Light from the East: A Lecture Series on Eastern Christianity
Speaker: Rt. Rev. Archimandrite Mark Melone, Pastor
Date: November 19, 2006
Fr. Mark Melone: Well, thank you all for coming. The last lecture was a presentation on the history and genealogy of the Eastern Churches.
One thing I would like to review is the concept of tradition in the Eastern or Apostolic Churches. By Apostolic Churches I'm referring to the churches that use the name Catholic or Orthodox; specifically Christians that acknowledge the Nicene Creed. What makes the distinction between these Apostolic Churches is an understanding of tradition.
St. Paul gives us the beautiful image of the church as the Body of Christ. We are all members of that body, and Christ is the head. Tradition is the spirit or the soul of that body. We use the term breath that gives that body life. It is the living presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church.
The thing that we have to realize, as Eastern Christians, is how tradition is manifested. When we say tradition we are referring to a number of manifestations. First is Scripture. Western Christianity, specifically Roman Catholic Christianity, tends to describe the fonts of the church's theology as scripture and tradition.
But Eastern Christianity says that scripture is a part of the tradition because scripture doesn't have a life apart from the life of the church. The Bible is, first and foremost, a liturgical book. This was the function that it served in Judaism. You read the Law or the Prophets during the services: it is the record of God dealing with His people, transmitting His life to His people. It is read to remind us of these things, and also to make present the saving power of God. It is not an answer book or a code-book. That's the way of looking at scripture.
So scripture is one aspect of tradition. Another very important aspect of tradition is the liturgy. By the liturgy I mean not only the Eucharist, but also all the prayers: baptism, marriage, Vespers (the Evening Prayer), Orthros or Matins (the Morning Prayer, et&c.): all those public prayers of the church. They are manifestations of tradition, as well.
Another manifestation of tradition is the holy icons. This is the theology of the church in line and color. Similarly, hymnography is the theology of the church in music. Other manifestations are the writings of the fathers of the church, the lives of the saints, even the canons of the church. All of these are manifestations of the tradition. So keep that in mind: when we use the term tradition, it has all of these things in it.
I would like to focus on one specific aspect of that tradition which is the liturgical year and the liturgical day.
We had a clock, actually two clocks in the seminary, hanging in the kitchen. One was a normal clock. Next to it was another clock was that missing its hands. So someone labeled the clock that was working as chronos, and the other clock was labeled kairos. Those are the two words for time that are used in the New Testament.
Chronos is how we measure time in seconds, minutes, hours, and so on. Kairos is time, but as it exists with God. Thus, chronos is the time in which we act as human beings, and Kairos is the time in which God acts. Someone once suggested that if we really wanted to be exact, then we should also take the numbers off the second clock. Well perhaps that's another theological discussion!
We have the custom that before we begin the services, the priest or the deacon goes to take the kairon from the bishop and says “it is time to act” using the word kairos and thus begin the prayer.
Time is a creature. It is in need of salvation. If you look at Genesis, at the very beginning there is no time. God begins creation in His own time, the Kairos of His eternity. The first words of Genesis:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth
was formless and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep,
and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters. God said, “Let
there be light”, and there was light. God saw the light and that it was
good. God divided the light from the darkness. He called the light
‘day’ and the darkness he called the ‘night’. So evening and
morning happened and that was the first day.
So the very first of God's creatures is light. There is time when God creates the Sun, and the moon, and the stars to mark off the seasons. What Genesis is trying to tell us is that God is the creator. Time is a creature. As a creature, time is in need of redemption.
We are commanded to sanctify time. We sanctify time as Christians through the passage of our lives by the holy mysteries: baptism, the funeral service, the marriage service, and so on. We sanctify the passage of time each day by the hours, the prayers of the offices: Vespers, Compline, Orthros, the first hour, the third hour, and so on. What do these terms mean? They are prayers that are appointed for certain times of the day, which we'll discuss momentarily.
We also sanctify time by the passage of the seasons by the calendar, the liturgical year, first of all by the celebration of the great feast of Pascha — the Lord's Resurrection, which gives bearings to all the other feast days, and then the other feasts that occur on specific days.
What I'd like to look at is these two aspects of the passage of time: the passage of the day marked by the hours, and the passage of the seasons marked by the calendar.
The prayers of the hours — Vespers, Orthros, Compline, and the little hours — mark day. Why do we pray these?
First of all, because we are called to pray constantly. In one place Jesus tells us that when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray. Certainly, this is one aspect of prayer but He also says where two or three are gathered in My name, there I am in their midst. So, when we pray as community it is not only us who pray, but Christ who prays.
So the hours are the prayer of Christ, and our participation in this prayer is the gift and duty of our baptism because we “put on Christ” — as St. Paul says.
St. John Chrysostom says in one of his homilies:
Well you know everyone tells me, ‘Oh, I pray at home.’
(I hear that constantly as a priest.)
‘I don't need to go to church, because I
pray at home.’ Well that's true and we should do that because Christ
tells us to do that, but what you have at home is not quite what you
have in the church where, as a community, it is all of the voices in
unison asking God for the same thing. It's what we say so beautifully
in the liturgy, ‘Let us say with one mouth and with one heart’.
As we pray, we enter into Christ's prayer. There is no dichotomy in our minds, as Apostolic Christians, between private prayer and public prayer. You can't have one without the other. Baptism, first of all, inserts us into a community that is Christ.
Clement of Rome, one of the fathers, writes in the year 96:
Now this is clear
to us and we have peered into the depths of the divine knowledge. We are
bound to do in an orderly fashion all that the Master has bidden us to do at
the proper times He set. He ordered sacrifices and services to be performed;
and required this to be done, not in a careless and disorderly way, but at the
times and seasons that He fixed. He tells us where He wants them done, and
by whom, and fixes it with His will, so that everything should be done in a
holy way. Those, therefore, who make their offerings at the time set, win the
approval of God and His blessings. For they follow the Master's commands
and do no wrong.
This is the idea of prayer during the day.
We complain sometimes that our faith has nothing to do with our lives, and yet we don't do those things that will integrate it into our normal everyday life. For example, the hours of prayers that set aside specific times to come together as a Christian family.
Similarly fasting. You can fast wherever you are. You don't need a fasting kit, you don't need fasting equipment, but three times a day you think about God. What you eat and what you don't eat. The fasts are helpers, they're not rules, they are not burdens; they help us to live constantly in awareness of God.
We have kind of gotten away from the tradition of prayer throughout the day. But two striking experiences in my life reminded me that these prayers are meant to be a part of our lives.
First, we had the clergy conference one year in Detroit, and we had some free time. Well, what do priests do when they have free time? They look for things to eat. So we got into the car, and we drove down to Dearborn, Michigan, to Shatila bakery. Later, as we're walking down the street, it was prayer time. We could hear the call to prayer from the local mosque over the loudspeaker. I had never heard it live before, and it made quite the impression. But what made an even larger impression, was people from all over, closing their stores and going to pray. It dawned on me that the Muslim arrangement of prayer comes from Christianity, which comes from Judaism.
Second, in 1987, I was Thessaloniki, Greece in an old section of the bronze workers' quarter. In Greece, they normally do Matins in the morning, and also Vespers at about 7pm in the summer time in the parish churches. So at 7 o'clock the bell rang at the church and we walked into the church. The priest and the chanters started, and little by little, people were closing the cafes and came in, and we ended up with 50 people, in this tiny neighborhood church. They finished Vespers went back and reopened their stores.
The calculation of the day begins with the evening. So for example, this week the 21st is the feast of the Entry of the Mother of God into the temple, so the celebration of the feast begins with Vespers on the evening before.
Why? Back to Genesis. When God starts creating, what's the constant refrain in the first chapter of Genesis? And it was evening, and it was morning — the first day… It was evening, and it was morning — the second day… It was evening, and it was morning — the third day… and God saw that it was good. That was the refrain. So the goodness of creation as the Lord meant it to be.
There are many examples in the Old Testament: In Exodus, God tells Moses how to make the altar of incense, and that on it Aaron shall burn fragrant incense — morning after morning when he prepares the lamps, and cleans the lamps. And in the evening twilight, when he lights the lamps, he shall burn incense and throughout human generations this shall be established an incense offering before the Lord in the morning and in the evening.
Interestingly enough, an early commentary says the priests and the Levites were organized into groups that would serve for two weeks to be present at the sacrifice and they were accompanied by lay delegation from their towns because the priest lived all over but they had to go to Jerusalem to serve. Other laypeople that stayed home gathered in time for the morning sacrifice and the evening sacrifice to pray with them. Then it goes on and it says the services in the synagogue and the temple included Psalms, blessings, hymns and readings. We can see how that enters into Christianity. The liturgy of the hours is basically the book of the Psalms in the Bible, which served functionally as hymns. These Psalms are the same hymns sung by Jesus and by the Apostles that we sing today in the services.
The daily cycle as I said begins with Vespers. Why? It's the image of light. In modern times, we're very spoiled: we flip a switch and a light goes on. In the old days, it was a little harder: you had to rub sticks together, or you had to strike a piece of flint, or you had to go to the neighbor and get the light. We still have a remnant of that during Pascha, when we go to the priest and get the light. It's not only the light of Christ, but it's also a very timeless gesture. There's a wonderful article about Vespers called “Thanksgiving for the Light”. This is something known even in the Pagan world. The ancient Greeks, when the first person came into a dark room with a lamp, they would say: Hail O Joyous Light.
Interestingly, that's almost the title of the hymn we sing at Vespers, O Joyful Light and St. Basil says in the 3rd century that this hymn is so old that we don't know where it comes from. It's may be as old as the New Testament.
I remember someone in Rochester, New York telling me that their grandmother, whenever someone flipped the light on in the house she would say “Allah yedawi allaki” or “God's light be with you”. A certain action elicits a certain blessing. When there's a new moon and a new month, the Greeks say Kalle Mini or “Good gracious month”, and in Arabic “alaina shaher moubarak” or “the blessing of the Lord on this month”. These cultures actually reflect the Christian practice. So, it's not a stretch that this idea got expanded to become Vespers.
So, we begin with Vespers in the evening. These prayers were always meant to be public. They weren't meant to be private. They weren't made to keep the priest busy, or to keep the “professional Christian” busy. They were for everybody and they were considered a necessary part of the life of the church. In fact, some of the most interesting rituals and some of the most touching customs occur not during the liturgy, but during Vespers or Orthros: processions, and so on.
Again, it's not meant to be private. St. Gregory of Nyssa has a beautiful passage in the funeral oration for his sister, Macrina: as she lay dying, it was the end of the day, and she couldn't speak, but she asked her brothers to bring in a lamp. The family started singing Joyful Light. She couldn't sing, so she just mouthed the words, smiled, and then died. That was what she asked for in her last moments.
Let's look at the structure of the day. Please refer to the handout that says “The Daily Cycle of Services”:
| Service | Time of Day | Theme |
| Vespers | Sunset | Christ, the never-fading Light |
| Little Compline (ordinary days) or Great Compline (fast days) | Before retiring | Protection during the night |
| Midnight Service | During the night | The unexpected coming of the Lord |
| Matins (Orthros) and/or the First Hour | Sunrise | The gift of Christ, the eternal Light |
| Third Hour | Nine AM | Descent of the Holy Spirit |
| Sixth Hour | Noon | The crucifixion |
| Ninth Hour | Three PM | The death of Christ |
Source: Light For Life, Part Two: The Mystery Celebrated ISBN 1-887158-09-X (Part Two) / ISBN 1-887158-06-5 (Three Part Set) ©1996 God With Us Publications | ||
Vespers of course is the first prayer, the prayer of sunset. It talks about Christ, the never fading light — the theme that runs throughout all of Christian literature starting with the gospel of St. John: Christ says “ am the light of the world” — Christ is our never fading light. Vespers is a celebration of light, and it's a celebration in the sense of purification.
The burning of incense during Vespers is one of purification. Incense has a lot of functions. Some people say it was used because the church “smelled bad”. Ignorant and naive. In ancient culture, incense was a sign of honor and respect: here's this precious gum brought from Ethiopia, and when someone special came to visit, you would burn incense to honor them.
It was used even in the pagan temples — they would burn incense before the idols. If someone were trying to force an early Christian to deny their religion, they would try to make the Christian burn incense before an idol. Today (November 19th), we remember St. Barlam of Antioch, who they tried to make offer incense to idols by putting coals on his hands and then putting the incense on top of it. Then they reasoned that when he would shake his hands to throw off the coals, it would be an offering of incense. Well, St. Barlam stood there and let his hands burn off. St. John Chrysostom talks about that in his homily for today.
But the offering of incense was a practice of the Church of the Old Israel as well. And it stayed on in popular custom and in the church, as well. St. John Chrysostom says, when we come to Vespers it's almost like a forgiveness service for us. One aspect of incense is that it is cleaning. It's a sign of forgiveness that when the incense passes over us we are cleansed of the sins of that day and we approach God with a new heart. Vespers evening prayer is the beginning of the day, the day of the new creation. That's why the feasts begin with Vespers.
The other main service of the day is Matins (the Morning Prayer) from the Latin, or Orthros (Sunrise) from the Greek. It's the prayer of the coming of Christ, and the last judgment, the new day of Christ coming. Another service, Compline, is the evening prayer. The literal name is apodeipnon or “the after supper prayer”. It's a prayer for protection during the night and it's also a service in which we especially remember the dead because the night's darkness and sleep are the image of the sleep of death, so we pray for the dead as well.
These other prayers, the first hour, the third hour, and the sixth hour all recall different commemorations.
The third hour, that commemorates when the Holy Spirit came down upon the Apostles at the corresponding time of 9 AM. That's why, when the Apostles begin preaching enthusiastically after the decent of the Holy Spirit, everyone says “these men are drunk”. Then St. Peter says don't think we're drunk it's only nine in the morning.
The sixth hour is noon, the hour at which Christ was nailed to the cross, and the ninth hour, is 3 PM, the time that he died.
So that's how the cycle is calculated. Vespers and the morning prayer are the two main public hours. They were done in the church, but the others, like the third and sixth hours) were done mostly in monasteries or cathedrals. Some families also chose to do them, but these other hours didn't develop the public character that Vespers and Orthros had. That's the daily cycle.
Now, the weekly cycle. We're going to look at the weekdays. Please refer to the handout that says “The Weekly Cycle”:
| Day of the Week | Commemoration | |
| Sunday | The Resurrection of Christ | |
| Monday | The Holy Angels | |
| Tuesday | St. John the Forerunner | |
| Wednesday (a fast day) | The Precious Cross; the betrayal by Judas | |
| Thursday | The Holy Apostles; St. Nicholas | |
| Friday (a fast day) | The Precious Cross | |
| Saturday | All Saints, the rest of the departed, the original creation | |
Source: Light For Life, Part Two: The Mystery Celebrated ISBN 1-887158-09-X (Part Two) / ISBN 1-887158-06-5 (Three Part Set) ©1996 God With Us Publications | ||
It's interesting that the days of the week became dedicated to certain people. We're not so much aware of this because we rarely hear the services during the week but we would see, for example, if we looked at Monday, or Sunday night Vespers for Monday, some of the hymns would talk about the angels. Different commemorations are associated with the different days of the week.
Obviously, Sunday celebrates the Lord's resurrection.
Wednesday and Friday are the two fast days that are kept in the week, and these are from the earliest church. A book called The Didache referred to The Teachings of the 12 Apostles — probably comes from the first century, may be as old as the book of Revelations — says: “your fasts must not be identical with those other people. They (the Jews) fast on Mondays and Thursdays, but you should fast on Wednesdays and Fridays.” Why? Because Wednesday was the day on which the Lord was betrayed, and Friday is the day on which He died. So we see then why Wednesday and Friday have those special dedications. They are still be to be observed as fast days.
Saturday became the day of all saints, but especially the day for the dead. Memorial services should be done on Saturday. Why? Because, Saturday is the Sabbath, the day of rest. The Father said in the command to Moses, “Rest on the Sabbath day.” Why? Because, God rested on the Sabbath, the seventh day after His work of creation. The Fathers saw the Old Testament as the prefiguring of the great Sabbath, which is the Great and Holy Saturday when Christ lay in the tomb, resting in the body from his work of re-creation.
As the priest incenses around the altar, right at the very beginning of liturgy, he says to himself one of the hymns which images the altar as both the tomb and throne of Christ. He says: “You are in the tomb with Your body; You are in Hades with Your soul; You are in paradise with the thief; You are on throne with the Father; You are doing all of this at the same time; You are in a body, but you are not confined where you lie.” It's a hymn of the power of God's time. In God's time, all of that multiple action is possible, because there is no before and there is no after; there is only now.
Saturday is the day of remembering the dead. So we have the memorial Saturdays of the dead, that happen a number of times during the year.
The idea of dedicating the days of the week to specific saints was also actually an aspect of paganism that linguistically survives in English.
For example, what do we call the days? Sunday: the sun's day. Monday: the moon's day. Tuesday: Tyr's day (the Norse god of war). Wednesday: Woden's day (the chief Norse god). Thursday: Thor's day (the Norse god of thunder). Friday: Freyja's days (the Germanic goddess of Marriage and Love). Saturday: Saturn's day (the Roman god of agriculture).
You have the same in French. Lundi: the moon's day. Mardi: Mars' day (the Roman god of War). You have the same thing in Spanish and Italian, but you don't have it in Portuguese.
Portuguese is the only romance language that keeps the church calculation of the week and the church names of the days of the week: Domingo (the Lord's day), the 1st day, the 2nd day, the 3rd day, the 4th day, the 5th day, and then Sabado (the Sabbath day).
Similarly, Greek uses the church calculation as well: Κυριακή (the Lord's day), numeric designations for the weekdays, and then Σάββατο (the Sabbath day).
Russian is similar except that Sunday is not called the Lord's day, it is called воскресенье (resurrection). Even the communists had to call it “resurrection”. This reminds us of the primacy of Sunday as the day of resurrection, as the day of the liturgy, the fathers say “the eighth day”. Christ rose on the eighth day — the eighth day outside of time not in the chronos anymore but in the kairos. Not in human time, but in God's time. As an aside, we have all kinds of prayers and customs that belong to the eighth day, because they tell us that whatever is being done now belongs most properly to the Kingdom of God.
Now let's look at the liturgical year: it's a little complex because we have cycles within cycles, within cycles. Please refer to the handout that says “The Cycle of the Year”:
 | ||
©2006 Rt. Rev. Archimandrite Mark E. Melone | ||
Next to it you'll see a list of the twelve Great Feasts:
| Feast | Commemoration | Date |
| Nativity of the Theotokos | Mary's birth heralds the Coming of Christ | September 8th |
| Exaltation of the Precious Cross | The discovery of the cross calls everyone to worship Christ | September 14th |
| Entrance of the Theotokos | The holiness of Mary, expressed by her entry in the temple | November 21st |
| Nativity of Christ | The saving presence of God in the world through Christ | December 25th |
| Holy Theophany of Christ | The manifestation of the Trinity at Christ's baptism | January 6th |
| The Hypapante (Encounter) | Christ's meeting with His people when He was presented in the temple | February 2nd |
| The Annunciation | Christ is incarnate at Gabriel's word | March 25th |
| The Entrance into Jerusalem | The coming of the Kingdom of God | Sunday before Pascha |
| Holy Ascension of Christ | Christ sitting at the Father's right | 40 days after Pascha |
| Pentecost | The descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples | 50 days after Pascha |
| Transfiguration of Christ | Christ's glory shown before His passion | August 6th |
| Dormition of the Theotokos | The repose and glorification of the Mother of God | August 15th |
Source: Light For Life, Part Two: The Mystery Celebrated ISBN 1-887158-09-X (Part Two) / ISBN 1-887158-06-5 (Three Part Set) ©1996 God With Us Publications | ||
The arrangement of certain feasts has to do with light, so we have the relationship of the sun to the year and the Christian calendar. The calendar also has to do with the cycle of Pascha, or our resurrection day.
We have two cycles, one where the cycle of feasts exists in relationship to the Pascha, and this other cycle that exists in relationship with the solar year.
Because of the importance of light in the early Christian Church, to this day, we pray facing east. There are several reasons: first, Christ is our light; and, second, paradise is our true home, as it says in scripture: God planted paradise in the east. We also bury facing east, because from that direction Christ will come again. If you are going to pray and you don't have an icon to focus on, if you know where east is, then that's where you focus to pray. This was a Christian custom taken by the Muslims who started like the Jews, facing Jerusalem but then decided they would face Mecca, forgetting the original reason why the direction was used.
There's a homily of St. Leo as he's preaching in Rome, and he tells everybody to stop praying for a moment and turn around because he has something to say. They were all facing east, but the altar in the church was not in the eastern part of the church because of the layout or the unique topography of that particular church. So he asks everyone to look at him since he's about to say something.
That's the unbroken tradition, one of those things that St. Basil talks about in the 3rd century: facing the east when praying, making the sign of the cross, singing Joyful Light; invoking the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He's saying this tradition is so old that we don't know where it comes from.
How was the year put together? Let's look at the solar year. Here is the spring equinox and the fall equinox, when day and night are equal. Then we have the solstice: the winter solstice — the shortest day of the year — and the summer solstice — the longest day of the year. What is the solstice? The winter solstice (approximately December 25th) is the shortest day of the year, and from that point the light starts to get stronger, more hours of daylight. Then we have the summer solstice (approximately June 25th), and the days begin to get shorter until we come back to the winter solstice.
Pascha, the Lord's resurrection, takes place in scripture on the 14th day of Nisan, set in the Hebrew calendar, which is roughly around the 25th of March. It moves around a little because the rest of the year is based on a solar calendar, but the calculation of Pascha is on the lunar calendar — based upon the phases of the moon instead of the sun.
Since this is also approximately the spring equinox, when the day and night are equal, the fathers reflect that this is the perfect time for the resurrection! They are making a theological, not a scientific, reflection and say that since God first divided the light from the darkness, and since God is not going to do anything messy, He's going divide the light from the darkness equally. So on the first day of creation, day and night are equal. Christ is going to come to begin the re-creation — He comes and takes human flesh; it's re-creation, so that probably should be at about the same time. Hence the feast of the Annunciation is the 25th of March. Later on, we'll see that there is obviously a direct relationship to Christmas. Pascha is more or less set, and the Paschal cycle starts from there: the Triodion and Great Lent before Pascha, and forty days later, the Ascension and then Pentecost.
We have all the beautiful imagery of the forty: the forty years in the desert for purification, Jesus fasting for forty days in the desert before beginning His Ministry, the rain of forty days and forty nights in the ark, and so on. 40 days out of 365 is roughly a tenth of the year. We take one-tenth of the year and that's absolutely God's for sure: a tithe. The Fathers in Palestine loved that particular image.
Then the other cycle begins to get fixed. The Eastern Christian church celebrated the birth of Christ on the 6th of January. It celebrated together his birth and his baptism — one feast day.
St. Ephrem the Syrian says that the day was fixed because the pagans celebrated the winter solstice — the day when the light begins to get stronger — as the birthday of the S-U-N. Well, we add to that the image of Christ and his twelve Apostles, which gives us thirteen. So start with the 25th and the 13th (or 12th) day after that is the 6th of January, which was celebrated as the birth of Christ in the Eastern Churches.
The Church in Egypt kept that day as the celebration of the Lord's baptism because that's the day when the waters of the Nile River were supposed to be holy. They would sprinkle their houses with water, they would pour water over their boats, they would water their crops since the water is holy and is life-giving. As Christians that's not much of a stretch for us when we consider that Christ God says that He is the living water and that whoever comes to Me, from Me receives a spring of living water.
So we celebrate the baptism of the Lord on the 6th of January, and we also call it the Feast of Lights. This has to do with that idea that the light grows stronger, and Christ is the light. A lot of the customs derive from this. For example, when the priest comes to bless the house, all the lights are flicked on. You put candles on the roof and at midnight, you turn on all the lights in the house. The association with light and obviously the association with water, the day we bless water, the 6th of January.
How did the 25th of December become Christmas? The Romans celebrated the birth of the S-U-N on that day because that's the day the light gets stronger. The Church of Rome decided to celebrate the birth of Christ on that day to take over this pagan festival and also acknowledge that Christ is our light.
Around the time of St. John Chrysostom, about 386, the Byzantine Christians accepted the separation of the Nativity and Baptism, placing the Nativity feast on the 25th of December and the Baptism on the 6th of January. (Although the Coptic and Armenian Churches continue to celebrate these two feasts together.)
Paradoxically in the West, the Baptism became a secondary aspect of the feast day and it became more of the visit of the Magi, the three wise men. The Epiphany or Theophany, the 6th of January, is absolutely loaded with folk customs. Christmas becomes fixed, and other feasts start to fall into place.
Midsummer, John the Baptist speaks about Christ and says, I am not the light. I've come to bear witness to the light. I have to decrease, so He can increase. The commemorations of John the Baptist are among the oldest in the church. Christ says no one born of woman is greater than John the Baptist and also that the least of the kingdom is greater than he, which seems kind of a sneaky compliment! So St. John the Baptist has primacy in the calendar: he has his own weekday. His birthday was set around the day where the light begins to get weaker as Christ's Nativity is set when the light gets stronger. “I must decrease so He can increase.” Beautiful imagery.
Christ is the only perfect man — perfect God and perfect man — so John the Baptist can't be born on the 25th of June, so his Nativity is moved to the 24th of June. Now we have to celebrate the conception of Christ. That's easy: since the Nativity is on the 25th of December, nine months earlier is the 25th of March: the feast of the Annunciation. Recall our earlier discussion on the Paschal cycle.
To determine the conception of St. John the Baptist: 9 months before the 24th of June is the 24th of September, but since only Christ is perfect, we celebrate the Baptist's conception on the 23rd of September.
Even in our church, the birth of Virgin Mary is celebrated on September the 8th, but on the Eastern calendars the conception of the Mother of God is not the 8th, but the 9th, of December — because only Christ is perfect. But while John the Baptist's Nativity is one day earlier, the Virgin Mary's Nativity is one day later.
Other feasts begin to fall into place. The 14th of September is the Exaltation of the Holy Cross — the day that the cross was shown to people when the Church of the Resurrection was dedicated in Jerusalem. Forty days before that is the feast of the Transfiguration — when Jesus goes up the mountain with his disciples to strengthen them for the upcoming passion — the 6th of August. So the Transfiguration feast is related to the feast of the Holy Cross.
The Nativity cycle is fixed on December 25th. Then, eight days later, on the 1st of January, is the feast of the Circumcision because that's when Hebrew boys were circumcised and given a name. Twelve days after the Nativity, January 6th, is the feast of the Epiphany or Theophany. In English, this is sometimes called the feast of Twelfth Night: in some parts of England it is called Old Christmas and in other places, it's called Little Christmas.
It drives me crazy to see all of these commercials that are counting the twelve days of Christmas, because they start twelve days before the Nativity. What they are really talking about is the twelve shopping days before Christmas. They throw in some Happy Holidays “factoid”, for example that Gene Autry wrote “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, etc. This destroys the notion that the time before the Nativity is a period of preparation — we're supposed to be getting ready for the celebration. Why should that be surprising when the stores seque from Halloween villages to Nativity sets?
Forty days after the Nativity, there's the feast of the Encounter or Presentation of the Lord in the Temple, on the 2nd of February. Once again, we see the importance of the light in the winter's darkness. Father Alexander Schmemann used a beautiful term when referring to the Christmas cycle: he called it the winter Pascha as opposed to the spring Pascha.
How did the saints' feasts come about? Initially, only martyrs were honored as saints — the day of a saint's death usually became his feast day. The Church of Rome had the beautiful custom — they called it a “birthday&rdquo, because that's when the saint was reborn into eternal life. If you look at a catacomb inscription and it says “so and so buried here in peace, age 12 years old 3 months” — but the person inside the tomb is obviously an adult, maybe 70 years old. Why? Because the age that they wrote on the tomb was calculated from their baptism. It's very touching.
To conclude, I'd just like to read for you a little section from St. Eusebius of Caesarea. He was a bishop in Palestine, a friend of the emperor Constantine. He was the first church historian. So, he writes this little section, in around the year 300:
Throughout the world in the churches of God, in the morning at
sunrise and at evening, hymns, praises, and truly divine pleasures are
constituted for God. The hymns, which everywhere in the world are
offered in His churches at the morning and evening hours, are as a
pleasure to God. Therefore, it is said ‘the lifting up of my hands as an
evening sacrifice.’ The practice of singing Psalms in the name of the
Lord is served everywhere. For this commandment to sing Psalms is
enforced in all the churches existing among all the peoples not only
among the Greeks, but among the barbarians. In the whole world, in
towns and villages as well as even in fields, in the world, in the entire
church, the peoples of Christ gather together in all nations and sing
with a loud voice, hymns and Psalms to the only God who announced
by the prophets in such a manner that the voices of the Psalm singers
are heard by those outside. The Emperor Constantine, himself, as a
sharer in the holy mysteries of our religion would seclude himself
daily at stated hours in the inner most chambers of his palace and
there, in solitary, converse with God. He would prostrate to the
ground in humble simplification and ask blessings of which he stood
in need.
Thank you, all.
By the way I'll do a little commercial at this point and point out a couple of books from our adult catechism for Eastern Catholics. “Light for Life” is a three volume set from God With Us Publications. I took the charts from the second book, “The Mystery Celebrated”. It speaks about the liturgical year, Vespers, Orthros, and so on.
Question: Why don't we have pews in the Church?
Fr. Mark Melone: In the Roman Catholic Church, pews did not come into Catholic worship until the Protestant reformation. If you go to France or Italy, in the big churches, there are no pews. People stood during liturgy. We should be unencumbered to make the prostrations, to go in the processions, to go up and touch the priest with the holy gifts, and so on. Traditional liturgy is very free in movement. It was only with the Reformation that the liturgy became a “class” where everyone becomes rigidly confined to these seats. You stood up once in a while, but the rest of the time, the minister preaches at you.
Question: What is the Triodion?
Fr. Mark Melone: It's a liturgical book that we use for the period of Great Lent. It contains changeable parts of the services. The name comes from the expression “Three Odes”. Of course, that doesn't make much sense unless you know that the Canon in Morning Prayer, which is a poetical composition, has nine odes based on nine songs from the Scriptures. Basically, the Triodion contains the variable Lenten prayers.
Next time Father Maximos from Holy Resurrection Monastery in the Mojave desert is going to speak about prayer and the spiritual struggle from the Byzantine Christian perspective. Thank you all.