Beautiful churches, vestments, sacred music and liturgies

[The Liturgist]

Our new green paraments have arrived a few months back, and last Sunday they were consecrated and put into service. Green is on the longest each year and our old set was badly faded, and weakened by the UV exposure. The Vail, Pall and Burse were bought by the Elders a couple of years back, not just the green but all the colours, and the paraments were ordered from the same company in the same fabric.
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These paraments are gorgeous. I particularly dislike cheap green paraments and vestments, and the Eastern Orthodox / Greek Catholic equivalent, cheap gold paraments and vestments, since these are the default liturgical colors in the Western and Byzantine Rite. There is also a problem in the Byzantine Rite with cheap green paraments and vestments which I think might be due to the fact that some churches only use them two or three times a year (they are standard on Palm Sunday, except in a minority of Ruthenian Greek Catholic and Carpatho Rusyn Orthodox churches where purple is used, and also on Pentecost, and usually, All Saints Day, which is the first Sunday after Pentecost in the Byzantine Rite, however, the rubrics in the Byzantine Rite do allow them to be used more frequently; the typikon actually just specifies light or dark vestments, so liturgical colors are a matter of tradition + jurisdictional or diocesan instructions from the bishop, or the abbot of a monastery; some Greek monasteries like St. Anthony’s in Florence, Arizona, do not pay much attention to liturgical colors), just as some Western churches have rose colored vestments for Guadete and Laetere Sunday but buy cheap ones because of the limited use.

I actually wish rose colored vestments saw more use in the Western Rite, for example, in restoring the Apostles Fast and Dormition/Assumption Fast which were once observed in the summer, but like fasting on Wednesday, fell out of favor in the West (although John Wesley to his credit tried to revive Wednesday fasts, and wanted Methodists to on that date and Friday attend the Anglican Great Litany, or the modified version of it he included in his 1784 recension of the Book of Common Prayer, The Sunday Service Book for the Methodists of North America.

 

[Anthony2019]

I love all of these replies and was writing a detailed reply; forgive me but it will be delayed as I had to go to the ER yesterday and have to return today for testing. Please pray for myself, because I may have had a small heart attack, my relatives, who were frightened by the incident, and most importantLy my fiend Jeff who is not a Christian but a colleague from the realm of computer science who has become mentally unwell and attacked me, resulting in my hospitalization for tachycardia, and has been arrested (for reasons I cannot understand, he blames me for the fact that his wife who left him last year did not reunite with him in November as he had hoped, but she left him due to an incident of possible domestic violence he claims was an accident, and I have never even met her; after he attacked me in March I persuaded him to see a mental health professional, and for one month he was back to normal as was our relationship, then he stopped seeing his psychologist and a few days later attacked me again).

I pray he repents and finds comfort in our Lord; he is not an atheist and believes in quite a lot of pseudoscientific alternative medicine touted by quacks who are so quacky I suspect they are really Daffy Duck in disguise. It is strange how people can dismiss Christianity as irrational while subscribing to healthcare modalities that scientists have not only been unable to validate but whose claims in some cases have been falsified. He has diabetes and sleep apnea and I also worry about his health. He has been a friend since 2007 so the fact that he came close to frightening me to death is deeply upsetting.

So in a few days time I will be posting more content but in the interim if you have anything else you want to add to this thread that would be lovely. I also forgot to ask @Ignatius the Kiwi to join us; he is from ROCOR which is a denomination I love as I attended a ROCOR parish after joining the OCA and moving to a location where the closest nearby Orthodox church was ROCOR, and I had the best confessions of my life with ROCOR priests, who really helped me with bereavement over the death of my father, and also helped me overcome a lifelong fear of hearses. I also count Fr. George Whiteford as a friend and love his liturgical resources site.

So I am hoping @Ignatius the Kiwi might share some ROCOR content with us; his parish raised a massive amount of money for Ukrainian refugees but is one of several ROCOR parishes to be vandalized because the “R” stands for Russian, despite the fact a large percentage of cradle members of ROCOR are Ukrainian, indeed in the US and Canada there are more Ukrainians in ROCOR than in the UOCNA, and the presiding bishop of ROCOR, Metropolitan Hilarion Kapral, memory eternal, who reposed on May 22nd at a young age for a bishop, was a Ukrainian Canadian who I greatly admire, for among other things saving ROCOR’s Western Rite Vicarate after the retirement of Archbishop Jerome Shaw.

Forgive me for posting a downer when the point of this thread was a celebration, but I felt you all deserved to know why I hadn’t replied to you individually until now, and also I wanted to ask for your prayers.

Sorry to hear your news and hope you are making a good recovery.

 

[The Liturgist]

Fun fact - St Basil said that O Gladsome Light (Phos Hilaron) was so ancient that they didn’t know who composed it but that they sang it at the lighting of the lamps every day.

I love the architecture and iconography of that church, the iconostasis and the frescoes on the arches and the pendatives are gorgeous.

I really hope the Christian Science cult fails soon, so that their beautiful Byzantine-style headquarters in Boston can be acquired by an Orthodox or Eastern Catholic Church without giving them any money with which to prop up their dying and dangerous counterfeit Christianity, which took the lives of countless people by discouraging them from seeking medical care and instead praying people to pay for them.

And while they are the largest and most notorious of these cults, called the New Thought Movement, there are others less notorious, because they were not partially culpable for the death of Jim Henson and directly responsible for the death of children in the 1990s in cases which attracted high profile news media coverage and led to the Christian Science denomination shrinking so dramatically. In my youth it seemed like every strip mall had a laundromat, a liquor store, a pharmacy, a RadioShack, a video rental store, and a Christian Science Reading Room. The video rental stores and RadioShacks I sorely miss, the Reading Rooms, not so much, but laundromats, pharmacies and liquor stores are still with us.

 

[The Liturgist]

I think the Trisagion is the most beautiful hymn in the world.

I especially like the Church Slavonic setting in what is called Greek Chant, which isn’t Greek or related to Byzantine Chant.

The Trisagion is one of my favorites, along with Te Deum Laudamus, Ho Monogenes, Haw Nurone, the Cherubic Hymn (particularly those settings by Bortnianski and Rachmaninoff), Let My Prayer Arise, and Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent (the version composed by Pavel Chesnokov).

I am not including Psalms or Scriptural Canticles like The Magnificat or Benedicite Omnia Opera.

 

[The Liturgist]

I am rather fascinated by this uniquely American (or at least American-sounding) expression of Orthodox chant

I'll be honest, my love of bluegrass and ancient chant and hymnody makes me REALLY REALLY REALLY love this.

-CryptoLutheran

Look for the Christ is Risen Appalachian melody as well. It’s pretty awesome

A friend of mine who is an Orthodox priest in Knoxville, Tennessee loves Appalachian music and has been composing Appalachian settings of Orthodox hymns, made easy he says because their pentatonic scale lends itself to division into eight modes, like Byzantine, Gregorian, West Syriac, Ambrosian, Gallican, Mozarabic and Armenian chant.

 

[The Liturgist]

Norwich Cathedral where I visited a couple of days ago.....

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Splendid. My personal favorite among Gothic cathedrals of the Church of England is Gloucester Cathedral, which historically had a fantastic choir program, although the last few recordings of them I have seen suggest they were hit more severely by Covid than York Minster or some of the other cathedrals, and the London churches.

 

[The Liturgist]

That’s an interesting recording because I have never heard the Copts chant the Trisagion to that melody before, and I have a large collection of Agpeya (Coptic Chant).

Usually its a simplified version of this melody, which in its simplified form I have also heard in Byzantine Chant:

 

[The Liturgist]

Sorry to hear your news and hope you are making a good recovery.

Thank you! Do share some more content in this thread as I realized I just became that guy who accidentally made this beautiful thread momentarily depressing. I should have made a separate post in prayer requests. The moral of this story is don’t be that guy, he has a deservedly bad reputation on Social Media, although not as bad as Florida Man (that might be a bit of an in joke among North Americans due to the number of wild news stories that come out of Florida with headlines like “Florida man wrestles alligator, loses arm” or “Florida man jailed after running fake police department.” (That last one actually happened; Google Jeremy DeWitte if you are bored and have 18 hours to kill; its quite a rabbit hole of a story and it will suck you in; I did not watch Tiger King on Netflix but I have heard its similiar, although the difference is Jeremy DeWitte filmed himself impersonating the police using police-issue bodycams, so the entire story has been arranged on YouTube and elsewhere by alternating footage from the bodycams of the fake police department with those worn by real officers serving in various real police services and other law enforcement agencies).

 

[The Liturgist]

Sorry to hear your news and hope you are making a good recovery.

This is the interior of St. Andrew Holborn, which is one of my favorites among City of London churches. I love the eggshell blue / light bluish green ceiling color and the decorations:

I also like how it contrasts with the sky blue ceiling at St. Mary le Bow, a particularly important City church home to the Court of Arches:

The last major case decided by the Court of Arches involved the controversial new altar at St. Stephen Walbrook, which I like, although if they became common I would not like it. I have in the past shared photos of it with @Paidiske, but this church is now streaming beautiful services and has been since Advent (unfortunately, they take their older videos down; I particularly liked their service on the Thursday after Guadete Sunday; of course as Paidiske and I discussed you cannot reach the center of the altar, where a wreath had been placed, so have to celebrate at the edge):

 

[MarkRohfrietsch]

I love all of these replies and was writing a detailed reply; forgive me but it will be delayed as I had to go to the ER yesterday and have to return today for testing. Please pray for myself, because I may have had a small heart attack, my relatives, who were frightened by the incident, and most importantLy my fiend Jeff who is not a Christian but a colleague from the realm of computer science who has become mentally unwell and attacked me, resulting in my hospitalization for tachycardia, and has been arrested (for reasons I cannot understand, he blames me for the fact that his wife who left him last year did not reunite with him in November as he had hoped, but she left him due to an incident of possible domestic violence he claims was an accident, and I have never even met her; after he attacked me in March I persuaded him to see a mental health professional, and for one month he was back to normal as was our relationship, then he stopped seeing his psychologist and a few days later attacked me again).

I pray he repents and finds comfort in our Lord; he is not an atheist and believes in quite a lot of pseudoscientific alternative medicine touted by quacks who are so quacky I suspect they are really Daffy Duck in disguise. It is strange how people can dismiss Christianity as irrational while subscribing to healthcare modalities that scientists have not only been unable to validate but whose claims in some cases have been falsified. He has diabetes and sleep apnea and I also worry about his health. He has been a friend since 2007 so the fact that he came close to frightening me to death is deeply upsetting.

So in a few days time I will be posting more content but in the interim if you have anything else you want to add to this thread that would be lovely. I also forgot to ask @Ignatius the Kiwi to join us; he is from ROCOR which is a denomination I love as I attended a ROCOR parish after joining the OCA and moving to a location where the closest nearby Orthodox church was ROCOR, and I had the best confessions of my life with ROCOR priests, who really helped me with bereavement over the death of my father, and also helped me overcome a lifelong fear of hearses. I also count Fr. George Whiteford as a friend and love his liturgical resources site.

So I am hoping @Ignatius the Kiwi might share some ROCOR content with us; his parish raised a massive amount of money for Ukrainian refugees but is one of several ROCOR parishes to be vandalized because the “R” stands for Russian, despite the fact a large percentage of cradle members of ROCOR are Ukrainian, indeed in the US and Canada there are more Ukrainians in ROCOR than in the UOCNA, and the presiding bishop of ROCOR, Metropolitan Hilarion Kapral, memory eternal, who reposed on May 22nd at a young age for a bishop, was a Ukrainian Canadian who I greatly admire, for among other things saving ROCOR’s Western Rite Vicarate after the retirement of Archbishop Jerome Shaw.

Forgive me for posting a downer when the point of this thread was a celebration, but I felt you all deserved to know why I hadn’t replied to you individually until now, and also I wanted to ask for your prayers.

You are in my prayers!!

 

[dzheremi]

That’s an interesting recording because I have never heard the Copts chant the Trisagion to that melody before

That's the melody for ordinary time ('sinawi'/yearly), perhaps sounding a bit modified in that video by what sound like Australian (?) accents.

 

[The Liturgist]

That's the melody for ordinary time ('sinawi'/yearly), perhaps sounding a bit modified in that video by what sound like Australian (?) accents.

Ah, I just found the directory on the Tasbeha website of the different tones.

 

[Anthony2019]

Church of St Nicholas, Dereham, with its separate bell tower....

 

[The Liturgist]

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Church of St Nicholas, Dereham, with its separate bell tower....

That’s unusual, not unheard of, but unusual. I will have to look it up.

 

[The Liturgist]

I like the more ornate church but not the ones with precious metals all throughout. Better use of that like helping the needy in the world and not part of some church.
Where are the commandments and instructions for building such costly, precious metal included churches? Those hats, robes, and all leather shoes are expensive.
Pretty sure the life of a church leader is to be humble not all blinged out like some religious gangta rapper.

Actually Orthodox priests are generally prohibited from wearing leather shoes, there exists a ban on animal products being used in the altar. This is also why oil lamps are used on the Holy Table. Syriac Orthodox priests wear liturgical slippers; I know of an Assyrian Church of the East parish where the priests wear plain off brand tennis shoes, trainers, etc, because the marble floor is too slippery to use liturgical slippers.

Vestments can also be surprisingly inexpensive if you buy them from the right vendors (@MarkRohfrietsch and I were recently comparing notes on inexpensive suppliers of vestments, paraments and liturgical supplies), as opposed to a posh brand like Slabbinck. So they can also cost more than a new car, and some Catholic and Anglican and Orthodox churches do have endowments to pay for it, but ironically the churches that spend the most on vesture and iconography also spend the most on charity, and generally, orders of magnitude more on charity. And do not make the mistake of thinking that beautiful vestments are comfortable to wear. It is the cheapest and most plain vestments which are most comfortable to wear. My friend who is a retired Episcopalian priest who retired in 2014 wore an alb, stole and cincture only, never a chasuble, and his vestments were cheap vestments owned by the church that were inherited by his successor, and were relatively comfortable.

Orthodox priests I know usually buy their own vestments, at great personal expense relative to their minimal salary, this also applying to some Catholic and Anglican priests, but they tend to be much better paid, and the formality of full vesture in the Byzantine or traditional Western or Syriac Rite is not conducive to comfort. One is wearing a cassock, and over that an alb, and over that, a stole, a chasuble or cope, with girdles or cinctures, maniples, and headgear which is hot and/or heavy, sometimes multiple layers of headgear (Coptic monks when serving as priests don a white skullcap and then pull the white hood of their liturgical robe over the skullcap, and this is worn over their regular monastic habit).

The reason for wearing these vestments is actually to draw attention away from the celebrant and focus it on Christ, because you don’t notice the celebrants under the layers of vestments, except as a generic anthropic forms.

It is the prosperity gospel preachers who dress in comfortable business casual or jeans and a T shirt and promise riches to the congregation in return for helping them upgrade to a larger and faster Gulfstream business jet that one needs to watch out for.

I am not going to make a silly catchall statement like the more well-vested the pastor, the better the church in terms of charity because there are some very low church denominations like the Quakers who do a lot to help, although one of those low church denominations, the Salvation Army, has their clergy, or commissioned officers, as they call them, and many of their laity, or enlisted members, as they call them, wearing full military attire based on British Army parade dress and service dress uniforms of the 19th century.

 

[Paidiske]

The Salvation Army here have gone for a much more informal look in recent years. They seem to think that makes sense in this cultural context, and with the demographic they focus on serving.

The other thing to say about the cost of vestments etc. is that there's a very strong second-hand market for them. Most of what I personally own I have been given by other clergy who no longer wanted or needed them. For some things, like cassocks, this is not always ideal because they're often quite fitted; but for something like chasubles, really unless they were cut for a very tall thin man (and I've come across a few which seemed to be), they're pretty much one-size-fits-all.

 

[The Liturgist]

The Salvation Army here have gone for a much more informal look in recent years. They seem to think that makes sense in this cultural context, and with the demographic they focus on serving.

The other thing to say about the cost of vestments etc. is that there's a very strong second-hand market for them. Most of what I personally own I have been given by other clergy who no longer wanted or needed them. For some things, like cassocks, this is not always ideal because they're often quite fitted; but for something like chasubles, really unless they were cut for a very tall thin man (and I've come across a few which seemed to be), they're pretty much one-size-fits-all.

It partially depends on the chasuble, for example, with West Syriac, Armenian or Byzantine Rite chasubles, and I would argue with western Copes, which are similiar in cut, and which are used in lieu of chasubles by the Assyrians (who after centuries of poverty following the genocide of Tamerlane, who is infuriatingly regarded as a national hero in Uzbekistan despite killing millions of peaceful people including the entire Christian populations of Tibet, China, Mongolia and Central Asia, were supplied with decent vestments by the Church of England), and I suppose the Copes worn on rare occasions by Coptic priests, you really don’t want those to drag on the ground, nor do you want too much of the alb to be visible below the chasuble, but you also don’t want the chasuble to hang below the alb. However if the gap between the chasuble and the bottom seam of the alb was wide, people would notice and the result would not be aesthetically pleasing. This is in marked contrast to the Roman Fiddleback chasuble, which is designed to obviously be suspended, sometimes to a great extent above the ground, or the Gothic chasubles which currently dominate the market, which seem to want to float above the ground, within reason. Hence tall thin priests would pose a problem.

I might ne at the limit of vestment interoperability with someone like you, given my height of 6’2”, about 187 cm, and my successful elimination of the portliness that characterized my appearance between the ages of 16 and 30, when my weight was between 250 and 275 lbs (now it is 200, which has required me to replace my khaki and dress slacks, slacks being an American dialect term for trousers, so I suppose the British expression for someone who talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk, as we say in the U-nited States (gotta stress the “U” for a proper country sound), “He’s all mouth and trousers,” could hypothetically be Americanized as “that man’s nothing but slacks and a pie-hole!”).

Indeed, some of the best vestments are those made between the 19th century and the mid 1960s. There are some splendid Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox vestments even older than that, for example, Roman-style chasubles from the Renaissance and Baroque era, which in many cases are too fragile to be worn or safely removed from plastic wrapping.

I tend to avoid a certain subset of contemporary vestment designs. There was a hilarious blog, a bit uncharitable at times, categorizing the worst of the worst: Bad Vestments

However, traditional vestments of recent manufacture look really good, particularly gold vestments.

 

[The Liturgist]

I previously have linked to liturgies at St. Bartholomew the Great, the oldest surviving church in London, but they did an amazing Anglo-Catholic liturgy for their patronal feast this year, with a thrilling homily, gorgeous music, splendid vesture, and a truly exquisite piece of liturgical embroidery which was discovered a few months ago by an altar server who was trying to sort through the Sacristry, which probably came off of a cope from the 19th century or an unfinished cope, but which perfectly fit the lectern from which the Subdeacon reads the Epistle.

 

[The Liturgist]

This is a beautiful example of a liturgy at a parish of the Orthodox Church in America, one of the three descendants of the Czarist era Russian Orthodox Church in the US, along with ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate. The OCA is also highly multiethnic, with the current and former Metropolitans being Americans not of Orthodox ancestry, a substantial number of converts, more than half of the Carpatho-Rusyn/Ruthenian Greek Catholics who converted to Orthodoxy due to a controversy wherein the Latin Rite bishops in the US and Canada unexpectedly required Ruthenian Catholic priests who migrated to North America, who were like many Eastern Catholic priests, married, to cease to be married, so a great many of priests and laity, led by St. Alexis Toth, left and joined the Russian Orthodox Church, and a second wave joined the Greek Orthodox Church. The OCA also includes the large Native Alaskan Orthodox population evangelized by the Russian Orthodox missionaries St. Herman and St. Innocent. Furthermore, about half of the Bulgarian and Romanian Orthodox churches in the US are part of the OCA, and nearly all of the Albanian Orthodox. The Albanian archbishop Fan Noli was able to preserve their traditions in the US during Enver Hoxha’s extremely brutal suppression of nearly all religions, which exploded back into being as soon as the communist regime, which was certainly the worst in Europe, second only to North Korea in terms of dystopian nightmares, ended. The OCA also runs St. Vladimir’s Seminary, which trains both Eastern and Oriental Orthodox students and is one of the best seminaries in the US...usually when I think of great American seminaries the first names to come to mind are St. Vladimir’s and Nashotah House.

To assist in Ukraine, the OCA has raised massive funds and partnered with the Polish Orthodox Church, which has a large presence in South America but not North America, being the largest autocephalous church in Europe not present in the US, to provide safe housing, food and medical care for the large number of displaced Ukrainian refugees in Poland.

This liturgy of this church I like because it demonstrates how the Orthodox liturgy is both extremely beautiful yet organic, free flowing, the interactions between the priest and deacon at times seeming like the pilot and copilot of an airliner. The vestments are beautiful as is the music.

 

[Andrewn]

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware 1934-2022 Memory Eternal

Our beloved Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, Metropolitan of Diokleia and hierarch of the Ecumenical Throne, has fallen asleep in the Lord on August 24th (1934-2022).