Thanks, Heather, for your appreciative note. I think one reason why I can enter so “handily” into the other-worldly space of a church is that my childhood church was a Ukrainian Orthodox one – and one entered it in silence, lit candles and said quiet prayers, sat in meditative anticipation of the Liturgy…well, you get the idea. No chit chatting! So it became a habit – to walk into a church, any church, as though entering another “zone.” Certainly the interior of an Orthodox church fools no one that it is a drop-in centre. (The community perogy suppers are for that. 🙂 Lucky you for those whales and fishes; I wish we had a hymn like that. Ours are so, well, other-worldly. I think it has to do with the fact that the first Slavic translations of the Scripture and liturgy were straight from the Greek without going through real people.

“Armed me for life.” I look forward to learning more about this when I see you later this year, I hope. In the meantime, have you been to a Roman mass lately? As an Oblate of the Benedictines and a retreatant at their monastery in Saskatchewan, I’ve been to Eucharistic Mass a lot and, boy, is it ever stripped down compared to the Byzantine Rite (which itself keeps getting a little shortened and simplified as the decades roll on from the heyday in Constantinople in the 7th century). I never was at a Latin Mass, pre-Vatican Two (although I’m familiar with a lot of the music and even texts, of course, from concert presentations of the great Masses – just listened today to Mozart’s C Minor on the car CD player) and it somehow seems familiar from movies and novels. Too bad that people don’t have the same familiarity with the Orthodox Liturgies.

Thank you, Ruth. It was thanks to you and Trevor, when I was writer-in-res in Campbell River back in 2006, that I was introduced to Anglican Liturgy. It was Maundy Thursday and I was deeply moved by the ceremonial stripping of the sanctuary, the dimming of lights, the gravest silence …We have no such service on Holy Thursday, only an awful lot of Liturgy and Scripture. As Orthodox Wiki describes it: “Holy Thursday begins with the celebration of vespers and the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil, in representation of the earthly presence of Christ realized at the Last Supper. In the evening, anticipating the Matins of Friday morning, the Holy Passion service of the reading of the Twelve Gospels is conducted. In these readings Christ’s last instructions to his disciples are presented, as well as the prophecy of the drama of the Cross, Christ’s prayer, and his new commandment.” Keeping in mind, too, that the reading of the Gospels, performed by a number of priests from the Edmonton parishes, all with their backs to us and chanted in Ukrainian as well as English, you can see why the simplicity of Maundy Thursday among the Anglicans was so unforgettable.

Hmmm. It seemed to me there was an awful lot of “function” going on, once you accept the notion (from earliest Christian times) that a Liturgy is “the work of the people.” There were all sorts of “functions” that “people” were involved in, mainly but not entirely of a symbolic nature. Bring on the metaphors!