visiting
For the first time since I started attending an Orthodox church I attended a Liturgy in a church other than St. Stephen's. It was an Antiochian church as opposed to an O.C.A.. I felt like such a rebel. I went to meet some LJ friends at St. Philip's in Souderton, Pa.
The chanting seemed primitive compared to the choral tradition of Russian Orthodox music and it seemed as if I was closer to an early church experience. But still, it's the liturgy and it's contents that draw me. In the Gospel reading from Matins there was a passage that I have heard many times in my life, but for some reason it grabbed me in a way it never did before. One of the things that happens, to me at least, in the Orthodox liturgy, is that each week there is a moment when a prayer, or psalm, or reading gets inside me in a way that stops everything cold. As if I'm hearing it for the first time and as if it happened yesterday. Today the Gospel reading for Matins was John 20:11-18. The words of Mary Magdalene were so sad. And they became my words. I imagine her sorrow at finding the empty tomb not knowing yet that the empty tomb was a sign of joy. First the angels ask her "“Woman, why are you weeping?” She answers “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him.” But then she is asked again only this time it is the Lord who asks, the very Lord she thought she has lost.
And then later, grabbed by the closing words of the sermon, "Let the world go.....let the world go"
Only a few days left in Paschaltide.
Christ is Risen!