Amy Welborn went to mass at a Melkite Catholic Church, which celebrates the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, as Orthodox Christian churches do. Here's her report. Excerpt:
Please go. If you're a Latin Rite Catholic and have never experienced worship in one of these other Catholic churches, go. It will open your eyes to what worship is, and help you grasp what people are saying, even in the Latin context of "singing the Mass" instead of "singing at Mass," for almost every bit of the liturgy is chanted by presbyter, deacon and people, mostly facing in the same direction. It puts staring at each other and mumbling back and forth in a whole new light.
Read the whole thing. Everything she writes about her experience at the Melkite parish is true of (most) Orthodox parishes. If you're a Western Christian, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, you really should check out the way Eastern Christians (Catholic and Orthodox) pray on Sunday. It's like nothing you've ever seen before. I remember a couple of summers ago walking into the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and realizing that the liturgy that was celebrated in this place when it was a church, and which was written by the fourth-century bishop whose church this was, is pretty much the same liturgy we sing on Sunday back home in Dallas.
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Classic rookie mistake: St. John Chrysostom died in A.D. 407. Hagia Sophia was built between A.D. 532 and 537. Obviously, it was never his church.
Rod, thanks for passing on Amy Welborn's report and recommendation. As a NY-er, I'm lucky to have easy access to Eastern Catholic churches and I'd be stupid not to check this out. I'll add it to my "must do" list for 2009.
Steve K.:
How to clarify? What I find that the Eastern Church does is situate the individual within the universal, so that, for example, when a couple marries, the ceremony is not primarily about them but rather they're participating in something that applies to couples at all times and everywhere, and they're a particular instance (in this regard, Wendell Berry talks about falling in love as falling into something much larger than oneself). Or when I pray the penitential Psalm 50, I'm praying something that applies to me not merely as X, who happens to have stolen, coveted, blasphemed, but to me as a type: a sinner--they were David's words, after all, not mine originally. It's not an either/or matter; it doesn't do away with individual responsibility, or the individual situation; it just situates both within a larger framework. Ultimately, it seems to me, the Platonic way of viewing things is right and the Eastern Church is in may ways Platonic.
Re: Hagia Sophia was built between A.D. 532 and 537. Obviously, it was never his church.
Minor quibble: Today's Hagia Sophia was not John Chrysostom's church, but it replaced an earlier Hagia Sophia on the same site which had been destroyed in the Nika riots and with which St John would have been familiar.
While Hagia Sophia wasn't St. John Chrysostom never served in Hagia Sophia, his liturgy was offered there for centuries until the Turks closed it and turned it into a mosque.
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