Re: CHAT: Visible planets (was: Corpses)

>I was amazed in participating in Eastern Catholic
>liturgies how so many people knew all the words
>and music without looking at the missals or
>weekly pamphlets.
>
>Perhaps they just used them as references before
>hand, you know a sort of "oh, OK, that one
>again".
Most of the Eastern Divine Liturgy (I suppose you'd call it a Mass) is
fixed.  There is really very little that changes from week to week.  Very
few people at our Church have their prayerbooks open during Liturgy, and we
don't have any weekly pamphlets, though the Antiochian parishes that we
attended did.  I can't remember what was in them...nothing very necessary.

The teaching services of the Church are Vespers and Matins, which the
Russians combine (along with First Hour) into All Night Vigil, which, in
spite of its name, does not last all night (although it *could* if you sang
everything instead of intoning it and didn't make the standard
abbreviations), but it rarely lasts over 3 1/2 hours.  (If you don't make
the standard abbreviations, among other things, you will chant (=intone)
one kathisma from the Psalter.  The Psalter is divided into 20 kathismata.)

>I'm sure that at least older practicing Nidirino
>would have most if not all of those prayers and
>liturgies down pat.
The ones who practice piously, yes.  I'm sure that they don't all practice
piously.

> > Anything
> > repeated daily becomes
> > memorized quickly.  I can rattle off large
> > portion of Morning Prayers and
> > Prayers Before Sleep without thinking, and
> > frequently do, which is
> > annoying, because if you're not concentrating
> > on what you're saying, you're
> > not actually praying, so I am perfectly capable
> > of getting through 15 or 20
> > minutes of prayers with out actually *praying*
> > at all.  I need to correct
> > that situation.)
>
>If possible, try varying the prayers with
>scripture readings or a capella prayer.
We do the Epistle and Gospel of the day after morning prayers in my family.

What do you mean by a capella prayer?  All Orthodox prayers are
"intoned."  They're read or recited in a peculiar manner that you would
probably categorize as "chanting."  (But for us, "chanting" involves using
one of eight different melodic templates, and not all texts are intended to
be chanted.)  Mainly, I need to learn how to concentrate on what I'm
saying.  I also have to want to mean the words that I am saying.  And all
Orthodox liturgical music, BTW, is supposed to be a cappella.

>Out of pure curiosity, how much has the Orthodox
>faith been an influence on Nidirino or even
>Cwendaso religion?
I notice that you didn't ask about Trehelish :-)  Obviously, there's no
influence there.  On second thought, there is, but it's not
direct.  Classical Trehelish religion, when the Death cult was strong, is
the antithesis of everything Orthodox.  The Trehelish Death cult is the
antithesis of everything good.  Even Trehels who do not openly and actively
worship Death (and many modern ones don't) still do worship him, because it
is so embedded in everything that Trehelish culture believes.  There is a
tiny minority who actively *refuse* to worship him, and the presence of
this religious sect in Trehelish society is a result of my Orthodoxy.  The
clash of the Trehelish Death cult and the Nidirino Sun cult is also a
product of my Orthodoxy.  The whole idea of the struggle between Life and
Death in the religions of my concultures is something that has a deep
meaning to me because I am an Orthodox Christian.

>The prophecy in Tovlm that "in time, a certain one of the great gods would
>come and men would cease to die from that time on" is very definitely a
>product of my own Orthodox faith.  Christ is the God who conquers
>death.  For Protestants, Christ frees us from our sins.  For Orthodox,
>Christ frees us from death.  To Orthodox Christians, sin, death, and the
>devil are all roughly the same thing, and Christ took flesh of the
>Ever-Virgin Mary, ascended the Cross, and descended into Hades in order to
>free us from death.  At Pascha (Easter) we sing, "Christ is risen from the
>dead trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing
>life."  I could explain more, but you probably get the idea by now.  (Why
>does it look like this paragraph was quoted from a previous message?  It
>wasn't.  I just finished writing it.  Eudora is acting up on me.  I hope
>it (she?) doesn't crash.)
Of course, Tovlm has it very wrong.  Tovléis taught that there were many
gods and that men would cease to die when this god comes (which we all know
was not the immediate result of Christ's resurrection; physical death still
occurs.)  There is also no talk of the dead being raised, only of death
ceasing; it's not retroactive.  But you can still see the clear
influence.  I have always (or at least as long as I have been Christian)
been fascinated with the prefigurings of Christianity that are so often
found in pagan religions.  This is one of those.  They are obviously
waiting for Someone.

Immediately following the prophecy that death would cease is the
instruction that "until that came to pass, we should place a portion of
cooked food at the graves, hoping that they may suffer neither hunger nor
thirst in the lands where they now wander."  Perhaps there is some
influence here, perhaps not.  Being Orthodox, I am used to praying for the
departed.  Of course, *we* pray for the repose of their souls and
forgiveness of their sins, not for anything so material as what the
Cwendaso ask for.  And I should clarify that the Cwendaso do not believe
that they are *feeding* the dead with this offering; the food is a prayer,
not a funerary offering.  They leave new food every day; everyone in the
village takes turns bringing the food.  They often leave a cup of sheep's
milk or water, even though it is not prescribed.  Orthodox often make
koliva, boiled wheat with sugar and often nuts, when a pannykhida (a
memorial service for the departed) is said.  I'm not certain that there is
any connection here, unles it's a subliminal one.  I don't think that there
was any intentional resemblance on my part.

The general feel of Nidirino devotion, with daily prayers at the right
times of day, etc., does seem to be influenced by my own experience of
Orthoxdox Christianity.  The idea of everyone who is literate having a
standard prayerbook is another influence.  Everyone in the Russian Orthodox
Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) has the same Jordanville Prayerbook, which
will fit into a large pocket (I keep one in my purse.)  The Prayerbook
comes in either red or blue, and they keep tweaking the English translation
in little ways every time they reprint it, which can lead to problems if
you've been using an older edition.  If you're Russian, you're lucky, as
the Slavonic text never changes.

The last influence that I can identify that my Orthodoxy has had on my
conculturing is that the religions are so deeply implemented.  (And they
aren't yet implemented as deeply as they eventually will be, but the basic
form is there.)  You would think that, as a Christian, I would shun
dreaming up pagan religions, and I do wonder if it's really good for me,
but I see religion as being a very important part of who a person, or a
people, is.  When I became Orthodox, I decided to stop being entirely
American.  Seriously.  You cannot think like an American and think like an
Orthodox Christian at the same time.  So I had to learn to think like an
Orthodox Christian, rather than like a Westerner.  In converting to
Orthodox Christianity, I actually changed ethnic group.  (And I think that
it's really got to be a difficult trick to pull to change ethnicity, but I
did manage it.)  I am not talking about the fact that we go to a Russian
Orthodox Church; when we converted, we went to an Antiochian (Arab)
Church.  (A side effect of this is that I don't think of Arabs as all being
Muslims, because the overwhelming majority of the Arabs that I personally
know are Christians.)  I was raised Presbyterian.  I was raised as a White,
Anglo-Saxon Protestant.  I will always be White; I can't change that.  I am
predominately Anglo-Saxon, although I am one-quarter Danish, and there is
some German and a little bit of Scots mixed in.  But I am no longer
Protestant, and I no longer belong to the same culture that my parents
do.  (They took it pretty well.  We have known people who lost all their
family and friends by converting.  We consider ourselves blessed.)  I have
joked that I am now a WASO.  In any case, in my own life, I have seen how a
change of religion can profoundly reshape who you are culturally, and I
know how deeply Orthodoxy has affected any culture that has ever adopted
it, so my concultures are greatly shaped by their religions.

Hope I answered your question thoroughly...I have no idea how many K I just
wrote.

Isidora

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