Episode 314 - The Divine Liturgy with Father John Strickland

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Hello everyone and welcome to the History of Byzantium, episode 314,

The Divine Liturgy with Father John Strickland.

I've been discussing with listeners for some time the need to talk about orthodoxy in more detail on the podcast, and today we begin by talking about the liturgy.

Christianity is in many ways what defines Byzantium against the pagan Roman past, and so for those of you like me who are fairly ignorant about the Orthodox Church, this seemed the obvious place to start.

I grew up in the Church of England, a Protestant church, and my

local service was a low Anglican one, meaning there was much less emphasis on ritual and procession than in many churches across the world.

It was informal and modern and lively, but it left me very separated from the traditions which the Byzantines helped create and maintain.

So I've turned to an Orthodox pastor and historian to help educate me.

Our guest today is Father John Strickland.

John is the pastor of an Orthodox church in Pulsbo in Washington state.

He has also written a four-volume series about the history of Christian civilization called Paradise and Utopia.

He's also recorded a podcast of the same name as an accompaniment to the book.

He also wrote The Making of Holy Russia, The Orthodox Church and Russian Nationalism Before the Revolution.

Father John is originally from California and an Episcopalian background.

In the interview he will explain how he came to join the Orthodox Church and become a pastor.

But the bulk of the interview is him explaining what the divine liturgy is all about.

What is the service composed of?

What are its origins in Byzantium?

Why is it called divine?

And why is it so important?

It was a fascinating conversation.

I hope you enjoy it.

And I will try to persuade Father Strickland to come back on in the future to answer your questions about Orthodoxy.

Father John Strickland, welcome to the history of Byzantium.

Hello, Robin, good to be with you today.

It's great to have you.

I'm very grateful to you for coming on.

As I said in the introduction, Father Strickland has studied and written about the history of Christendom in great detail, but today has agreed to come down to my level and answer some fairly basic questions about the Orthodox faith.

Now, some listeners know a great deal, but many listeners like me are quite ignorant about the basics of what the Byzantines believed.

So, let's start with the liturgy.

Now, my understanding is that the divine liturgy is a Eucharistic service, so where Holy Communion is given.

But could you give us just a rough idea of what the liturgy is composed of and what it would mean to those taking part?

Sure, sure.

Yeah.

The liturgy is just a liturgy can mean two things.

It can mean the overall pattern of worship.

So liturgy includes, you know, other services that take place throughout the year and

Orthodoxy to the present day has a wide range of different liturgical services that mark different times of the day or seasons of the year and so forth.

The word liturgy can also, however, mean and is often used to mean

that specific service offered on Sunday mornings and other days of festal character where, as you just said, the Eucharist is offered.

And

this is usually more formally known as the Divine Liturgy, and even more formally known by a saint that helped shape one particular order of the divine liturgy.

So the most common order of the divine liturgy served in the Orthodox Church, which has its origins

in the Byzantine period, is the Divine Liturgy of St.

John Chrysostom.

St.

John Chrysostom having died in the early 400s or 5th century.

That's still being used today.

And we could talk about its content.

Even though St.

John Chrysostom is associated with

the order of the liturgy, there's a great deal in that liturgy which he did not himself compose or

hand on to posterity, but it's known by his name.

So, the service that you would attend on a Sunday now in Washington State would be familiar, at least parts of it, to a Byzantine from John Chrysostom's time?

Yes, parts of it.

And yeah, that's the emphasis, parts of it, because there are certainly parts of it that were composed and introduced into the divine liturgy of St.

John Chrysostom long after St.

John Chrysostom's death.

So it was a service that was served especially in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople up until the end, until 1453, when that was ceased to be a Christian temple or church.

And during the course of this time, it continued to get some,

it was malleable to some extent, and things were added to it after John Chrysostom's time.

If I'm not mistaken, though it goes all the way up until the 1300s, if I'm not mistaken, by the 11th century, by the time of the Great Schism, conveniently, the divine liturgy of John Chrysostom is pretty much set.

And so, to your question,

what we do here in Paulsbo, Washington,

on the western borderlands of the planet on a Sunday morning or a feast day,

is pretty much what would have been served in Constantinople a thousand years ago.

Yes.

Yeah, which is amazing.

So if I wanted a very basic

run-through of what that service was composed of, how would you describe it?

Well,

that's a great question.

But there are really three parts to the divine liturgy, two of which are observed by the people that assemble to participate in it.

And one part, the preliminary part, really reserved just for the clergy and namely the priest.

That first part is called the proscomedia.

It concerns the preparation of the bread and the wine that will be used in the Eucharist.

And it's very special, very sacred

preparation that takes place.

The priest and a deacon, often maybe an altar server or two are inside the altar area.

not visible to people who might come early to the divine liturgy, doing this proscomedia service.

And that's really the first part.

But

the two other parts, the ones that really, you know, most people would

see because they would be part of it,

are often distinguished between the first of these two parts, which centers upon or culminates in the reading of the gospel for that particular day, and the second part, which culminates in the consecration of that bread and wine into the Eucharist and then its consumption by the faithful people.

And as a result, this is sometimes called the first part of the liturgy that's seen, really the second part in the way I've laid it out, is called the liturgy of the catechumens,

sometimes the liturgy of the word, because the word is the gospel reading, or the catechumens, because catechumens, those being prepared to be baptized into the Orthodox Church or received through chrismation, if already baptized in some churches,

they are dismissed.

That's part of the liturgy.

The catechumens are dismissed often, well, not often, but sometimes, certainly in my church, to go off to a separate building and be instructed in the Orthodox faith.

And after that, the liturgy of the catechumens or the word is complete, then starts the liturgy of the sacrament, or sometimes known as the liturgy of the faithful, because it's the people who are faithful, the ones who are baptized and ready and prepared to receive communion, who remain and ultimately do so.

So, those are the three parts of the liturgy, and each part has its own special elements to it.

And if you're interested, we could talk about some of the elements, especially the latter two parts that would be visible to most people.

Yeah, well, tell us a little bit more about that then, because what several listeners have tried to communicate to me is the way they experience the liturgy brings the faith to life for them or brings

the story of Christian faith to life for them through participating in the liturgy?

Is that something?

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Liturgy

generally, you know, and

that general definition I offered earlier before we even get to the divine liturgy.

Liturgy in general, for an Orthodox Christian, is the center of Orthodox Christianity.

As a matter of fact, it's often commented that in Greek,

and I'm no specialist in the Greek language for sure, but in Greek, the word orthodoxy basically can be translated as correct worship, correct worship.

You know, if you go to an orthodontist, he puts your teeth in correct order.

So ortho means correct, and adoxi or doxia comes from the word adoxa, which means

glory or the glorification, namely of God.

So the idea is that there's a liturgical kind of center to Christianity.

Modern Christianity, especially in the West, has

in some ways developed in such a way that it's become largely rational,

largely an intellectual project or

activity.

Doctrines are held, books are read, doctrines are affirmed, and these are all necessary good things,

but worship, standing in the presence of God, that is something, while still very commonly found, most Christians, I think, still go to church on a Sunday.

Nevertheless, the emphasis upon the worship, the sacramental liturgical worship of God

was always very, very central to the Orthodox ethos or mindset.

So we could start maybe just by pointing out that this term divine liturgy

comes from a practice in the ancient world where a patron of a given community, like a town or something like that,

would pay for

and supply what's needed for a public celebration of some sort, a public activity of some sort.

This was called a liturgia, a liturgy.

And it's interesting,

the word often is translated as a work of the people, work of the people or work for the people.

And what's interesting is by adding the word divine to this, we see that there's this vision that God arranges this

patronage for his people.

He assembles, he offers, I mean, this is very biblical.

He creates a banquet.

He creates a celebration.

He creates

a joyful assembly for his people.

And he's the patron.

He's the host.

Jesus actually has, you know, in the New Testament,

statements that he makes and imagery is offered

about a great king who holds a banquet for his people and then calls them and says, Everything is prepared.

All you need to do is show up.

That's all you need to do.

And so Orthodox Christians show up on a Sunday morning, for instance, or on another feast day.

It's not just limited to Sunday mornings by any means, but we can just focus on that for the moment.

Show up on a Sunday

ready to have this wonderful

life-changing, life-transforming experience hosted by their God.

And so, that word divine liturgy says a lot about

why some of the people who communicated with you about what this all means, you know, spoke about it being the center of life.

And, you know, Orthodoxy is somehow grounded in this experience.

It really is a liturgical faith, Orthodox Christianity.

So,

can you

explain what people would hear and then where would they participate and why do they stand for these services?

Yeah, that's a famous, infamous,

notorious element of orthodoxy.

We have lots of people coming to our church and becoming Orthodox here at our parish, St.

Elizabeth in Polesbo, Washington.

We just baptized about 12 people at Pasco or Easter.

And just the other day, a third of the people in our Sunday liturgy were visitors.

So a lot of people come, and I'm often explaining why we stand typically.

Well, we'll get to that, I guess.

But I guess what we could start by saying, Robin, is that the day in question is quite significant here.

In most European languages, the day is not Sunday, as it is for us English-speaking people.

The day is some form of Lord's Day, the day of the Lord.

The day of the Lord is actually a technical term in the prophets and other parts

of the Old Testament.

And it's also used in the New Testament.

And the idea here is that this day belongs to God,

that there are seven days that God created as part of the old cosmos.

He created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, according to the Old Testament.

But for Christians from an early, I mean, almost immediately, they began celebrating the liturgy, whatever it might be, not the divine liturgy of John Chrysostom.

He wasn't even alive yet, but the early Christians celebrated the Eucharistic liturgy, East and West, from an early point on that, on what we call Sunday, which is called elsewhere in most other European languages, the day of the Lord.

What's interesting about the Russian language, and if I'm not mistaken, it's the only language on the planet, it's the only language, human language in existence, calls

the day voskresenia.

Vos Chresenia means day of the resurrection, day of the resurrection.

And this reminds us that the day of the Lord, more generally understood, is the day on which Jesus rose from the dead.

By rising from the dead on the first day of the week, in other words,

the seven-day week has expired,

and Jesus, who is both God and man by Orthodox doctrine and Protestant and Roman Catholic doctrine in most cases too,

died on Friday, the last day of the creation.

But for him,

the completion of the new creation of the world.

In fact, Jesus recreates the world through his passion and death on the cross.

And in fact, he says on Holy Friday, he says, it is completed.

It is finished.

Like, in other words, I've completed the work that I came to do through the incarnation.

And then on the seventh day, it just blows one's mind when they think about it on Holy Saturday.

God rests.

Jesus rests in the tomb.

He's buried and he rests.

And that's the new Sabbath

for an Orthodox Christian.

And then the day that follows the Sabbath is the first day of the week, Sunday on the calendar, but also what's often symbolically known as the eighth day of the week and the eighth day of creation, the Lord's Day, the day that takes us beyond this world, or rather, more exactly, brings heaven and its eternal reality into this finite cosmos or world and transforms it by the presence of heaven here.

Now, if this sounds like a lot of theology and cosmology and stuff like that, or biblical reflection, I offer it just to try to emphasize why

your listener or listeners commented that this is the center of Orthodox life, because now the whole cosmos is recreated in that divine liturgy being offered on

Sunday morning,

that God is hosting this eighth day eschatological event that remakes and transforms everything,

beginning with the people who are assembled there.

And so when they come to church on a Sunday morning, you know, they may not be fully conscious of this.

I mean, this is what I teach in catechesis here to

my catechumens, but they may or may not really get all of this.

But there's a lot of hymnography that they hear in the course of the

life of the church that communicates this stuff quite well.

And that's why this is so important and so beautiful and so transformative is to assemble as the body of Christ, as the church, at a local parish of the church for this divine liturgy.

So

beyond the context

in time and space,

the cosmic context for all this, the cosmology of all this, you might have specific questions or your audience, you know, you might want to bring attention or ask me questions about elements of the divine liturgy

as they are introduced during the sequence of worship that that occurs there.

So how much of

Jesus' story is told within the

liturgical service itself?

Yeah,

that's a good question.

You know,

there is a pedagogical element.

There's more than just a pedagogical element.

There's a transformative element, but there is certainly a pedagogical element to it.

The Orthodox liturgy historically

has

been translated into various vernacular languages over time.

Maybe most famously, it was translated into the Slavic languages or language by two Greek

bishops and missionaries named Cyril and Methodius in the 9th century,

and then communicated to like the Russians, the Ukrainians, and other people, Bulgarians, Serbs.

So the pedagogical

element has always been there.

About the life of Jesus specifically,

this whole body of hymns and prayers and everything being offered has sometimes been

described as being about 90% scripture.

So, for instance,

before we get specifically to the life of Jesus himself,

there are hymns in the liturgy that are just psalms.

We just sing in psalms.

The antiphons, so-called at the beginning of the divine liturgy, are just singing psalms.

Then we sing from the New Testament, the Beatitudes,

the prayers being offered, like whether they be litanies where we're asking God for specific petitions, one after the other, you know, for the peace of the whole world and for the welfare of the holy churches of God and for the union of all and for

fair seasons, and abundance of crops, and all the whatever it might be.

These things, too, are all very rooted in scripture.

But very specifically to your question, there are two readings at a divine liturgy on a Sunday that relate directly or indirectly to Jesus.

And that is, the first of these is the epistle reading, where

one reads a section from one of the epistles, usually of Paul, but of other apostles too or or rather and also

the gospel reading which yeah it tells the life of jesus but not in a narrative sense uh robin what's interesting here is that there's not an effort to say okay we're gonna like okay the word lectionary is the is is what

governs what readings are read during the course of the year

And the lectionary is not arranged around telling the life of Jesus as such.

And the divine liturgy is not concerned primarily with instructing

the worshippers in what happened in the life of Jesus, so much as introducing one to the person of Jesus.

And that might sound like the same thing, but actually,

there's a distinction to be made here.

One is united to Jesus in Orthodox theology through worship, through divine worship, such as the divine liturgy.

And union with Christ is a priority over everything else.

And so, knowing about Jesus' life, the instructional or pedagogical element of the liturgy and the readings that go with it,

serves that higher purpose of sacramental and you might say eternal union with Christ, which is salvation.

Very good.

And where would congregants be expected to participate?

That has varied over time and space in the history, the 2,000-year history of the Orthodox Church.

We have almost no material whatsoever in the first century, so it would just be mostly speculation with some archaeological reinforcement to talk about that.

Certainly, I can say that today

there is a high value placed in parishes like mine on people singing the hymns, being conscious of their faith.

That's why catechesis is so important in a pluralistic post-Christian society like ours today.

A lot of people fleeing that or just done with that, like that, they're not getting anything out of that really anymore, come to our church as catechumens and become members of our church.

And they're instructed over the course of a year.

uh in orthodox christianity so they bring that instruction that catechesis with them and grow in it over the course of the years that follow their reception into the church.

So singing, theologically informed

participation in the prayers that are being said and the theology being communicated in the hymns.

Orthodoxy,

there's a phrase, we believe what we pray.

Orthodoxy places a lot of attention in our faith on what we pray in our services.

Our services are not a kind of an add-on to a doctrine that kind of a doctrinal body of doctrine that kind of exists independently from worship.

Much of our tradition, there are different sources of tradition, like the scriptures or the councils or the fathers of the church, but saints' lives.

But one source of our faith, our doctrine, is found in liturgy and hymns that have been composed by

Christians from centuries ago who were later canonized.

Maybe they were monks in monasteries and later canonized.

And the hymns they wrote were then integrated into worship and became canonical sources of our tradition.

So people coming to our churches would participate,

hopefully, in all of this.

Likewise, in our church and in a lot of churches here in the West, there's a high

emphasis or a value placed on frequent communion.

So they would, most of the people in my parish receive the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist every Sunday, provided they've prepared for it through prayer and fasting.

We Orthodox fast from midnight, the night before the divine liturgy, until we receive communion, we don't eat or drink anything.

So no breakfast and nothing like that.

It's a complete or strict fast until we receive communion.

If they've done that, and if they've said prayers in preparation for receiving the awesome thing that no one's worthy of, but God gives to us anyway because of his love, a holy communion.

If they prayed and prepared, fasted,

repented, and made sacramental confession on a regular basis, then

as members of the Orthodox Church, they receive in our church anyway, frequent communion.

Now, I want to say, though,

There are many places in the world and in the West too, some jurisdictions of the Orthodox Church

where frequent communion is not the practice, that communion comes infrequently through a long period of preparation in each case, but not every single Sunday or almost every single Sunday.

So, and there are many churches where the choir is highly trained, but the people don't sing along with the choir.

There are many churches where people are admitted and baptized, maybe as infants, and they grow up and they never really are catechized.

And so they don't bring that theological illumination with them to the services.

And therefore, in those cases, Robin, they don't participate nearly so much as the kind of maybe hopefully not idealized, but certainly

the description I just gave to your question.

And so

there's an emphasis on the importance of the service as you sort of acting out your faith.

Is that partly why people are encouraged to stand rather than

sit and just let it wash over you and not sort of act out what you're believing.

Yeah.

Well, I wouldn't want to make claims about what it's like to sit during a service.

I'm at the altar, so I stand all the time, no matter what.

There was a time when I was Protestant that I would sit down during the services, and certainly that was very meaningful to me, you know, and I think I grew spiritually as in that condition.

So I don't want to suggest one can't, you know, sit down and

there are are many churches, even in the old world, you don't generally find pews, benches, formalized seating in Orthodox churches.

Certainly you don't in Russia or I don't think Ukraine.

I'm not sure about Ukraine as much.

I've lived in Russia for a while and I do know that there it would be very uncommon.

Parts of Greece would be uncommon.

But pews, I mean, okay, so here's the thing about pews.

Pews are

an innovation.

Pews are a recent development

in liturgical architecture, you might say.

So as I understand it, pews began to appear

really in large numbers after the Protestant Reformation, began to shift worship away from a sacramental experience

in participation in God's presence.

and more toward an intellectual reflection on the scriptures and the instruction of scripture during a Protestant service, and also

the less liturgical, less sacramental experience of some forms of Protestant worship.

And again, I'm not a specialist in Protestant worship, and I certainly don't want to tell Protestants what their worship experience is like.

I have no right to do that.

But there is no question in my mind.

You know, I am an historian and I did write a book on the pro, you know, one of my books deals with the effects of the Protestant Reformation.

And people like Calvin really did

minimize, lower the importance of the sacraments

in the experience of Christianity, in the life of Christianity.

And insofar as worship continued on Sundays, the Lord's Day, as it did, more attention was placed on instruction, on that pedagogical element, especially around the scriptures.

And people were encouraged, therefore, to sit down.

so that their body could rest and their brain could get to work on what's being said to them by their pastor from the pulpit.

Whereas in an Orthodox, whereas in a traditional Christian, I just want to say traditional Christian because it was true in the Roman Catholic West, I think, as well,

the emphasis is upon standing in the presence of God

and encountering the kingdom of heaven in that experience.

And I don't know if now is really a good time for us to get into it, but I think at some point it would make a lot of sense for us to just reflect a little bit on how an Orthodox church is designed architecturally

in terms of spatial arrangements, in terms of where the altar is located, in terms of the icons and their role in bringing the experience of heaven to earth.

Because Orthodox worship is, you know, always...

always associated with that term heaven on earth that heaven has come to earth now if it has come to earth

then what is a believer, a worshiper, going to do but get on his or her feet and stand at attention?

Because if someone of great stature walks into the room, you know, say the leader of a country or

something like that, maybe even one's boss,

often the response of a person is stand up, right?

To show respect for the person who's just entered.

Well, so much more so the case

with the conviction that Jesus Christ is really here, he's really present.

He's not someone we're just thinking about or memorializing in our human actions here, but the Spirit of God is present, has descended on us.

The angels surround us, and heaven has entered into this cosmos that we call our temple.

And

as a result, we stand at attention because our bodies, and not just our brains, but our bodies are worshiping, which is why Orthodox Christians still, you know, cross themselves.

They make prostrations, full prostrations to the floor in the absence of pews.

They go down on their face

during services during Great Lent, the Great Fast before Pasco or Easter, make full prostrations to the floor.

The body is being transformed just like the mind and the soul is being transformed in Orthodox worship.

It's why we fast.

It's why we have incense.

It's why we have beautiful icons.

It's why we have space arranged in a particular way.

So that's why we stand.

We stand because God is really present there with us.

Brilliant.

Well, I was going to ask about icons.

And

the use of space obviously is very relevant to Byzantium because it would have been developed in

Byzantine churches, including the big one that you can still visit.

So do briefly take us through

how you see the physical movement as part of the service, and obviously the icons.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, Orthodox worship is oriented.

The word orientation has, in our modern kind of post-Christian world, come to mean like an introduction to something.

Like in college here in America, there's also often something called freshman orientation, where the new college student, you know, is walked through the campus and shown, you know, where the different buildings are and all that stuff.

Job orientation is a term that's often used to get a new employee kind of up to speed on how things are done.

Well, the word orientation, as I think you and your audience will already perhaps know and quickly realize or recognize, comes from the word Orient, which just means East.

That's all it means.

If someone

in America or Britain wants to go to the Orient, they go to India or Japan or China or something like that because it's geographically in the East.

It's in the Orient.

it comes from the Latin word oriens, which means east.

That's all it means.

And

the word orientation comes from

this, facing east,

having a disposition toward the east.

And that's because in early Christianity, worship was always eastward.

or almost always eastward.

And the question is why?

Well, they face eastward because eastward symbolizes, it's not a literal thing, it's a symbolical thing, but symbols matter, symbolizes the kingdom of heaven.

So, how so?

Well, scripture reveals this.

Like, for instance, Genesis talks about how paradise, the Garden of Eden, was planted in the East.

It's right there in the opening of the Bible.

Other passages brought attention to the importance of the East.

Like, for instance, I think it's the book of Malachi, the prophet, who says that the Savior, the Messiah,

is known as the Son, S-U-N, Son of righteousness.

In other words, the Sun rises from the East.

Jesus himself says that just as lightning strikes from the East in Matthew's gospel, so the Son of Man will come again in glory.

So early on, Christians used the East

as the place of the sunrise, this glorious breaking into the world of light and beauty and majesty as a symbol, a cosmic symbol.

It's just part of the created cosmos, but it's a symbol of

Christ's coming into the world.

And so there was a orientation facing eastward that accompanied worship, as it were, waiting for the coming of Christ and standing in vigil.

And the darkness of this world, all the darkness metaphors and light metaphors that are found in the Bible come into play here.

And so, when one would enter a Byzantine temple, church, just as like in most cases

in the West as well, although it's interesting, St.

Peter's Basilica is not oriented.

It actually, the altar faces in the direction of the West.

I'm not sure why that is, but

I think it's an anomaly.

I think most

Italian

and Western and ultimately Roman Catholic churches are also oriented.

I think many Protestant ones are as well.

The idea is to face east because a Christian has this total identification with the kingdom of heaven, which is not of this world, which comes into this world through worship and the Christian life, but it is not of this world.

You know, that famous phrase that's often used out of the New Testament, not of this world,

in this world, but not of it.

And so, the

Christianity, Orthodox Christianity, for instance, um,

imparts to the believer a way of life that often is at odds with this world, doesn't live by the standards and values of this world.

Um, if someone strikes you on the cheek in this world, you usually hit them in the face.

But Christianity

tells us to turn the other cheek and

love our neighbors.

I'm sorry, love our enemies, love our enemies, um, things like this.

And so this orientation then is symbolic of a turning from the darkness of this world

toward the kingdom of heaven.

It's interesting.

It's different than, say, what Muslims do.

You know, one might think, oh, Muslims face east too.

Well, they do in the West.

They face Mecca.

But in Indonesia, where a lot of Muslims live, they face west when they worship because Mecca is westward from Indonesia, from the east.

Christians, however, no matter where they are on the planet, face east because this world and nothing on this world has a complete attachment for them.

Not Jerusalem, you know, not any other holy place on earth, but it's the place beyond this world.

Here we have no continuing city, the book of Hebrews tells us.

And so to come into a Byzantine temple then, to worship, say on Sunday, the Lord's Day, in the divine liturgy, required a Christian then

to become oriented,

to leave the West behind and its symbolic reference to a broken, sinful, demon-riddled cosmos that's been overrun by demonic dark forces, to leave that behind and to face the kingdom of heaven.

And so in they would come to the temple.

Now, we could talk about the specific organization of space in the temple.

There were three parts to it.

um,

uh, and and these were all modeled on the Old Testament uh temple or tabernacle uh that was used.

We could talk about that too, if that's of interest to you, and the place of icons and all of that.

But I want to check in to make sure I'm not way off into the weeds here.

Um,

well, just just to keep it in simple terms, um, okay, yeah, it would be good to know, and definitely uh, the role of icons, yeah, yeah.

So, I think that this this applies for Byzantium for most of most of the history of Byzantium.

And so I don't think, you know, what's what goes on in an Orthodox church today is really different than the way it was a thousand or even fifteen hundred years ago.

So there are three parts to an Orthodox temple typically, three spaces.

Each space brings one closer, as it were, to the kingdom of heaven symbolically.

symbolically we're talking about symbols here closer to the holiness of god to the presence of god so the first first most distant space, just inside the entryway,

is called usually the narthex, the narthex.

And that space in a modern Orthodox church is where you'll find like candles that can be lit and put in front of icons.

There might be literature that one can, you know, pick up if they're a visitor or something like that.

Anyway, the narthex is kind of a liminal space, to use a technical word.

It's kind of a transitional space from the world into the kingdom of heaven, symbolically speaking.

But once you pass through the narthex, that first space of an Orthodox temple, you then enter the main space, which is called the nave, N-A-V-E.

And as the word suggests, it comes, it's rooted, it's related to the word navy or naval as in boat.

And here is where in an Orthodox Christian church, the majority of the people assemble.

They assemble here.

This is where the people assemble for the worship and where they will remain during the course of worship.

It's interesting that this space, this is a Latinism too, by the way.

This is not the Greek, but this is the Latin word nave.

It's interesting that that space

is named after a boat or it means boat.

And that says a lot.

Like, for instance, it alludes to the Old Testament image of the Ark of the Covenant.

I'm sorry, Ark or the Covenant, Noah's Ark, sorry, Noah's Ark, where the people are carried away from the darkness and

iniquity of the world and protected by God and pass through tumultuous kind of storm-like waters that threaten to destroy them, but they're kept intact as God's people and brought eventually to safety.

That's kind of what the image is there.

But it also means you're going somewhere.

Orthodox worship is dynamic.

It's not something that's just static.

Like that's why we're not sitting down and crossing our legs and drinking a sipping a cup of coffee or something like that.

It's a dynamic experience of spiritual transformation where union with God is occurring.

And through that union with God, we are being transformed from the old man into the new man to allude to some scripture of the New Testament that Paul uses.

And so

this idea that the nave the place where the people assemble for worship is named after a vessel, a vehicle taking them somewhere as a reminder that we have no place here on earth.

We're on our way somewhere.

And that, of course, is facing east.

We're oriented toward the kingdom of heaven, toward paradise.

And so that final

space is reserved as a symbol of paradise.

And that's the sanctuary inside of which the altar table is placed in the center.

The altar table

and the sanctuary

conforming,

well, I I should have said the nave conforms to the Old Testament

space called the holy place.

That's where the priests would assemble.

The priests would come in and make their sacrifices in the holy place.

That holy place becomes the nave where the people assemble.

Now, one might ask the question, well, if this is modeled on the Old Testament, why don't the people stay out in the narthex?

The answer to that question is because the people

participate in Christ's priesthood.

christ is the only priest and he imparts his priesthood to all to all people all people baptized into his body and the people uh the the church is a royal priesthood to quote the new testament to quote peter there and so the people are assembled as as it were in that space reserved for the priests um in the corresponding space uh in the old testament temple in that nave Well, anyway, the final space

in this procession toward holiness holiness or orientation toward the kingdom of heaven in Orthodox worship is the altar area, the sanctuary.

And that

is marked off by, in modern practice, the icon stand, iconostasis, iconostas.

Historically, and this I think would be relevant for your audience, that was not there in the earliest centuries.

There was a barrier of sorts, a chancel barrier, it's often called.

And with time, and it looks like it's as late as the fifth century, with time that begins to be built up and accentuated more.

It used to just surround the altar table, and then it began to kind of separate the altar area generally from the nave.

But with time,

it's built up into what looks kind of like a wall of icons, a stand of icons is a better word for it and and then it has gates so it has icons that are facing the people and then it has gates in the middle called the royal gates or the holy doors the holy gates and then on either side of these gates smaller doors access doors kind of doors of convenience the doors in the center are really quite significant uh often called royal gates because they're the gates through which the king comes and we're not talking about the byzantine emperor here we're talking about the king of kings jesus christ in his word which is brought out when the gospel is read the priest or deacon will walk through those doors in a procession with the gospel book open it and then read it to the people in the nave standing in the nave

likewise when the that's you know we talk about the two parts of the liturgy that the people observe that's the part known as the liturgy of the word and then the liturgy of the sacrament that comes later or the faithful um the eucharist the the chalice or cup of the eucharist is brought out from the altar table through those royal gates

and distributed to people inside the nave as well.

And so

this creates a kind of, you might say,

another point of transition or liminal space.

Sometimes people see that wall of icons as a barrier separating the people from the altar where the clergy serve.

In the Orthodox Church, only men are members of the clergy.

And furthermore, only a small number of men, like a really small number, like a half a dozen, actually go into the sanctuary and serve at the altar with the priest's blessing to do so.

Most men are not allowed into the, even men are not allowed into the

into the

into the sanctuary.

But there's a sense that like the people, women, but also most men, are not, you know, are kept outside and there's this wall of icons.

And there's this kind of thing like, so what's like, what's this all about?

Why are people being kept from the holiest of places?

Well, there's really a couple answers that are there.

One is if we don't, if we don't set something apart, we lose a sense of like

of its holiness.

Like there should be things that are off limits or almost off limits to us to remind us that we live in a world.

where heaven is off limits, but for the actions of God through the incarnation of Jesus by the Holy Spirit.

Another thing, though, that I think is

really quite important to keep in mind, that stand of icons is, you know, it has icons of Christ and all the saints facing the people.

And so it projects heaven into this world, into this space, to see the face of Jesus, who's both God, yes, and therefore beyond representation, but also became human, just like me, and therefore has two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, and his mother holding him.

And then all the other saints, these icons are a proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that the incarnation is real, and that heaven has come into this world.

Heaven is on earth.

And so it's really just the opposite of what some people might mistakenly think, a barrier.

of the people from the holy place and more a projection of the holy place into the life of those people.

So those are some details.

And then finally, that sanctuary conforms, of course, to the Holy of Holies.

So the Old Testament had the court, it had the holy place, and now it has the Holy of Holies.

Only once a year, a priest would go into that space to the Ark of the Covenant and make a sacrificial offering on the mercy seat on top of the Ark of the Covenant.

which had its own icons

of angels on top of it

and become models of the icons that the church uses.

And the altar table now takes the place of that Ark of the Covenant.

And something as holy as the broken tablets of Moses inside the Ark of the Covenant and Aaron's rod and the manna from the wilderness, which are said to have been kept in the Ark of the Covenant before it disappeared in the history of Israel.

Something much more holy now is offered in an Orthodox Christian church at the Sunday Divine Liturgy, Liturgy, and that's the very body and blood of Jesus, which is consecrated right on that altar table, something even more holy than what the Ark of the Covenant contained within it.

And that holiness is a really big deal.

Like, for instance, only the bishop or priest or deacon may touch the altar table.

This is an allusion to the Old Testament ban on anyone touching the Ark of the Covenant except the high priest once a year.

So,

this is considered to be really awesome stuff.

The word awesome here is certainly appropriate.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much.

I think my last question on the liturgy is a personal one because you mentioned you had a Protestant background, but now, of course, are an Orthodox pastor.

If you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit about your journey and if the liturgy played any role in that.

Yeah.

Well, the short answer is yes.

The liturgy played a big role in it.

Orthodox worship really drew me in.

I was Episcopalian.

In America, Episcopalian, the Episcopalian Church is the sister church of the Anglican Church in Britain and other parts of the world.

Some elements of the Episcopal Church, as in the Anglican Communion more broadly, have a very liturgical,

have a very strong liturgical and sacramental emphasis, sometimes called high church.

That was kind of the Episcopalianism that I was drawn toward.

I was baptized as an infant by my parents in the Episcopal Church and then got serious, or more serious anyway, about it,

later on in my early 20s, and started attending a very liturgically, sacramentally defined Episcopal church,

different places I lived actually as a graduate student, finally.

But then, and I really rejoiced in all of that.

It was all beautiful.

It was was all good.

And I'm just very grateful that I had that experience.

It was a real blessing.

I moved to Russia where I was studying the history of the Orthodox Church in Russia, still with myself, you know, I was an Episcopalian at heart.

But I started, there was no Episcopal church in St.

Petersburg in the 1990s for me to attend.

And I was really interested in and drawn toward Orthodoxy in different ways as I researched it more and more.

I started attending a local church there in St.

Petersburg.

It must have been about 1995, 97, 6 or something like that.

And

yeah, there were no pews.

And that was like, wow, that's interesting.

Why are there no pews?

And then I realized, well, it's, you know, because people really, you know, they're being trained to believe that Christ is really here, present, and they're at attention.

I learned that before communion, I wasn't receiving communion at that point because I wasn't Orthodox.

But

to receive communion, I learned that they were fasting absolutely from everything before they did so, from the night before.

That impressed me.

Watching them go through Great Lent and all the services with their prostrations to the floor during Lent just felt right.

I just observed this.

And so

I

fell in love with Orthodoxy, especially through the experience of the liturgy,

but also from its conviction that it has kept the Christian faith unchanged since the time of the apostles and in many forms of Christianity today.

There were a lot of varieties, like in the Episcopal Church where I was,

beautiful things were being done by Episcopalians and in the Episcopal Church, but I was also aware that there were bishops who were teaching things that, you know, there was no resurrection of Christ, and there were things being taught and believed that were just very diverse and I did not believe very healthy.

And so the authentic continuity that the Orthodox Church kept

was really attractive to me.

And so I converted to that in 1997 in Russia.

And then later, after getting my PhD in history back in America in California, I was a graduate student in California.

I went off to seminary and eventually became an Orthodox priest.

I did ask listeners if they had any questions and they were extremely varied and

some much too complex for today.

But one kind listener just sort of wanted to give you the floor.

Because I had sort of said, for those of you who know nothing about Orthodoxy, what question would you ask?

And one of them just said, what would you like an unfamiliar audience to know about the Orthodox Church?

And another sort of said, what should someone do when visiting an Orthodox Church?

So is there anything you'd want to say about

anyone who was curious or interested in knowing more or visiting the Orthodox Church?

Is there anything you'd want them to know?

Yeah.

Well, I would, I mean, certainly as a pastor of the Orthodox Church, I would want them to know that

they are, of course, welcome in the church.

Sometimes I'll get a call from someone saying, you know, I've been learning about Orthodoxy.

I discovered it.

It's truly the greatest, the best kept secret, religious secret, you know, in the West.

I've discovered it online or whatever, and I'm not sure if I can come yet or not because I'm not Orthodox.

It's just like, no, just come.

It's fine.

It's cool.

It's fine.

We, as I say, I mean, just

the other week, we had like of our, of the whole congregation that was assembled, 20,

I think 30% were just visitors, right?

And it's just, there's a lot of people coming into the Orthodox church today, and that's really beautiful to see.

I don't think any.

thing is needed.

I always encourage people to reach out to me as a pastor in advance so I can communicate some of that stuff I just said about the space and orientation and stuff like that.

Like I didn't even say anything about the central icon, the central dome and heaven on earth through that.

But anyway, we'll leave that behind for now.

They won't know a lot of that.

And so I do encourage people to reach out to the pastor of the church they're considering going to and just letting them know they'd like to come.

And if they could learn anything about it in advance, that would be great.

But I'm convinced that you know, I'm an Orthodox Christian priest and I'm convinced that God made everyone in his own image and likeness for communion with him.

And everyone is called to be a member of the Orthodox Church, as bold as that may sound.

And so I treat everyone who's interested in coming to the church as such a person.

Brilliant.

Well, before I let you go, because

I feel like we can have another conversation in the future and touch on all sorts of other topics.

But obviously, the reason you came to my attention is your book series, Paradise and Utopia.

Would you tell the listeners a bit about what's in it and why you wrote it?

Sure.

Well, I fell in love with history, as you did.

Both of us fell in love with history as undergraduates.

And I always wanted to study the, I always wanted to know more about how Christianity contributed to the world I live in.

And so I was always interested in Christendom, to give that a name.

And I taught for about a quarter of a century, about 25 or more years now.

I've taught college courses,

sometimes more or less full time, and

accumulated

a growing

kind of sense of how Christianity contributed to the world in which we live, the West, let's call it.

And so when I felt like I had attained enough kind of sense of this, enough vision of this, I put together a podcast called Paradise in Utopia that's hosted by Ancient Faith Radio and

started kind of working out

a narrative of how this all came about.

It was kind of a, I call it a scholar's notebook because a lot of it was like I was trying out ideas, I was doing research and thinking, and I'd hear people like you said, you hear from your audience and engage people on things.

But when I felt like I had finally reached the point where I was ready, I sat down to do what I really was interested in doing, and that is writing this four-volume series.

The series is called also Paradise and Utopia.

It has a subtitle called The Rise and Fall of What the West Once Was.

And that title, or even more subtitle,

I think summarizes really what I'm trying to get at.

I'm trying to tell the history of the West that we live in today, a West which many people consider to be very troubled, very confused about its its identity, very uncertain about its future, very suspicious about its past.

I'm trying to tell the history of the West

from the perspective that almost no one assumes when they write such a history.

I mean, there's lots of people.

There's a lot of books that have been published

about

the West, obviously.

But I think what my project was to do it as an Orthodox Christian from the

perspective of the so-called East.

And this has really, as far as I know, never been done.

Never been done.

What has been done, especially when historians have reflected on the problems that have become so apparent today in the history of the West, the lack of unity, for instance, in the West,

the disintegration of spiritual values and things like this.

People People have often looked to certain events or developments or movements in what I would consider an Orthodox Christian would consider the recent history of the West, which includes things like the sexual revolution, for instance.

People might go back further and look at the Enlightenment, which brought secularization to the West.

People might go back even further and to the Protestant Reformation and consider how that fragmented, spiritually fragmented the West.

Some people go back to the rise of nominalism, which is a scholastic or post-scholastic intellectual movement of the Roman Catholic Church before the Protestant Reformation.

But what I'm doing in my series is going back to the first millennium, the first thousand years.

And the West has a 2,000-year history, but it's only the second of those two blocks of time, those two millennia, that ever gets any real attention.

That's why I love your podcast and your project, because you're bringing to um to the knowledge of a western audience an anglophone audience the history of the east uh in that first millennium i mean i know you've passed into the 1200s now so you're past the first millennium mark but basically what you're doing is you're reflecting on a civilization a brilliant powerful influential civilization

And it was influential.

One of my chapters in the first volume is called When the West Was Still Eastern.

And it's an effort to show how Byzantium influenced fundamentally what was early Western civilization, often ignored.

So I'm trying to bring

a perspective on the West from the East.

And I'm trying to understand how the deep past, the first millennium,

explains

where we are today, or put a little differently, how departing from that first millennium through the Great Schism, because that's the turning point in my narrative, the Great Schism, the division of the West from the East and the resulting loss of contact with Orthodox Christian civilization in the East that followed the Great Schism of the 11th century, how that put in motion the events that culminated today, and which include things like the rise of nominalism, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Sexual Revolution.

All of those flow out of this Great Schism in my narrative.

So that's my project.

It's got four volumes.

Each one focuses on one so-called age of Christendom.

The first, the first millennium.

The second is a study from the Great Schism

to the Protestant Reformation.

The third takes up a secular look at the Renaissance and goes all the way to the Russian Revolution.

And the final volume called The Age of Nihilism picks up in the late 19th century with the rise of nihilistic morality and philosophy in the case of like Friedrich Nietzsche and its opposition by people like Fyodor Dostoevsky, and takes it all the way through the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century and the rise of liberalism and progressivism in the United States after the end of the Cold War, and takes it up to the present.

Yeah, it just sounds absolutely fascinating, and particularly for us who are working their way through the story of the Western world attacking the Eastern world

in the Fourth Crusade and its aftermath.

Find Paradise and Utopia online at Amazon and wherever good books are sold, and find the accompanying podcast

at ancientfaith.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Father Strickland, thank you so much for speaking to us today.

Thank you, Robin.

It's been enjoyable.

Thank you.

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