The Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom
The Pathways of Music Part 2
My soul shall rejoice in the Lord. For He hath clothed me with the garment of salvation. And with a robe of gladness has He covered me.
- Isaiah 61:10
Generally speaking, there are two ways to enrapture a worshipper in the beauty of worship. The first is in the subtle quiet power found in simple Liturgies that are served with total attention and devotion not only by the clergy, but by all the people of God. In this, beauty is found in the simple act of recognizing God’s goodness towards us. Every syllable in the prayers, hymns, psalms, and scripture readings become theophanic outpourings of loving-kindness and compassion. The second kind is almost its polar opposite. These are the Liturgies characterized by their glorious, brilliant, overwhelming, titanic, and overpowering ecstasies. They are intricate, complex, detailed, well-sung, and effortlessly served by dozens of clergy and hundreds of faithful. While I have experienced many moments of the former, being a liturgical maximalist, the latter appeals to every fiber within my being, and naturally is what I will be discussing.
In 2019 the modern Orthodox composer Benedict Sheehan was set to debut his new setting of the Divine Liturgy at the Memorial Day Pilgrimage at St. Tikhon Monastery in South Canaan Pennsylvania. The concert would take place at an Episcopal church in the nearby town of Wilkes-Barre, a city whose history is steeped in and deeply woven into the history of Orthodoxy in America. I arrived late with a close friend to the church after a long drive from upstate New York where we were visiting the monks of New Skete. It was pouring rain and hot, forming a dense and muggy air one had to practically swim through. Pushing through the doors, the concert was already underway and we had to wait in the narthex for the current piece to end before we were allowed to find seats.
As we settled in, we were greeted by this rendition of the communion hymn, psalm 148,
It should be said at the outset that Timothy Parsons, the countertenor, sang so startlingly well that even listening to the recording again, after having seen it live, brought tears to my eyes. Naturally, he is helped by the beautiful support of the entire St. Tikhon Chamber choir. Furthermore, my sympathies towards American transcendentalism all too often make me an easy target when hearing the beauty of psalm 148 in any context, with its poetic presentation of the entirety of creation singing praises unto YHWH the God of all spirits and flesh.
Later that year, I had the great privilege of being able to experience this entire setting of the Divine Liturgy in an actual liturgical capacity. A hierarchical Divine Liturgy was to be served at the Cathedral of St. Nicholas in DC with the first hierarch of the OCA, Metropolitan Tikhon, serving along with dozens of other clergy and with the St. Tikhon chamber choir set to sing Benedict Sheehan’s new Liturgy.
While the recordings do capture much of the grandeur of the experience, nothing compares, as one might imagine, to the actual transcendent experience of what it was to actually stand at attention in worship, and more significantly, to commune when there is such an intense sense of the Holy Spirit’s presence.
What I find interesting in this experience, and broadly speaking in my journey to Orthodoxy and my time as a member within her body, is that this type of liturgical experience, for the vast majority of people, is going by the wayside in all of American religious life. I am certain many of my readers are familiar with the recent New York Post article entitled “Young men leaving traditional churches for ‘masculine’ Orthodox Christianity in droves.” I have several problems with this article, perhaps most of all because of its conclusion for why people are converting to Orthodoxy in America at such astonishing rates when compared to other denominations. Ricky Schlott, the writer, diagnoses the situation as men becoming Orthodox because it is uniquely “masculine” when compared to the other weak, limp wristed, and “effeminate” versions of Christianity on offer in America.
Aside from the fairly atrocious sexism explicit in the very premise of the question and answer (thus rendering all of the men converting to Orthodoxy as suspect of sexism, and all of the women converting as traitors to their sex), as one of the young men included in this mass influx of converts to Orthodoxy, I think he fundamentally misunderstands some of the deeper human yearnings behind those conversions.
Often, because of American Christianity’s iconoclastic tendencies, worship spaces can appear to be no more than multipurpose rooms, as good for worship as it is for hosting a potluck, or a game of dodgeball. The experience of worship, if it is at the very least capable of escaping the utterly banal and tedious, has a rigid formality and strangeness to it. Lamentably, a common theme running through the vast majority of churches in America is that they are rather ugly with architecture and hymns of worship ranging from saccharine and vapid to wooden and dour.
I recognize that this is a harsh appraisal of American Christianity. But I think it is important to be honest about my experience as I was surveying the religious landscape during my time inquiring into Orthodoxy. Sadly, much of what passes for worship comprises little more than a band playing jaunty tunes in a failed attempt to sound like Bob Dylan in an auditorium. Naturally, plenty of counter examples can be conjured.
Growing up, I attended what can only be described as a high-church Methodist parish in western Maryland. The exterior was a 19th century Gothic revival church, that was both towering and imposing. Within the nave, flying buttresses loomed overhead and the walls were punctuated by sumptuous Tiffany-made stained glass windows depicting scenes from the life of Christ. An enormous, intricately carved reredos adorned the high altar. The organist/choir director was paid a full-time salary, and it showed in the high degree of liturgical excellence that was my weekly norm. Often, we received the Eucharist at an altar rail while kneeling. Looking back on it now, it is clear to me that the original congregation put a tremendous amount of thought, effort, and money into the construction of what, for all intents and purposes, was a little cathedral.
However, what must be said is that this experience, far from being common, is an absolute rarity. As I reminisce about my experience as a child, my exposure to such liturgical excellence at that Methodist church was more dignified, reverent, and beautiful than what is generally on offer even at the vast majority of Roman Catholic parishes not to speak of the shocking austerity and ugliness in many Protestant churches.
The most fundamental of my experiences when I first entered an Orthodox temple was not that it felt either “masculine” or “feminine” (if we can even diagnose a space or temple as fitting neatly in either of those categories. What, for example, counts as masculine or feminine architecture?), I felt that it was incontrovertibly a space conceived of and built for worship. The very axis of the space was obviously directed towards worship. The elevated altar, the iconostasis, the apse filled with an icon of the Panagia, the throne of Holy Wisdom, overseeing everyone and everything, the high place behind the altar—in essence, everything, was obviously geared towards worship.
Everything about the experience, not only of the architecture and the hymnody, but even of the very people themselves was astonishingly beautiful. Here, it felt, like there were people who really cared about the spiritual life. Beauty was not an optional aesthetic preference to be dispensed with at the whim of a pastor or parish council. Rather, the very intensity of that beauty formed the heart of worship. Beauty itself was both an offering to God and yet was ultimately a gift God was giving to us of himself who is the Beautiful.
And so I return to the NYP’s article about why men are leaving the “traditional” denominations of this land to enter into Holy Orthodoxy. In sum, I think the answer can be found in this debut of Benedict Sheehan’s Divine Liturgy. The United States is a land, and a people, starved of beauty. This is evident in the fact that we have accepted, unwittingly, ugliness as simply a matter of course in our day to day life. Strip malls litter the land like hulking behemoths scarring the land and our psyche along with it. All too often, the most beautiful structures that adorn our lands happen to be the temples and mosques of other religions. I often feel like the Apostle Paul as he surveyed the temples of the Athenians “Men of Athens, I see that you are very religious in all respects.”1
It is sad to say, but the dazzling Mandir of my local Hindu community feels like a space more attuned for worship than the plethora of brutalist or spaceship looking Christian churches that dot the landscape. If we worship He Who Is the Beautiful, does it not seem that our worship and the spaces we inhabit ought to reflect this supreme reality? The Vāstuśāstra2 continues to influence and constrain Hindus in the creation of their temples, while all too often the Torah, the book of Ezekiel, or Revelation are rarely if ever consulted to understand what divine worship ought to look like.
Beauty is the first way in which we come into rapturous encounter with the Living God. For this reason St. Basil the Great wrote in his commentary on Psalm 1,
When, indeed, the Holy Spirit saw that the human race was neglectful of an upright life, what did He do? The delight of melody He mingled with the doctrines so that by the pleasantness and softness of the sound heard we might receive without perceiving it the benefit of the words, just as wise physicians who, when giving the fastidious rather bitter drugs to drink, frequently smear the cup with honey. Therefore, He devised for us these harmonious melodies of the psalms, that they who are children in age or, even those who are youthful in disposition might to all appearances chant but, in reality, become trained in soul3
The commandments of the Lord are strenuous and difficult. The spiritual life is undoubtedly one that involves much toil and much struggle of labor, pains, and tears of repentance. However, we are given the beauty of the divine services, the inspiration of sacred architecture, the glories of our iconographic tradition, and so much more as a way to “sweeten” what very often appears to be bitter to us.
Timothy Patitsas puts it well,
It would be better if in a beauty first way we were to allow the gospel and it’s chaste life to attract those who are tired of living under the sentence of death imposed by the destructive disordered desires that affect all of us.4
Living in the modern world all too often feels as if we live in the husk of a beauty long forgotten. We have forgotten that as human beings made after the image and likeness of God, we share an essential need for beauty in our spiritual life. It is neither auxiliary nor something we can dispense with with no regard to the cost. The cost being that our world, rather than being a place where we pursue and take refuge in beauty, becomes a world of convenience, practicality, and efficiency. A daily rule of prayer no longer has a place, or rather, can only exist if it is transmutated into a “mindfulness session” to reduce stress and increase productivity. Fasting is only valuable when it helps reduce my waistline and makes me look better. Almsgiving becomes yet another calculation when crunching the numbers during tax season.
This, I believe, underlies the mass exodus from a worldly Christianity endemic in America, with its endless pursuit of relevance and marketability that has abandoned the beautiful as a rather charming relic of a bygone age, towards a vital living spirituality as found in the Orthodox Church.
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Acts 17.22-23 (NASB 2020)
An ancient Hindu text dealing with sacred architecture and geometry. It is the basis for constructing any Hindu temple.
https://psallamdomino.blogspot.com/2011/05/st-basil-great-on-value-of-psalms.html
Timothy Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty (Maysville: St Nicholas Press, 2019), pg. 477
Well said, Eduardo. That feeling of peace and flow when immersed in the beauty of the Divine Liturgy is beyond compare. Never experienced it before I found Orthodoxy.