Letters from 25 June
to 1 July 2007
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Orthodox
anomaly
A propos of your 24 June
2007 front page letter’s suggestion that “the
generally accepted meaning of … [the word “orthodox”]
seems to be ‘Of or relating to any of the churches or
rites of the Eastern Orthodox Church,’” our Egyptian,
Ethiopian, Eritrean, Armenian, Syrian and Indian friends who
are Oriental, not Eastern, Orthodox, would be rather surprised.
The Eastern Orthodox, of course, parted company with the West
in a process culminating Great Schism in 1054; the Oriental
Orthodox had taken their own path six centuries earlier, as
a result of their dissatisfaction with the Council of Chalcedon
in 451.
Encounters
between Oriental Orthodoxy and western Christians have not always
been markedly happy: the great catastrophe of Orthodoxy in India
was the arrival of Roman Catholic Portuguese who attempted to
convert the Orthodox to Catholicism by the sword, in the process
destroying their churches and burning their holy books. A consequence
for the St Thomas Christians was a splintering into at least
a half-dozen groups — some of them continuing as Oriental Orthodox,
others becoming Oriental-rite Catholics, other still becoming
Roman Catholics — in ways that are depressingly familiar to
latter day Anglicans. Other encounters have been more felicitous:
one of the groups of St Thomas Christians in India, the Malankara
Mar Thoma Syrian Church, is, indeed, in full communion with
the Anglican Communion.
Oriental
Orthodox worship is prodigiously vigorous: in the Malankara
Indian Orthodox Church every word of the liturgy is chanted
full-voice by huge congregations — in Aramaic in some
churches; Malayalam, Hindi or English in others. The ancient
provenance of its liturgies is strikingly apparent in, among
other things, their frequent similarity with Muslim worship:
the Christians whom the Prophet Muhammed would have known, of
course would have worshiped in this way. (I shall separately
email you a few photos of Orthodox worship in Bombay.) All that
being said, I of course fully concur in the view that it is
anomalous for Anglicans, traditionalist or otherwise, to refer
to themselves as “Orthodox.”
Mac Robb
Holy Trinity, Fortitude Valley (occasionally)
Brisbane, Australia
mac.robb@gmail.com
25 June 2007
We agree
that overhauling
St John Chysostom is unlikely
I agree with
your front-page
article that Anglicans should take a card from the
Orthodox, particularly when it comes to liturgy. I wish someone
had thought of this sooner.
I can't imagine
clerical movers and shakers in the Orthodox Church deciding unilaterally
to overhaul the Liturgy of St. Chrysostom in hopes of attracting
adolescents, young families or other prestige groups by catering
for what middle-aged clerics imagined were their tastes; I can't
imagine them introducing smarmy cliches to inculcate concern about
the environment and about "justice, freedom and peace"; I can't
imagine them turning church services into middle-brow social events
with all the numinous atmosphere of a PTA meeting in the interests
of "building community." I can't imagine them regarding liturgy
as a mechanism for manipulating the laity or an entertainment, and
then tailoring it to do the job.
H. E. Baber
University of San Diego
San Diego, California, USA
baber@sandiego.edu
28 June 2007
For more
information...
Further to your opening
page remarks about orthodox form, there is an excellent
collection published in 2004 by the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptyksky
Institute of Eastern Christian Studies entitled The Divine Liturgy
— an Anthology for Worship. It is quickly becoming the
major worship book for Eastern Catholic parishes in Canada. The
book is bilingual in parts (Ukrainian-English) but predominantly
English. Naturally, it follows the Greek form of worship approved
by the Vatican for eastern rite catholics. It's prose style is quite
different from what I've been used to in regular RC missals, as
is the calendar which, also, commemorates the Eastern saints, including
men and women lost through 20th Century persecutions. The Sheptyksky
Institute is part of St. Paul University in Ottawa.
Serge Tittley
Thunder Bay, Ontario, CANADA
stittley2003@yahoo.ca
29 June 2007
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