The Eastern Rite

If you want to experience what the mass was meant to be, you have to experience the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

/signed/ John Chrysostom Médaille (but that doesn't mean I'm prejudiced!)

How they pray? With all that damned incense I don't understand how they can breathe!

Presuming you mean Latin, because it's universal. Everyone everywhere is praying the same Mass on the same day, and since most missals have the Latin on one side and the vernacular on the other, it is easy enough to follow, eventually memorize, and even understand.

Because culture hijacks and reuses words, so the ancient words can't be re-translated according anyone's cultural bias without the words remaining right there next to the translation as witness.

Connie,

Divine Liturgy in the US is usually said in English. In some more ethnic parishes, it may be 50/50ish English and Ukrainian/Arabic/etc. One of the great things about being Catholic or Orthodox is that you can go anywhere in the world and worship and know what is going on. If you've been Catholic or Orthodox long enough, the liturgy becomes such a part of you, that the priest can be speaking any language and you will be praying it in English. Catholics and Orthodox are each part of a big, dysfunctional, at times, family. Worship together is always helpful I think regardless of language being spoken. The Eucharist is the central 'event' of our worship services, as opposed to a sermon which is usually the center piece of a Protestant service. This is why worshiping in a foreign language seems confusing to you.

Connie Connie: because worship is about heart, not head, or more accurately, "mind in heart." We in the West have overemphasized mere cognition and thus language cognizable to the individual has taken on inordinately high priority. You wrongly assume most Christians from the beginning in the early church experienced worship through the mental knowledge or heart-in-mind (mental feelings and emotions). And there's our Gnosticism. Yet Christians "know" more fully by "personal" participation in Christ, which is suprarational and never a slave to immediate, individualized comprehension.

Furthermore, when the Liturgy becomes a part of you, language vanishes as a barrier. Liturgy is truly anti-Babel, truly Pentecostal. Christians who insist on the divisive or alienating effects of liturgy in an ancient or foreign tongue are still trapped in Babel, or rather their understanding of liturgy IS a Babel. Liturgy is a rest and a liberation from the Babel that is already "the world."

Ultimately, the Liturgy is neither pro- nor anti-vernacular. Christians shouldn't have much problem either way. As a Catholic, I love attending Mass in languages I don't understand because it frees me from my Anglo-Americanisms. I am a Catholic Christian first, American somewhere after that.

Aesthetically, one learns quickly that our attachment to English can deaden our senses. Hearing Mass in Latin, Spanish, Polish, or Old Slavonic reminds me that the Liturgy doesn't belong to us in the here and now, that the Mass is unto ages of ages, joining all the saints across time and space en Christo, which BTW just doesn't have the same meaning as "in Christ" because it's a lot harder for us to domesticate NT Greek than modern NT English. The priestly otherness of Christ can be powerfully reflected in hieratic and ancient liturgical language.

If you go four weeks in a row, and you have any religious inclination, you'll never leave.

pentamom - I am speaking from a Latin perspective here, as I am a member of a Latin mass parish, but the same principle applies I think. You're not cast out to a sea of gibberish; for starters the pews are stocked with missalettes that have the English translation of the liturgy on page and the actual Latin on the facing page. Most parishoners have since acquired their own 1962 Missale, a good one like the one I have not only has this, but also has short explanations in italics preceding each part of the liturgy (such as the preparatory prayers at the foot of the altar, the introit, the kyrie, and so on), as to what that particular part of the liturgy means, as well as a preceding explanation in the missale as to the liturgy as a whole.

Also, this is the function of instruction in catechism, and in a parish like mine the children are instructed in the liturgy, and there is adult catechesis for newcomers (since sadly catechesis in most "mainstream" Catholic parishes is in a parlous state) and converts where the liturgy is also taught.

Finally, you don't just go to Mass, you are in a community, and ours (and I think pretty much all Latin mass communities in the States) is tight knit and as you settle into the community, the Liturgy becomes a part of your life, and I guess you just "tune into it" - the language barrier disappears really and you know what is going on and what God is saying to you through it, and what you are saying to God through it. I don't know any better way to explain it, the unfamiliarity falls away and it becomes intelligible. Even without learning Latin along the way. In my parish we do sing some of the chants in Latin with the choir, like the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei, and hymns (like Adeste Fideles instead of O Come All Ye Faithful).

On the subject of the Eastern rite, I must agree with the others who recommend for Western Christians to attend them. In my parents' town there is a Ruthenian-Byzantine Catholic Church, which we attend when I go to visit them. My Dad is a convert from EO when he married my Mom, so he much prefers to go there. It is a beautiful liturgy and except for a few small parts, the liturgy is in English. This to me recalls what the Novus Ordo should have been like in the vernacular, had not the radicals got a hold of it and done awful things to it. Modern English but very much an organic development of the Eastern rite that came before - which cannot be said of the real, existing Novus Ordo said in many probably post parishes in the West (though an excellent exception is the Novus Ordo mass said on EWTN).

My only quibble with this post is Rod's implication that the Eastern liturgy is superior. I dispute this simply on the grounds that any worship sincerely and reverently celebrated is pleasing to God. Even in the East differing liturgies abound, as they do in Western Christianity.

I have attended Eastern liturgies, one OCA liturgy in a Serbian parish (with a bishop celebrating) and two Eastern Rite liturgies (one Egyptian/Coptic one Ethiopian/Amharic). I found them moving and deep but not my worship preference.

Being a Latin Rite Catholic priest my preference is for the ordinary form (the rite used by most Catholics) reverently celebrated in English. I also like the ordinary form in Latin, but don't get that very often. I have only been to a few extraordinary form Masses, I found them, much like the Eastern liturgies, moving but not my preference.

My point is simply this, any form of worship can be done badly and almost all can be done well (there might be some worship that is inherently bad, although I don't know of any).

I very much dislike liturgical triumphalism, because if it were true you would just need to go to a good liturgy a few times in any tradition to be converted. This happens to some but not very many people.

CJ,

I'm where you are, except one step ahead -- we were invited and did visit an Orthodox church for the first time recently. It was Christmas Eve actually -- where they held the "Festal Vigil" which I was later told was one of the longest services they have! We took our seven kids with us and they did great! They weren't perfectly still, they sat or laid on the floor at times; they asked questions in our ears; they had to go the bathroom sometimes, and etc. And no one cared. The lady who had invited us was next to us and she kept reassuring us "Don't worry about it! If anyone is judging you or your kids, they're the ones that need to deal with something. Don't worry about it." But I honestly don't think anyone was. Our kids were 7 of the 8 kids there that night -- she said they usually have 20 or so. SO maybe check out the parish you're looking at attending! They may have a similar situation -- and even if not, oh, well.

Just a thought or two for you!

My only quibble with this post is Rod's implication that the Eastern liturgy is superior.

I didn't intend to imply it, because I don't want to argue about liturgics, but I do believe the Eastern liturgy is superior to the English-language Novus Ordo Catholic liturgy. But that's an aesthetic judgment (though there's a porous line between truth and beauty in these matters, though of course I would not deny the validity of a liturgy correctly celebrated by a validly ordained priest). My favorite liturgy remains the Maronite Catholic liturgy, which is distinctly Eastern, but much more Western in form than the St. John Chrysostom liturgy.

Erin - "It's my hope that both the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite and the various Eastern liturgies can help inform those celebrating the Novus Ordo so they can reincorporate those elements of balance, reverence, and mystery so often missing from the English Novus Ordo Mass in America and so helpful in providing the proper atmosphere for worship."

I'm sure you know, that's one of the Holy Father's primary reasons behind issuing the [i]Summorum Pontificum.[/i] I agree, God willing may it yet be so.

As a Latin Rite Catholic who is currently (when at my University) attending Sunday liturgy at a Ukrainian parish, I absolutely second this post. I love the Novus Ordo when well celebrated (and my University has a beautiful basilica with a wonderful choir every Sunday), but there is just a magic to the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom that's hard to encapsulate. The best thing I could say about is that, when I first went to my current, Ukrainian parish I realized, about halfway through the liturgy that I hadn't *thought* cognitively since before I'd walked in the door. Worshiping in that style unites mind, heart, and body into a single and total offering to the Blessed Trinity. Most of the liturgy's in English, a few bits in Ukrainian, and it makes no difference to me whether I respond "lord have mercy" or "hospodi po millui." It's about an offering of my whole self, not just my cognitive faculties.

I'd like to add a postscript to what I said above. When I'm in town visiting my mother, I attend the Tridentine Mass with her because I know it pleases her. I find it reverent and meaningful, but one thing that strikes me, especially about some of the propers, is the emphasis on the individual, especially on the individual as sinner. In the eastern liturgy I get the sense that I am praying not so much as this individual, X, but as a human being created by God, or rather my individuality is subsumed in my identity as creature of God. The other services, marriage, funeral, and others seem to emphasize this, as well, one reason I find these so moving and modern secular weddings and memorials, with their emphasis on the specific individual, so beside the point.

MMH, when you undergo the particular judgment, it's going to be as you, the individual sinner MMH, for your particular sins - it is salutary to approach sin with this in mind. I am not sure what is to be gained by not praying as individual X and instead as some general human creation by God (not that I ever got this sense from the Eastern rite though).

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.

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.

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.