Living in the Liturgical Cycles of the Church
by
Reader Daniel Olson
A
talk given at the Southern Missions Conference hosted by St. Nicholas Orthodox
Church in Dallas, Texas, July 14-16, 1995.
In
my talk today, I shall be discussing the various liturgical cycles of the
Orthodox Church, and some of the things we can do to live in them more fully.
First,
we have to consider what a cycle is. There are lots of possible definitions.
The one that I think is best says: "A
cycle is a recurring period of time, especially one in which certain events or
phenomena repeat themselves in the same order and at the same intervals."
We
see cycles in nature. There is the
daily cycle of the earth rotating continually on its axis, with the constant
succession of night and day. And then there is the yearly cycle of the earth
revolving around the sun, with the lengthening and the shortening of daylight
and the succession of the seasons.
We
use these natural cycles to delineate the passage of time, and we have devised
clocks and calendars to help us do this.
The
Church also uses these natural cycles, and other cycles as well, as vehicles to
convey to us over and over again, on a constantly recurring basis, the saving
piety of our Orthodox faith in all its height, its depth, its breadth and its
fullness.
The
first liturgical cycle we are going to look at is the daily cycle. This cycle
encompasses all the services that re-occur throughout the day, every day of the
year.
These services are:
Vespers, Compline, Nocturnes, Matins and the Hours - First, Third, Sixth
and Ninth - and also the Interhours. The
services of the daily cycle occur at various times throughout the day and night,
so that the whole day is sanctified at regular intervals by the Church's prayer.
The daily services provide the basic framework, the unchanging structure
in which all the psalms, prayers, hymns and scriptural readings that the Church
has amassed over the centuries are joined together to create one harmonious
whole. In addition to these basic formal daily services, we must also add the
more informal Morning and Evening prayers, the Commemoration of the Living and
the Dead, and the prayers before and after meals.
These all have a liturgical quality about them even though they are
usually said privately. The services of the daily cycle are found in the
liturgical book called the Horologion or Book of the Hours.
The
second liturgical cycle is the weekly cycle.
This cycle is not based on a natural cycle, since the seven-day week does
not appear in nature. The week was given to us by God in a direct revelation.
While the different themes of the weekly cycle are repeated every week,
the actual hymns that express these themes are divided into an eight-week cycle
based upon the eight musical modes or tones of the Church's musical system.
This means that the volume of liturgical material that makes up the
weekly cycle is so large that only after eight weeks is this material again
repeated. The hymns of the weekly cycle are collected into one large book -
which often is divided into two volumes. This
book is called the Octoechos or Book of the Eight Tones.
The
most important day of the week is the first day, which we call Sunday, but is
also known as the Lord's day. On
this day, every week, the Church commemorates Christ's resurrection.
This is such an important day liturgically, that it is always celebrated
just like a great feast - that is, it always has a vigil the evening before.
Sunday is so important that it almost never gives place to any other
commemoration. The only possible
exceptions are the great feasts of the Lord, which always take precedence - even
over Sundays.
The
character of Sunday is always festive, so during fast seasons the fast is always
relaxed to a certain extent on Sunday. Thus,
during Great Lent oil and wine are always allowed on Sundays, and during the
other lenten periods fish is almost always permitted.
The
second day - Monday - is dedicated to the Holy Angels - the bodiless hosts.
Most monastics and even some pious laymen keep this day as a voluntary
fast day. By fasting, they deny the
needs of the body and in this small way they strive to imitate those heavenly
beings who are bodiless by nature.
The
third day - Tuesday - is dedicated to Saint John the Baptist.
Christ said that there was no greater man born of woman, and the Church
recognizes this greatness by giving him a special place in the weekly cycle. The
fourth day - Wednesday - is dedicated to the Holy Cross of the Lord. It was on
this day that Judas agreed to betray Christ, thus setting in motion the events
of the Passion. This is a fast day which is obligatory for all Orthodox
Christians.
The
fifth day - Thursday - is dedicated to the holy Apostles and also to Saint
Nicholas. The fact that Saint
Nicholas has been given a place in the weekly cycle indicates that great
veneration that the Church accords him. The sixth day - Friday - which is the
day of Christ's crucifixion, is again dedicated to the Holy Cross. Like Wednesday, it is a fast day for all Orthodox Christians.
The
seventh day - Saturday - is dedicated to all the saints and also to all the
faithful departed. Saturday was the day of rest in Old Testament times and
always had a festal character. The
Church has maintained this festal character to a certain extent in its
liturgical practice. We can also
see this by the fact that during fasting seasons the Church's fasting rules are
exactly the same for Saturdays as they are for Sundays.
The
weekly cycle is always used in conjunction with the yearly cycle, but the amount
of liturgical material from the weekly cycle that is used on any particular day
can vary significantly from day to day. At
one end of the scale the weekly cycle dominates. And at the other end, it is completely suppressed in favor of the yearly
cycle.
The
third liturgical cycle is the yearly cycle of fixed or immovable feasts.
This cycle is based on the solar cycle of 365 days.
The commemorations in this cycle are called fixed or immovable because
they always fall on the same calendar date every year. These include all the
great feasts of the Mother of God - her Nativity, her Entry into the Temple, her
Annunciation, and her Dormition - and also some of the greats feasts of the Lord
- His Nativity, His Presentation in the Temple, His Baptism, and His
Transfiguration. It also includes
the great feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
Each
day of the yearly cycle has some commemoration or other.
Usually, there are several commemorations on any one day; however, not
all of them are commemorated liturgically; that is, not all of them have a
special church service. Besides the
great feasts of Christ and the Mother of God, the Church also glorifies
wonderworking icons and other holy objects, it commemorates its heroes, the
saints - both from the Old and the New Dispensations -
and it remembers important events in Church history. Unlike the other
liturgical cycles, the yearly cycle is continually being added to as new saints
are revealed by God. Just last, year three new saints - Innocent of Moscow,
Nicholas of Japan and John of San Francisco-were glorified by the Church and
added to the yearly cycle of commemorations.
All
the services for the fixed cycle are contained in the twelve volumes of the
Menaion - one volume for each month of the year. The yearly fixed cycle also has
two fast periods: Before the
Nativity of Christ there is a 40-day fast, and before the Dormition of the
Mother of God there is a two-week fast. These
fasts always fall on the same dates and last the same length of time.
Besides
the yearly cycle of fixed commemorations, there is also the yearly cycle of
moveable commemorations. This cycle
is called moveable because it varies from year to year. This happens because all the commemorations in this cycle are
tied to the celebration of Pascha, the annual celebration of Christ's
resurrection.
The
date of Pascha changes from year to year because it depends on the lunar year,
which does not correspond exactly to the solar year. The lunar calendar was used by the Hebrew people-and is still
used by the Jews today- but it was not adopted by the Christian Church, except
for calculating the date of Pascha. This
was necessary so that the historical connection between Passover and Pascha
would always be maintained.
The
great feasts that depend on Pascha are: The Lord's Entry into Jerusalem-commonly
called Palm Sunday-which occurs one week before Pascha; Ascension Day, which
falls forty days after Pascha; and Pentecost, which occurs fifty days after
Pascha.
The
period before Pascha can be divided into three parts. The first three weeks are called preparatory weeks because
the Church prepares us during this time for the struggle of Great Lent.
The second section is the Holy Forty days, which is a time of intensified
prayer and fasting. The third section - Passion Week - is ushered in by the two
feasts of Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday.
The Holy Forty days together with Passion Week make up Great Lent.
The
whole cycle of moveable feasts is extremely rich liturgically.
Many Orthodox Christians are acquainted with the richness of the first
half of this cycle - the Great-Lenten half - but very few people experience the
richness of the second half - the half that begins with Pascha.
Many
churches offer more services during Great Lent; but the reverse is true after
Pascha. This period has become a
time to take a rest from Church. Usually very few services are scheduled after
Pascha and the number of people who attend services tends to drop off
significantly. This attitude is
absolutely opposed to the true mind of the Church. In fact, if you look closely at the structure of the services
after Pascha, you see that they are almost a mirror image of the services before
Pascha. The Church calls us to
rejoice spiritually in Christ's Resurrection after Pascha to the same extent
that we prepare for it during Great Lent. The services for the moveable
liturgical cycle are contained in two large books. The one used before Pascha is called the Triodion, and the
one used after Pascha is called the Pentecostarion.
The
fourth fast season of the Orthodox Church -the Apostles' Fast-is somewhat
unique. It always begins according
to the moveable cycle on the eighth day after Pentecost, but it ends according
to the fixed cycle on the feast of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul - which
falls on the 29th of June. So the
Apostles' Fast varies in length every year from a minimum of eight days to a
maximum of six weeks.
Incidentally,
one of the most important objections to using the New Calendar is the
unfortunate impact that it has on the length of the Apostles' Fast. Under the
New Calendar, the Apostles Fast is always reduced by thirteen days, and this
frequently results in it being entirely eliminated.
The
liturgical cycles of the Orthodox Church all merge into a harmonious oneness in
accordance with the ingenious rules that were devised by the Holy Fathers and
collected in the book called the Typicon. This
book contains the key to the whole science of liturgics, which, unfortunately is
terra incognita for most people. The prescriptions and rules in the Typicon are often
considered to be arbitrary and obscure; but this only proves how far we are from
the mind of the Fathers. It also indicates how little we understand the
principles that underlie the rules, and how little we comprehend the great
wisdom and artistry that the Church uses in constructing her liturgical system.
Through
the liturgical system, through the use of the various liturgical cycles, the
Church provides us everything that we need to work out our salvation.
Our task, then, is to make the best use of what the Church offers us.
Unfortunately,
we do not accomplish this task very well.
The
Church sets before us the ideal of daily services, and in earlier times this was
not just an ideal, but a norm; this was the standard practice of the Church.
But in our time, and especially here in America, daily services have
become a rarity, something almost exclusively limited to monasteries and a very
few cathedrals. In all honesty,
such a situation must be called an aberration.
What
is worse, though, is that such a sad state of affairs does not bother us in the
least. Most people are not even
aware of the Church's standard. We have come to accept the aberration as the
norm, and we see the results in the sad state of Orthodoxy in this country.
By
every objective standard, the level of Or-thodox piety in this country is
abysmally low, and, tragically, we have become satisfied and complacent -even
comfortable-with this situation. The
Church, in her liturgical life, presents us with a banquet table heavily laden
with all manner of wonderful foods, but we are all basically starving of
malnutrition. And for the most
part, we do not even realize that we're starving.
The
image of the banquet reminds us of the very striking Gospel parable, in which
Christ tells us about the man who made a great supper and invited many people to
come. But they all began to make
excuses. They all had other things
to do, things that were more important to them.
Is not this precisely the attitude that we display when the Lord, through
His Church, invites us to His liturgical banquet?
Do we not also have our own heavy load of excuses? Are we not also just
the same as those men in the parable who were invited but begged off.
What
can we do about this? I think that
before we can hope to do anything of a practical nature, we have to start making
some fundamental changes in ourselves. We
have to change our basic attitude. We have to reorder our priorities.
We have to arrange our hierarchy of values in the proper sequence, in
accordance with the mind of the Church.
This
means, basically, that we have got to begin putting God and the Church first in
our lives. Generally speaking, as we arrange our lives every day, as we deal
with all the demands placed on our time, the Church has a low priority.
Whether it is our attendance at church services, whether it is our
involvement in other aspects of parish life, whether it is our monetary
contributions - the Church is usually far down on our list of priorities. We do
what we can to fit the Church into our busy lives, but more often than not,
other things take precedence. This
is exactly the opposite of how we should be living as Christians.
Let
us look at an example. It is a sad
fact that our church attendance at Saturday-evening Vigils is haphazard at best.
Some people never attend, while others do so sporadically.
Of those few people that do come at all, some arrive late, some leave
early and some do both. It can only
be called a scandal for Christians to act this way.
If
we were to be invited to the White House or to Buckingham Palace, would we not
jump at the chance? Would we not be
there well ahead of time and in our best clothes? Would we not stay as long as we could? Would we not revel in the occasion? Would we not be enthralled by all the important people and
celebrities that we would encounter?
And
yet, in church, it is not just a president or a king who is inviting us, but the
King of kings and the Lord of lords. We
are not just meeting worldly officials and celebrities in church, but the
angelic powers and the saints, of whom the whole world is not worthy.
We should be trembling with awe in contemplating such an assembly, and
yet, for the most part, we are coldly indifferent.
Let
us take another perspective. The
word "liturgical" comes to us from the Greek and originally pertained
to "public work". In the
Christian context, of course, it pertains to the "work" that we
perform as a community - the "work" of common prayer.
However, if we approached our secular work with the same haphazard
attitude that we approach the Church's "work", we all would have been
fired long ago.
We
have got to reverse this trend; otherwise, it will not be long at all before we
lose our great liturgical heritage. If
we want a preview of what is ahead for us, just look at the liturgical life of
the other jurisdictions in this country. Feast
days have almost disappeared. Vigils
are unknown. Matins, if it is
served at all, is almost unrecognizable. Not long ago I saw a schedule of church
services for a parish where Matins was listed as fifteen minutes in length. I
cannot even begin to comprehend what such a Matins must be like.
But are we not also headed in that direction?
Undoubtedly,
many people will say that it is impractical to think that we can reinstitute the
Church's system of daily services in our parishes. However, such an attitude
admits defeat even before the battle is engaged. Rather, we ought to set before
us the Church's magnificent ideal, and then we should start moving towards it -
to the best of our ability, with God's help.
Our progress may be slow, and there may very well be setbacks; but unless
we engage in this struggle, not only will we never make any gains, but we will
ultimately lose what little we have.
How
can we start to turn this situation around?
First,
we can start by having more church services.
In many places, liturgical life is limited to what might be called the
bare minimum - Sundays and the great feasts.
This means that there are tremendous possibilities for adding more
services. The feasts of many wonderful saints and other significant
commemorations are almost universally neglected. And yet, it is precisely these commemorations that are so
filled with the Church's theology, with its sacred history, with its inspiring
examples of piety, virtue and morality. These
are all things that we desperately need in our lives.
So we need to start adding more services to our schedules.
Another
thing that we can do is stop shortening our services. Whenever we shorten the services, we are only depriving
ourselves of spiritual nourishment. We
are only impoverishing ourselves of our spiritual riches, of our true
inheritance. When we come together
in church, we should do all that we can to make the most of the time, and not
try to reduce it to some bare minimum.
Besides,
just why are we shortening the services? Are
we hurrying to go somewhere else, to do something else? What place could
possibly be better for us than our church? What activity could possibly be more important to us than
worshiping our Creator?
But
we can only accomplish these things if we have much greater involvement, much
greater participation by the whole church community. This means regularly
attending all the services - by everyone. The
services are not just something for the priest and the choir.
We need people who are willing to learn our Church's wonderful music,
which is such an important part of Orthodox worship.
We need people who will acquire the specialized knowledge of the Church's
Typicon, which so masterfully regulates the interaction of the liturgical cycles
with one another.. We need people
who can learn how to be readers, servers, deacons.
Finally, we need people who can participate intelligibly in the services,
who will make the effort to master the Church's vocabulary, its imagery, its
symbolism. All this requires dedication and commitment - things that we are
sorely deficient in.
In
general, we all have very little continuity in our lives as far as the Church is
concerned. Our experience of Church
life is, at best, episodic. We are present at a church service for a brief space
of time and then we return to what we consider to be our "real" life -
to our jobs, our families, our worldly pursuit -until the next brief Church
episode occurs. There is little continuity from one Church episode to the next,
and what we consider to be our "real" life is influenced very little
by the Church. The Church established the system of daily services precisely in
order to help us maintain this vital and necessary continuity in our spiritual
lives. Daily services are not just
something nice to have; they are a necessity for our spiritual well-being.
And if we have so many spiritual maladies abroad these days, it is
because we are no longer drinking sufficiently from the healing waters of the
Church's liturgical life. Unfortunately, the present reality is that we do not
have daily services in our churches. And
until such a time that we do, the only alternative is to start doing more on our
own at home. And this is not an
unreasonable proposition. After
all, every home should be a "little church."
Besides, there is really no other available course.
So I want to talk about some things we can do at home to incorporate the
liturgical cycles into our daily lives to a greater extent.
To
begin with, we must cultivate our individual prayer life more assiduously.
This means, first of all, that we have to get serious about saying our
morning and evening prayers. They
are not just something nice to do when it is convenient or when we feel like it
- which is rarely. They are precisely the foundation we need in order to build
and develop our involvement in the Church's liturgical life. Once we have
securely established this foundation, we can begin to add to it in any number of
ways. The possibilities are numerous. The
liturgical cycles are extremely rich in material - psalms, hymns, readings,
canons, akathists - all of which can be added to our daily prayer rule and
enhance it significantly. It is not at all unrealistic to think of doing whole
services at home. For instance, one
of the Hours only takes about ten minutes and can be done at different times of
the day as is convenient. Compline
only takes about fifteen minutes and can easily be added to our evening prayers.
Nocturnes takes only about half an hour.
And these particular services are not at all complex; they scarcely
change from day to day.
There
are also many little things we can do to enhance our appreciation of the
liturgical cycles. For instance,
whenever a great feast is celebrated, we can read or sing the troparion of the
feast before meals and the kontakion after meals throughout the festal period.
We can obtain icons of the various feast days and saints' days and put
them up in our icon corners on the appropriate days to remind us of the main
celebrations.
We
should follow the Church calendar closely every day. In fact we should live by the calendar - without fail.
We should know what saints are being commemorated each day, and we should
invoke them in our prayers. We should become more familiar with their lives.
One of the best tools for this is The Prologue from Ochrid, by the
wonderful Serbian bishop, Nicolai Velimirovic.
In it, on a daily basis we can read the short lifes of the saints of the
day and other inspiring materials. It
only takes about ten minutes to read the daily entries - such time is certainly
well spent.
As
part of the moveable cycle, the Church has established a system of readings for
every day of the year. We need to
nourish our souls with the word of God on a daily basis, so we should always be
reading the sacred Scriptures. And
there is no better way to read them than by following the system devised by the
Church. This can also be found in
the Calendar. When we read the Scriptures, we should also read one of the
commentaries of the Holy Fathers. It
is vital that we understand the Scriptures the way the Church does, and not
according to our own understanding. Already
two volumes of the interpretation by Blessed Theophylact have been published and
another one should be out by next year. This
is an excellent aid, and we all should have it and use it continually.
Closely
related to the Church's liturgical life are the various fast days and fast
seasons. Fasting is a vital part of
an Orthodox Christian's life, and its importance cannot be overemphasized.
We all need to be extremely careful in keeping the fasts of the Church.
We not only derive great spiritual benefit from fasting, but if we
neglect it, that means we are neglecting our salvation.
One
of the reasons why fasting is so beneficial is that it requires us to change the
way we live, to change the entire focus of our lives.
We cannot possibly be true to fasting and still live like the world
around us lives. But it is important that we follow the Church's fasting
regulations, as found in the Calendar, and not make up our own rules.
We must humbly accept the Church's wisdom, which is tried and true, and
not think that we somehow know better.
Furthermore,
the system of mitigations on fast days, such as wine and oil and fish, is
primarily designed to handle situations where feast days and fast days coincide.
Thus, when a great feast falls on a fast day, the Church grants a
mitigation of the fast by allowing the use of fish in honor of the feast.
If we indiscriminately use fish on every fast day, then we have no
special way to mark a great feast when one occurs on a fast day except to
dispense with the fast - something which is totally unacceptable. The same
principle applies to the use of wine and oil in conjunction with middle ranked
feasts.
While
we are talking about fasting, I would like to discuss a question which sometimes
comes up, and that is: When does a
fast day begin? There is an
erroneous opinion abroad that a fast day begins in the evening. Under this
understanding, for example, the Friday fast begins with the evening meal on
Thursday and continues on through Friday. How-ever,
the Friday evening meal is not a fasting meal. This understanding is not at all
in accord with the Church's age-old practice.
The
proper practice is to begin a fast day upon arising in the morning and then
continue the fast until the next morning. Thus,
the Friday fast should begin Friday morning and pertain to all food eaten during
that day, including the evening meal.
These
are just a few things that we can do in order to live more fully in the Church's
liturgical cycles. And this is precisely the correct image: We must live in
these cycles just as a fish lives in water.
This
all seems very difficult, and I suspect that a lot of people are thinking that
it is unrealistic, that we cannot expect people to live this way anymore. My
answer is this: If our fathers
lived this way, why cannot we? What
really has changed? Certainly not
God. Jesus Christ is the same,
yesterday and today and forever. If
we say that we cannot change, are we not actually denying Christ's power to act
in our lives, just as He acted in the lives of our fathers?
What
really is the problem? Is it not
our sinfulness, which so dominates our existence?
Is it not our passions, which rule our lives so completely? Is it not our
laziness, our negligence, our indifference? And finally, is it not our lack of
love for God, our Creator and Redeemer? These
are tremendous burdens that we carry; but we have become so fond of them that we
cannot bear to part with them.
It
is time for us to wake up to the reality of our true spiritual state. This could
be a decisive moment for us. But if
we do not start now, when will we start? As
Father Seraphim (Rose) used to say: "It's
later than you think!"
And
truly this is so!
And
so, as Saint Paul exhorts, Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin that doth
so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,
looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith. Amen.
