That’s my son Lucas, 11, spending an hour in church this morning reading the Psalms aloud. As I’ve mentioned, the Orthodox tradition is to read the Psalms straight through in an all-night vigil starting with the first service of Holy Saturday (which takes place on Good Friday night), until the Paschal liturgy at 11:30pm on Saturday. Except for a couple of hours of break for an afternoon service, we will have recited the Psalms aloud at the symbolic tomb of Christ for more than 24 hours straight.
In a parish as small as ours, this is very hard to do. This morning, as I finished my second shift up at five, I was bleary and weary and wondering why on earth I was doing this. But then I thought about how it was a good kind of tired, and how vividly my faith had come alive in me through these long services, prayers, chants, and ascetic labors. When we came into Orthodoxy in 2006, people told us that it would take us about a decade to really become Orthodox. And they told us that the only real way to do it was to show up. You can’t really read your way into Orthodoxy, which is less a set of doctrines (though it is that) than it is a way of life. I’m not talking about Greekness or Russianness; I’m talking about what happens to you when you participate fully in the life of the church, through the long, sensually rich liturgies, the fasting, the prayers, and so on. Getting out of bed at 2:30 in the morning to drive to church and read the Psalms aloud for two hours all alone, in the dark, when you are dead tired — it changes you, and in a good way. This is hard. But this is my life now, and I love it, and am so grateful for it.
Read Full Article »