POINTS FROM CORRESPONDENCE

“A simple question, but why are Orthodox services so long?” E.G. - Warrington.

It is quite true that people coming from the Protestant churches, as you do, do find our services long, but, of course, it depends on how you look at things. From one point of view, our services are short! The liturgy in Heaven is never-ending, the praise of Almighty God is unceasing, and our services here below on earth, are simply a feeble attempt to join in that never-ending worship. So, in that respect, as in many others, they fall very short.

From the point of view of modern, “western” churchmanship, of course they are prolonged. There are good and, it must be admitted, bad reasons for this.

Let us dispose of the bad reasons first. One is that it is now quite common practice for Orthodox churches to string a series of services that originally might have been chanted separately together. In addition to the Divine Liturgy, there are eight daily services, and these are rarely, if ever, celebrated separately now. For convenience sake, they are usually served in two or three groupings of services, even in the monasteries. This is sensible, but sometimes the chain of services can become somewhat overextended.

Secondly, the musical settings used sometimes unnecessarily extend the services. Often, of course, one wants to make the service a little more festive by using elaborate settings, but one does get the feeling that this is sometimes taken to unacceptable extremes. I remember hearing one Greek chanter take about 45 minutes to sing the one hymn, “O Virgin Theotokos, rejoice” (a verse of about five lines in a Prayer Book)! This seems to be verging on simply taking a pride in prolonging things or in one’s own prowess, and one must admit that some Orthodox sometimes seem to feel a silly pride in how long their services are. I suspect it does not edify many people.

One of the good reasons I have already mentioned - joining in the never-ending doxology on high, “on earth as it is in heaven.”

A second good reason is that we need the time, so that we can attune ourselves to the prayer. It is impossible simply to walk into church from our worldly concerns, without having time to quiet down, and put aside all worldly cares and begin to attune ourselves to prayer.

Thirdly, there is an ascetic reason. The services are a period of discipline for us. They are a training ground for us. If we only attend for as much as we like (or, as we kid ourselves, as much as we can bear) we will find, as in our private prayers, that this period gets shorter and shorter! So the services set us a rule and a discipline to train us to continue in prayer.

This last point is important because it indicates a way in which we can “shorten” the services. They will inevitably seem longer and more tedious, if we simply attend them, and do not join them. We need to pay attention to the words that are being chanted or read, or (if, as sometimes happens in the diaspora, they are being read in a foreign language) to follow them in our prayer books. We need also to learn something of the order of the services, and to understand the significance of various parts of the service, so that we can more fully appreciate their richness and their beauty. If we fail to do this, attendance at church becomes something like watching an old foreign language film over and over again, only occasionally glancing at the subtitles. Not only does it seem long, tedious and boring, but we gain nothing from it but time wasted. Though it must be said that this is probably a little better than time destroyed: that it is certainly better to stand in church vacantly than to be about something sinful away from church.