONE
THE ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN AND THE
CHURCH SITUATION TODAY
IN ORDER TO PRESERVE (or return to) the true spirit of the Orthodox Divine services, it is not enough to be against the senseless reforms of the church modernists, who wish to substitute a "modern minimum” for the inspiring standard of the Church's Typicon. One must also have a clear idea of what the Holy Fathers had in mind when, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they compiled the Divine services for the benefit of us, the faithful. Mere outward knowledge of the services — their history, differences between the Greek and Russian Typicons, etc. — is of decidedly secondary importance; this knowledge can make one an "expert" in the Typicon, but that is not what is needed today. The Divine Services must be spiritual food from which the faithful can take real nourishment for eternal life. Everything else is secondary to this aim. The situation of Orthodox Christians in the modern world is too desperate to allow us the luxury of being merely "correct” in the performance of the Divine services. It is far better, while indeed knowing as well as possible the high standard which the Church offers us, to be "incorrect” and deficient and, reproaching ourselves for our deficiency nevertheless singing and praying to God with love and fervor according to our strength.
The "outward knowledge” which is offered in this series of articles is not, therefore, intended to produce "Typicon experts”; and for this reason it is not offered in systematic form. Basic systematic information on the Church services is already available in standard textbooks. [In English a good primer of the cycles of services, with a description of the church, vestments, accounts of feasts, fasts, sacraments, etc., is: Archpriest D. Sokolof, A Manual of the Orthodox Church’s Divine Services. This paperback book has been reprinted and is available inexpensively from Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, N.Y., 13361.] Here we shall offer rather material to inspire the fervor of believers, with emphasis both on the ideal of the Tvpicon and on what can be done practically under the conditions in which the faithful find themselves today.
There is no need falsely to idealize the contemporary performance of the Divine services in the Russian Church Outside of Russia; our hierarchs themelves have spoken very frankly about some of the deficiencies of our ordinary services and about the need to bring them ever closer to the ideal which the Typicon holds out to us. Thus, Archbishop Averky of Holy Trinity Monastery at Jordanville, New York, makes some sharp and appropriate remarks in a report concerning the "Internal Mission” of the Church which was approved by the whole Council of Bishops of the Russian Church Outside of Russia in 1962: [Archbishop Averkv. True Orthodoxy and the Contemporary World (in Russian), Jordanville, New York, 1971, p. 202.] <25>
'It is extremely important for the success of the Internal Mission to attract, as far as possible, all the faithful into one or another kind of active participation in the Divine services, so that they might not feel themselves merely idle spectators or auditors who come to church as to a theater ‘just in order to hear the beautiful singing of the choir which performs, as often happens now, totally unchurchly, bravura, theatrical compositions. It is absolutely necessary to re-establish the ancient custom, which is indeed demanded by the Typicon itself, of the singing of the whole people at Divine services... It is a shame to the Orthodox faithful not to know its own wondrous, incomparable Orthodox Divine services, and therefore it is the duty of the pastor to make his flock acquainted with the Divine services, which may be accomplished most easily of all by way of attracting the faithful into practical participation.”
Further, in the same article Archbishop Averky dispels the popular misconception that Orthodox Christians are not allowed to perform any church services without a priest, and that therefore the believing people become quite helpless and are virtually “unable to pray” when they find themselves without a priest — as happens more and more often today. He writes, on the same page of this article:
“According to our Typicon, all the Divine services of the daily cycle — apart, needless to say, from the Divine Liturgy and other Church sacraments — may be performed also by persons not ordained to priestly rank. This has been widely done in their practice of prayer by all monasteries, sketes, and desert-dwellers in whose midst there are no monks clothed in the rank of priest. And up until the most recent time this was to be seen also, for example, in Carpatho-Russia, which was outstanding for the high level of the piety of its people, where in case of the illness or absence of the priest, the faithful themselves, without a priest, read and sang the Nocturnes, and Matins, and the Hours, and Vespers, and Compline, and in place of the Divine Liturgy, the Typica.
"In no way can one find anything whatever reprehensible in this, for the texts themselves of our Divine services have foreseen such a possibility, for example, in such a rubric which is often encountered in them: ‘If a priest is present, he says: Blessed is our God… If not, then say with feeling: By the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen.' And further there follows the whole order of the Divine services in its entirety, except, of course, for the ectenes and the priestly responses. The longer ectenes are replaced by the reading of ‘Lord, have mercy’ twelve times, and the Little Ectene by the reading of ‘Lord, have mercy’ three times.
"Public prayer, as none other, firmly unites the faithful. And so, in all those parishes where there is no permanent priest, it is absolutely necessary not merely to permit, but indeed to recommend to the faithful that they come together on Sundays and feast days in church or even in homes, where there is no church, in order to perform together such public prayer according to the established order of Divine services.”
This normal church practice, which like so much else that belongs to the best Orthodox Church tradition, has become so rare today as to seem rather a novelty, is nonetheless being practiced now in several parishes of the Russian Church Outside of Russia, as well as in some private homes. This practice can and should be greatly increased among the faithful, whether it is a question of a parish that has lost its priest or is too small to support one, of a small group of believers far from the nearest church which <26> has not yet formed a parish, or a single family which is unable to attend church on every Sunday and feast day.
Indeed, this practice in many places has become the only answer to the problem of keeping alive the tradition of the Church’s Divine services, whether in the far-scattered flocks of the Russian Diaspora, which are often far from the nearest organized parish with its priest, or in the missionary flocks of true Orthodox Christians, both in America and abroad, which likewise are small and widely scattered and are often far from the nearest true Orthodox Church — it being understood that spiritual communion is impossible with the great apostate bodies which continue to call themselves Orthodox.
The way of conducting such services should preferably be learned from those who already practice it in accordance with both the written and oral tradition of the Church. But even in the absence of such guidance, an Orthodox layman, when he is unable to attend church services, can derive much benefit from simply reading through some of the simpler services, much as he already reads Morning and Evening Prayers. Thus, he can read any of the Hours (First, Third, and Sixth Hours in the morning, Ninth Hour in the afternoon), which have no changeable parts except for the Troparion and Kontakion; he can simply read through the stichera of the great feasts on the appropriate day; [The Hours and other services of the daily cycle are contained in the Hapgood Service Book, which also contains the sacraments and parts of the great feasts. The complete texts of the great feasts are in The Festal Menaion (Faber and Faber). These books may be purchased from Eastern Orthodox Books, P.O.Box 302, Willits, Calif., 95490.] or he can read the Psalms appointed for a given day, as indicated in the next chapter.
In pre-Revolutionary Russia in parish churches Vespers and Matins, as well as Nocturnes, Compline, and the Hours, were served daily, and this is surely the norm against which the Orthodox practice of today must be measured. The Divine services of Sundays and feast days, and the eves of these days, are the very minimum of any normal church life today, without which Orthodox piety simply cannot be inculcated and preserved. And these days must be spent in a holy way. There do remain a few parishes and homes where an akathist is regularly sung on Sunday afternoons, but the former pious Russian custom of gathering in homes on Sundays and feast days to sing religious songs or '‘psalms” has all but been swallowed up by the tempo of modern life. And how many Orthodox Christians still keep the eves of feasts in a fitting manner, devoting them to the All-night Vigil (or Vespers) and prayer, and not to worldly entertainments? It was a strict rule of Archbishop John Maximovitch of blessed memory not to allow anyone who had attended a ball or other worldly entertainment on Saturday night (even if he had first attended the Divine service, as if to “fulfill his obligation”!) to participate in any way in the Divine services of Sunday; and how sober were those Russians made who were found by Archbishop John when he “went to the Halloween Ball” on the eve of the canonization of St. John of Kronstadt in 1964, when by his stern and wordless gaze he accused their faithlessness!
The realization of how far we fall short of the ideal (that is, normal) Orthodox life and practice should be for us the cause, not of discouragement, but rather of a great desire to know and seek this ideal, as far as we are able in the admittedly very distracting <27> conditions of modern life. Above all we should know that this ideal is a very practical one and does not require of us either tremendous efforts which are simply beyond our strength, or the attainment of some exalted 'spiritual'’ state without which one dare not begin to sing praise to God. In fact, one reason which has prevented the wider use of the Orthodox daily services in everyday life is the presence or a certain dualistic error which has crept into the thinking of Orthodox Christians, namely, that being an Orthodox Christian is something abstractly "spiritual,” whereas in everyday life an Orthodox Christian is "just like everyone else." On the contrary, the Holy Fathers dearly teach us that a true Christian is different from everyone else both inwardly and outwardly, the one being an expression of the other. Thus, St. Macarius the Great teaches, "Christians have their own world, their own way of life, their own understanding and word and activity; for different from theirs are the way of life, and understanding, and word, and activity of the people of this world. Christians are one thing, and lovers of the world quite another; between the one and the other lies a great separation.... Inasmuch as the mind and understanding of Christians is constantly occupied with reflection on the heavenly, they behold eternal good things by communion and participation in the Holy Spirit. In very action and power they have been enabled to become children of God.... [It is chiefly by] the renewal of the mind, the pacification of thoughts, by love and a heavenly devotion to the Lord that the new creature, the Christian, is distinguished from all other people in the world.... [And so also,] Christians have a different world, a different food, a different clothing, different enjoyments, a different communion, a different way of thinking — because they are better than all other men.’’ (Homily V, 1, 4, 20.)
This is the Orthodox Christian standard against which our own lives must be measured. Do we, Orthodox Christians, really differ from everyone else by our food and dress — so important in our own days of brazen indecency and gluttony — by our words and actions, by our life and prayer? If we do not, it is fairly certain that spiritually, also we are not different from the lovers of this world. Do our Sundays and feast days have a savor different from that of the holidays of the lovers of this world, different because we constantly devote them to remembering God and singing His praises, to reading the Lives of His Saints and the inspired writings of His Holy Fathers? Do we devote at least a portion of every day, according to our strength and time, to the labor of prayer, using the God-given means, the daily cycle of services, as a way of lifting ourselves above the heavy weight of this modern worldly life? Without such labor, how can we be saved? St. Macarius the Great teaches: "Very many people wish to earn the Kingdom without labors, without asceticism, without sweat; but this is impossible.” (Homily V, 13.)
For people who live in the world and are engrossed in the cares of life, great ascetic labors are almost out of the question. How important it is, then, for such people to take maximum advantage of that pleasant and inspiring labor which the Holy Church presents to their striving souls — the daily cycle of the Church’s prayer. Even a small, if regular, degree of participation in this life is already capable of making an Orthodox Christian different from other people, opening up to him the special way of thinking and feeling which is the life of Christ’s Church on earth.
