- Jan 25, 2009
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Read something very interesting recently, from one of the ministries I've followed, from one very wonderful individual who is African and Orthodox. It was on the issue of the ways Orthodox Worship seemed to be alot different in depth than what's seen in other places...and as said in his article entitled Liturgy, worship and digital doodads « Khanya (for a brief excerpt):
I was rather amazed seeing the dynamic of how there seemed to be a bit of concern over the use of screens to show music. Whenever I've gone to Orthodox churches, the use of the screens didn't seem to be a distraction from what we were saying in the service itself/praying together...and the icons present did not seem to fade away due to the screens. But I do think the man had a point when saying that technology may possibly take away from the use of icons. Coming from an African perspective, I was wondering if perhaps what he noted was different than how it'd be for others in the Western Hemisphere in Orthodoxy since there's less usage of technology in some parts of Africa than what the West uses.
Do Orthodox here feel like the use of screens is a bad thing within service?
It seems to me that the use of this digital gadgetry is essentially incompatible with liturgy. Liturgy is “the work of the people”.
As Ugolnik (1990:138) puts it
Thus the Church itself is a leiturgia, a ministry, a calling to act in this world after the fashion of Christ, to bear testimony to Him and His kingdom. The eucharistic liturgy, therefore, must not be approached and understood in “liturgical” or “cultic” terms alone. Just as Christianity can — and must — be considered the end of religion, so the Christian liturgy in general, and the Eucharist in particular, are indeed the end of cult, of the sacred and religious act isolated from, and opposed to, the “profane” life of the community. The first condition for the understanding of liturgy is to forget about any specific “liturgical piety”
When a gathering of people are looking at a screen, they are not doing something together; they are rather passive recipients of something being done to them. It ceases to be liturgy and becomes manipulation, driven by the people managing the equipment. “Let us pray to the Lord: next slide”.
And when I try to think of this in the context of Orthodox worship, the incompatibility becomes obvious, for where can you put a screen in an Orthodox Church where it will not obscure some of the ikons?
Putting a screen in front of the ikons is replacing something having a deep, abiding and powerful symbolism with something superficial, banal and ephemeral.
But it is more. It breaks the community of the church.
Putting a screen in front of the ikons not only hides the ikons from the congregation, but it symbolically hides the congregation from the view of the saints depicted in the ikons. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, except for those we have chosen to exclude in favour of our own more ephemeral and self-centred concerns, our “worship experience”.
Orthodox Churches in Muslim countries are sometimes vandalised, because Muslims are iconoclasts. But they don’t usually vandalise the whole ikon, they just chisel out the eyes. And by putting a screen in front of the ikons we would in effect be doing the same thing.
If you can understand this, you may able to know something of the difference between the Orthodox Christian view of worship, and that of most Western Christians, certainly most Protestants.
As Ugolnik (1990:138) puts it
Liturgics enacts a representation of reality, embedded within a text, and seeks to impose its framework of meaning upon a resistant world. It is not, in essence, an ‘alternative reality,’ representative of a world in which it is contained – in the way, say, Middlemarch is a fictional representation of a provincial English town. Liturgics seeks to impose the textual vision upon a resistant world, and make the world conform to it. There is a phenomenon of inversion which is very important to a Russian Orthodox sense of liturgy; liturgy is in itself a kind of ‘revolutionary’ act. In this way Alexander Schmemann sees the liturgy as enacting or celebrating the Kingdom of God, a spiritual kingdom of justice and liberation, within a world which does not accept it.
And as Fr Alexander Schmemann (1983:25-26) himself has said:
The Eucharist is a liturgy. And he who says liturgy today is likely to get involved in a controversy. For to some — the “liturgically minded” — of all the activities of the Church, liturgy is the most important, if not the only one. To others, liturgy is an esthetic and and spiritual deviation from the real task of the Church. There exist today “liturgical” and “non-liturgical” churches and Christians. But this controversy is unnecessary for it has its roots in one basic misunderstanding– the “liturgical” understanding of the liturgy. This is the reduction of the liturgy to “cultic” categories, its definition as a sacred act of worship, different as such not only from the “profane” area of life, but even from all other activities of the Church itself. But this is not the original meaning of the Greek word leitourgia. It meant an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals — a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It meant also a function or “ministry” of a man or of a group on behalf of and in the interest of the whole community. Thus the leitourgia of ancient Israel was the corporate work of a chosen few to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah. And in this very act of preparation they became what they were called to be, the Israel of God, the chosen instrument of His purpose.
Thus the Church itself is a leiturgia, a ministry, a calling to act in this world after the fashion of Christ, to bear testimony to Him and His kingdom. The eucharistic liturgy, therefore, must not be approached and understood in “liturgical” or “cultic” terms alone. Just as Christianity can — and must — be considered the end of religion, so the Christian liturgy in general, and the Eucharist in particular, are indeed the end of cult, of the sacred and religious act isolated from, and opposed to, the “profane” life of the community. The first condition for the understanding of liturgy is to forget about any specific “liturgical piety”
And when I try to think of this in the context of Orthodox worship, the incompatibility becomes obvious, for where can you put a screen in an Orthodox Church where it will not obscure some of the ikons?
Putting a screen in front of the ikons is replacing something having a deep, abiding and powerful symbolism with something superficial, banal and ephemeral.
But it is more. It breaks the community of the church.
Putting a screen in front of the ikons not only hides the ikons from the congregation, but it symbolically hides the congregation from the view of the saints depicted in the ikons. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, except for those we have chosen to exclude in favour of our own more ephemeral and self-centred concerns, our “worship experience”.
Orthodox Churches in Muslim countries are sometimes vandalised, because Muslims are iconoclasts. But they don’t usually vandalise the whole ikon, they just chisel out the eyes. And by putting a screen in front of the ikons we would in effect be doing the same thing.
If you can understand this, you may able to know something of the difference between the Orthodox Christian view of worship, and that of most Western Christians, certainly most Protestants.
Do Orthodox here feel like the use of screens is a bad thing within service?
Wow
