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| Source: uncutmountainsupply.com |
Holy Tradition is the “ongoing life of the Holy Spirit within the Church” (Nicholas Lossky).
What does this mean? Simply that the very best of what the Church carries forward through time and history is offered as a perpetual gift to each new generation, preserved as a sacred treasure so that “all might be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4).
This is the inheritance of the saints, which includes the holy scriptures, the ethical teachings of the commandments, the liturgical tradition of “worship in spirit and truth,” the ascetical practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, just to name a few. Yet Holy Tradition must not be understood as something unbending or monolithic either. We must not think of the vocation of Christian Orthodoxy as the preservation of the faith in a merely rigid sense. Yes, there are many “fixed” features of the Orthodox faith that will remain forever a part of the treasury of our faith— the Bible, the Ten Commandments, the sacraments, etc. But it would be a great mistake to think of Holy Tradition as an attempt to embalm some by-gone ecclesial era and declare it as the totality of Christian Orthodoxy. The gospel disallows us from replicating (usually for the sake of romance or nostalgia) any kind of a sacred “era”— Byzantine, Russian, or otherwise.
Take for instance the so-called “secret prayers” of the Orthodox services. These prayers, offered by the priest or bishop, are found at the end of all the litanies: the Great Litany, the little litanies, etc., just before the doxologies, “For unto You are due all glory…” etc. These prayers are very ancient and are extremely rich in meaning as they point to the spiritual purpose of the services themselves. And by far, the most beautiful of these “secret prayers” are the prayers of the “holy anaphora” which end in the consecration of the bread and wine into the holy Body and Blood of Christ. Over the centuries, however, with the explosion of hymnography, these prayers were truncated (cut) by being said “silently” by the priest, so that all the faithful hear at the end of each litany is the doxology – “For Yours is the majesty…” etc.
Yet within the last 50 years of worldwide Orthodoxy there has been a liturgical renewal which, among other things, has sought to restore the secret prayers to their rightful place within the worship of the Church by being read out loud by the celebrants. In this way, then, the faithful are edified by these prayers, as they allow for a more deepened experience of the holy services.
The liturgical prayers reveal the mystery of the Church as the means and the “mode” of our salvation in Christ, specifically by extrapolating in a practical manner all the great biblical themes of faith: sanctification, redemption, justification, etc. So it is here, with these “secret prayers,” that the faithful are made more capable of coming to a stronger engagement with the worship of the Church, to such an extent that it, the liturgy, becomes the foundational structure upon which a genuine Orthodox way of life is built. As believers grow and begin to thrive in their faith, they learn how absolutely essential the services of the Church are for building up one’s faith.
How sad it is that there are many, still, who hold on to a narrow idea of Holy Tradition as a simple repetition and replication of the past, of 19th Century pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodoxy, where none of the secret prayers were ever prayed aloud (with the exception of “O God of spirits and of all flesh” during the Orthodox funeral service). How sad it is that the advice of the likes of St. Tikhon of Moscow, who himself was a 19th Century Russian bishop, is completely ignored, as even he both recognized and advocated for the reading aloud of the secret prayers “for the benefit of the faithful.”
This is our “Orthodox moment” in America. Many of our nation’s young are entering into the faith with love and zeal. Will we offer them a liturgical life which includes the richness of the Church’s prayers? Or will we offer them a museum filled with dead formalism that is only a semblance of the living Church?
Fr. Paul Jannakos
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Fr. Paul is a good friend of mine who is serving a parish in our Midwest Diocese in the Chicago area. Fr. Paul and I go all the way back to our seminary days at St. Vladimir's when Fr. Alexander Schmemann was the dean.
