The difference between the Catholic/Protestant and the Orthodox Liturgy
On the threshold of his 50th birthday, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations, gave an interview to the Russian-language sister site of Pravmir.com ‘Pravoslavie i mir’, in which he told how he came to believe in God, as well as about his approach to life and death, his new book and gifts as a writer.
If you have been in Catholic or Protestant churches, you will have seen that worship there as a rule consists of various bits and pieces: first people sing a psalm then sit, listen to a reading, then stand again.
Worship in the Orthodox Church is uninterrupted. This of course helps us to immerse ourselves in the prayerful atmosphere. Our worship is a school of theology and contemplation, it is replete with theological ideas. It is completely impossible to understand worship without knowing, for example, the dogmas of the Church.
This is why Orthodox worship for many people appears to be incomprehensible – not because it is in Church Slavonic, but because it appeals to the consciousness of completely different people.
Source:
www.pravmir.com/metropolitan-hi…
If you have been in Catholic or Protestant churches, you will have seen that worship there as a rule consists of various bits and pieces: first people sing a psalm then sit, listen to a reading, then stand again.
Worship in the Orthodox Church is uninterrupted. This of course helps us to immerse ourselves in the prayerful atmosphere. Our worship is a school of theology and contemplation, it is replete with theological ideas. It is completely impossible to understand worship without knowing, for example, the dogmas of the Church.
This is why Orthodox worship for many people appears to be incomprehensible – not because it is in Church Slavonic, but because it appeals to the consciousness of completely different people.
Source:
www.pravmir.com/metropolitan-hi…