We have been needing books with music for parish singing for YEARS, and most parishes really DO have a repertoire of multiple settings of each hymn. The new book is about as well organized for that as one would ask.
We could go back and forth forever and ever (really ages of ages)
over the organization of the books.
At the end of the day it's whats in the book and what isn't in the book (antiphons, little litanies, slavonic, etc.) that is the problem.
One would think that with new books that we could have corrected translation errors. But of course, no ages of ages, the word Orthodox is still missing, etc.
We did need new books and music, new books that had little litanies, minimum three verse antiphons, etc. etc.
The 'need' turned into a way to shove inclusive language down our throats and make the abbreviated (in and out in under 50 minutes) official.
The point I was trying to emphasize was that the bishops seemed to be avoiding "optional, you can take this part or omit it" sections - which on its face is not unreasonable, since the inclusion of printed music means that it's more difficult to skip over optional material. I would certainly like to see fuller services, but acting as if someone woke up and decided to leave out antiphon verses and litanies, as if we hadn't been doing that for fifty years, is also disingenuous. And I still haven't heard of a single case since the promulgation of a parish being told NOT to take more verses or additional litanies.
I don't know why you want to refer to parts of the liturgy that are supposed to be there as 'optional'. But there in lies the problem. We have leaders in our church that see parts of our liturgy as optional when these parts of the liturgy are anything but optional.
Can you really dispute that if the full liturgy was in the books that some people wouldn't figure out what was going on in terms of the chopping up and abbreviating?
Monomakh
