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You sit in the back so you can see who shows up late.

Oh, I see. Sounds like some Catholics I know.

I wanted to approach, incidentally, for the blessed bread, but they didn't distribute it after the service. Instead the altar boys (or whatever the correct Orthodox term is for boys who serve in the liturgy) brought out the bread before the Communion of the Faithful, and placed it on a small table to the right of the center aisle near the ambo.

In addition to the bread, the altar servers brought out a glass flagon half full of wine and poured it into little thimble sized cups on a tray (just like they do in many Protestant denominations). Since this all occurred, as I say, just before the Communion of the faithful, I honestly gasped thinking to myself, "they're having the altar boys distribute Communion??? Protestant style, no less??? What kinda whackadoo liberal Orthodox church is this???" Then I realized that it must be the blessed bread you mentioned, only at a different interval, and with blessed wine, to boot.

What happened, then, was that the congregation filed up for Holy Communion, and after receiving the Eucharist, each communicant went over to the table to take one the little pieces of bread and one of the little cups of wine. As that was the flow, I refrained. I didn't think it would be very seemly to join the Communion line, only to bolt at the last second and head for the table with the bread and wine.

I did join the line to greet the bishop, afterwards, however. I said, "Master, bless." He said, "Hi, nice to see you." I kissed the cross and felt included and happy. It made up for the fact that I didn't get my blessed bread. Then I walked around the church a little to look at the various icon stations before leaving. I didn't want to leave, though. Even though it was two hours long, I wanted them to do it all over again.

It was the custom of my OCA parish in Boston for communicants to share this "antidoron" with those who had not received. I always felt it was a good way of making visitors feel welcome. The Zapivka they took for themselves, of course.

Depending on the size of the loaves, the Antidoron for the Zapivka comes directly from the Proskomedia, or Liturgy of preparation. The Prosfora that is left over is what is distributed to the non communicants.

Is the custom of the zapivka-consumption a Russian custom, or is it done in other Orthodox jurisdictions as well? I've only seen it in Russian or OCA parishes.

Are there any Greek Catholic parishes that do it? I've never seen it done in a Greek Catholic church.

A Protestant acquaintance went to a Roman church to check out the Mass; he's visited our parish as well and was struck by what he called "utter chaos" in the vestibule and back of the church during the service: children wandering around and making a racket, people chatting, going in and out for smoke breaks, etc. In the Protestant tradition he comes from he says such behaviour would never have been tolerated; that deportment was rigid and closely monitored.

To be honest, until then I had never given this situation any thought and simply took it for granted that such shenanigans were an inevitable by-product of liturgical worship. It's intriguing and kinda funny what outsiders notice and remember - and interpret - about our worship.

I would like to think it is an Orthodox praxis. I have seen it in every parish I have been to. As for the actions of people that is a whole other subject. Go to Vespers on Saturday or even on Wednesday, there you will see the difference. The Liturgy is a small part of the daily cycle. And if you can find a parish that does it in English, then you will be able to understand even quicker.

The same phenomena occurs in Lutheran churches. We joke "come early to get a back seat".

It may be a subconscious fear of the Holy and a desire to be like the Publican of the Gospel "standing afar off".

Diak:

I have to apologize, I never saw your post with the helpful link. That having been said, It's probably just as well I didn't read it because in the section on how to greet a bishop they offer the following scripture passage:

Matthew 28:8-9
" So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. "Greetings," he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him."

Boy, that would have made things interesting, huh?

You might sit in the back also so you can bolt for the door the very second the Mass/Liturgy ends.

The most dangerous place to be is in a Catholic church parking lot right when Mass lets out.

Maybe some people are shy types and don't want others gazing upon their backs and backsides?

My husband likes to sit close to the front so that he can get antidoron quickly and unlike other faith traditions that bolt to get home, he/we bolt to get downstairs to have some coffee and treats! Just about everybody stays a bit for 'Agape' ('Agape' meaning 'Christian love'/community) fellowship after DL in the Greek tradition.

He especially loves to bolt downstairs after a memorial service has been said after Divine Liturgy (making Sunday mornings all the more longish feeling in the Greek tradition; add a 40 day blessing or two to that, and it gets even longer!)--because that means that there are 'kolyva' available (delicious wheat kernel sweet 'dessert' offered for the departed because of its symbolism), and he, like many other Greek Orthodox, loves kolyva! I do too, but it is quite fattening, so I eat a teaspoonful of his in order to say a prayer for the salvation of the soul of the departed whose memorial it was, as is the spiritual tradition.

I suppose it could be, too, that they all wanted a good view of the bishop's arrival ceremony at the front door. I hadn't thought of that. It was really cool, too, so it would be understandable that people would want to be able to see it.

I still love the fact that the bishop processed into the church with his train carried by a train-bearer. I know that once upon a time, our Roman Catholic bishops used to visit churches with similar pomp, sometimes wearing the cappa magna which also had a train that was lifted by a train-bearer.

I, myself, have never seen an RC bishop arrive at a church with all the traditional fanfare, so this was really fun to watch.

I posted a note about my experience on Facebook...


TON DESPOTIN: The Orthodox Greet Their Shepherd.

Once in a while I find myself exiting the highway in order to travel along a road I've never driven down before just to see what lurks in that weird little town that I always drive past at 65 miles an hour without giving a thought to because it doesn't have a great big golden arches symbol sticking up from it indicating that there's a bathroom that I can use. It's in places like that that I craft my best metaphors with run-on sentences, and follow up sentences that include two "that"s side-by-side.

Last Sunday I took one of those exits (metaphorically speaking) and landed on Russian soil. Sort of. I landed in the pew of a Russian Orthodox Church, to be precise. Suddenly intrigued by the ecclesiastical exotica of Byzantium thanks to an interesting tour of That Greek Church Where They Have The Hellenic Festival (which is it's official name), I did what any man does who finds himself suddenly inspired by transcendent beauty: I turned on my computer and surfed the internet. And amongst all the various internets I discovered that the Hellenic Festival Church is not the only Orthodox church in town, and that the Russians have their own gig going on over in ancient Lovejoy.

Much afeared of the thought of Lovejoy and terrified by my imaginations of a potentially bewildering church service in Russian, for Russians, I couldn't resist going. So I abandoned St. Suburbia's Church of the Everlasting Parkinglot for one Sunday to take an ecclesiastical journey beyond the Iron Curtain. For those of you who imagine that Lovejoy is little more than a decaying old neighborhood of train tracks, boarded-up windows, and unsafe streets...well, you're right; that's exactly what it is. But amidst all of that opposite-of-the-Hamptons urban decay rise two gray cupolas with strange-looking crosses atop them. Just barely.

Saints Peter and Paul Orthodox Church, weirdly shelved within a row of houses on Ideal Street, isn't exactly tiny, yet neither is it quite large enough to loom over the neighborhood the way, say, St. Adalbert's Basilica looms over that neighborhood. It's a rather off-putting edifice, truth be told. It's the sort of building that looks as though it must have closed down decades ago, even with the front doors wide open and people darting in and out of it.

The opaque windows of the church are not stained in the traditional sense (lots of colorful patterns and saints, &c). Instead, they're colored the same earth tone as the masonry, almost making it look, at first glance, as if the windows have been boarded up or bricked shut. But they haven't been. It makes you wonder what the designers were thinking, really.

If the exterior of the church caused a suburbanite to puzzle somewhat, it was nothing compared to what the interior of the church had in store. From the moment I walked through the (immemorable, non-descript) vestibule, I was confronted by a rather startling portrayal in the apse of the church of God the Father in heavenly glory, supported by angels, who glared at me as he protectively held the Baby Jesus in his lap.

It was a somewhat unsettling image of the Heavenly Father, to be honest, and the artistic style in which He was depicted was not exactly the familiar iconography the Orthodox are known for. Imagine, instead, the sort of art that you find airbrushed on amusement park rides that spin around and around, backwards, at vomit-inducing velocities, as they loudly blast hair band music throughout the park's thrill ride midway and you'll have a good idea of what this painting was like.

Beneath the unsettling painting stood the white, classical iconastasis, or icon screen, separating the "Holy of Holies" (Catholics would say "sanctuary") from the nave (area with all the pews). Around the church were hung various icons, haphazardly, by someone cleary not at all plagued by OCD. The familiar tiered circular votive candle stands preferred by the Orthodox (unlike the even rows of tea lights that Catholics prefer) stood here and there, in front of icon stations near the front of the church, and off to each side.

This particular Sunday, it turns out, was a banner day for the open church that looks closed. On this day, the parishioners were all a-twitter because their bishop was coming to visit, all the way from the distant land of Gotham. Unlike the Catholics and Episcopalians of our fair city, whose bishops dwell locally amidst the flocks they tend, the nearest Russian Orthodox shepherd normally pontificates from his onion-domed cathedral in Manhattan. But not today. Today he was here to grace the right-believing Christians of Lovejoy with paternal greetings from the Big Apple.

Interloping heretic that I was, I took my seat in the very rear of the church, not even in the last pew, but in one of a row of chairs lined up against the back wall. As I looked ahead of me, I was amazed to see that the regular congregation were as averse to a seat up front as I was. The front of the church nearest the altar, up to about a good six or so pews, was completely empty, as everyone squeezed themselves into the rearmost pews. Latecomers even prevailed upon already positioned worshippers to squeeze in so that they, too, could sit in back.

Suddenly, individual worshippers began to pop up from their seats one by one, like Jiffy Pop Popcorn. As they did they turned the wrong way around in their pews and faced me. "No need to rise on my account," I wanted to say, but stifled the urge. As it turns out, someone had noticed that the bishop had arrived at the front door. "He's here. There he is. That's him? He's shorter than I thought he would be."

Indeed, there he was, shorter than they thought he would be, standing in the vestibule donning a costume straight out of one of those made for TV movies about Catherine the Great. He wore a tall, black, cupcake-shaped hat with a long black veil hanging down from it, a black cassock with ample sleeves, and over his black cassock, a royal blue mantiya (silken cape) with a red and white stripe pattern (imagine a rugby shirt or a repp stripe necktie). A gold icon of the Theotokos (Mary, the Mother of God) dangled about his neck on a gold chain. He held in his left hand a black staff topped with with an elaborate gold finial. Toto and I were not in Kansas anymore.

After being greeted by the pastor and other members of the liturgically-vested clergy and having been presented with the loaf of bread that would later be transformed into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ at the Holy Table, His Grace, the Right Reverend Michael Dahulich, Russian Orthodox Bishop of New York and New Jersey, strode up the center aisle of the church with great nobility, an acolyte carrying his train behind him, to the bows and curtseys of the delighted flock.

For an American Roman Catholic of the 21st century, this regal episcopal entrance was quite an astonishing sight, accustomed as my lot are to ever so pedestrian bishops who typically arrive at the back door in a black suit and casually shake a few hands, chatting with "folks", politician-style, before disappearing into the sacristy with the pastor to robe themselves in bland vanilla vestments for Masses designed to unimpress.

Once upon a time, one is told, our bishops used to arrive in similar pomp as the choir intoned "Ecce Sacerdos Magnus" (a Catholic bishop's answer to "Hail to the Chief"). Occasionally, the odd, daring Catholic bishop here or there will make such an entrance these days, donning the magnificent cappa magna, but few have the courage to endure the anathemas that are sure to be hurled at them afterwards in the National Catholic Reporter or in the editorial columns of their local newspapers for showing such triumphalisitic hubris.

The Orthodox, however, still take episcopal majesty in stride, relishing it even, not at all succumbing to the weird guilt that modern day Catholics harbor when it comes to shows of ecclesiastical splendour. The bishop's solemn entrance was but the beginning of a pageantry that only escalated in magnificence as the service progressed. His Grace was divested of his mantiya and his veiled hat, and was dressed in his splendid green and gold brocade liturgical vestments by the clergy in attendance as he stood upon a carpeted platform near the top of the center aisle.

The vesting of the bishop reminded one of the royal levee', or robing ceremony, of the French kings at Versailles, back in the bad old days before the Reign of Terror sent the Bourbons fleeing (the ones who didn't get the guillotine, that is), only to see them return after Napoleon's fall as constitutional monarchs who dressed themselves in the morning. Appropriately, the crowning touch to the bishop's ensemble was a bulbous, jewel encrusted crown (actually a bishop's miter, but in the Eastern Church they're usually shaped like imperial crowns). Once the bishop's clergy finished vesting their boss, he looked more like a Russian Tsar than a bishop. Splendidly clad, and the chanting of "Ton Despontin" (an Orthodox bishop's answer to "Ecce Sacerdos Magnus") completed, His Grace was now ready to begin the sacred rites.

The service was, in a word, sumptuous. From the rich vestments to the glorious music to the aromatic incense, one really did get a taste of the ethereal during this two hour long ceremony. The forbidding gray church in Lovejoy with the eerie painting of the Lord in the apse was suddenly transformed into the Hagia Sophia as heavenly music swirled about in the great, unadorned dome, before descending upon the gathered worshippers to make way for the ascending clouds of incense.

Time and time again the bishop emerged from the royal doors of the icon screen to bless us with his lit, hand-held candleabra, making me neurotic over all the wax he was spilling on the red carpet each time he did that. No matter. It was not my church and I wouldn't have to clean it up (I reassured myself each time).

When it was all said and done, a line formed so that everyone present could greet the bishop. How does one greet an Orthodox bishop, though? It's not as simple as you might think, I was advised, so I approached the bishop with some apprehension as I made my way up the aisle behind everyone else.

Finally in the gracious presence, I bent to reverence the bishop's hand after petitioning, "Master, bless" as I was instructed to do. His Grace smiled before delivering his solemn response: "Hi, nice to see you." A bearded gentleman in his fifties, the affable prelate with the Downstate accent seemed more interested in making his greeters feel comfortable in his presence, at that point, and not terribly interested in standing on ceremony.

At any rate, having greeted his august personage and feeling ever so slightly self-conscious, I took myself on a brief tour of the church as everyone began to head over to the parish hall for the reception, which I, being a complete stranger, did not stay for. Instead I walked back to my car, glad of the experience, and somehow all the richer for it.

Godspodi pomiluj.

I've been in tears during the Bishop's vesting.

Fr. Thomas Hopko in his wonderful series, 32 episodes, Worship in Spirit and Truth [ancientfaith.com] devotes 7 episodes to Vesting for Liturgy which includes the vestments and vesting of the bishop. Prior to those episodes are also the episodes "The Entrance of the Bishop" and "The Prayers for the Bishop". All worth listening to, more than once.

I think he addresses a number of the things you ask about, including the location of the bishop's kathedra Russian vs Greek.

At this altar feast [youtube.com] there were plenty of folks taking photos. I was just to the right of one who seemed to be a professional photographer whom you can be seen in the foreground.

At times you can see Fr Stephan Meholick conducting the choir, more visible after the vesting is over, in that shaft of sunlight. This is his parish. He'd rather be in the kliros whenever possible At other times when Bishop Benjamin has been there he also chose to sing with the choir and leave the other priests to be celebrants. At the end of the video you can see the Bishop being St Nicholas giving the children gifts as we sang Christmas carols.

I was at an hierarchical Divine Liturgy at the Cathedral in Bright Week and Bishop Benjamin wore his mantiya but then vested in the Holy Place. Oh well, it was still a great Liturgy(and feast). I have a couple of photos I should post. I think there were 9 priests, including the bishop, and 2 deacons and 2 tiny altar boys.

The altar feast at the Ascension Greek Cathedral recently the Metropolitan did not vest perhaps because there was no deacon. There were 9 priests, including the Metropolitan. It was a great day! I've been in DLs with the Metropolitan present a number of times in both Greek Orthodox Cathedrals here and never seen the Metropolitan vest.