{"id":50214,"date":"2019-12-02T13:54:52","date_gmt":"2019-12-02T19:54:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/?p=50214"},"modified":"2019-12-08T09:35:08","modified_gmt":"2019-12-08T15:35:08","slug":"is-there-an-orthodox-advent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2019\/12\/02\/is-there-an-orthodox-advent\/","title":{"rendered":"Is there an Orthodox Advent?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the Orthodox Church, pastors often encourage people to observe\nAdvent. How do Orthodox Christians observe Advent, and how does it compare to\ntraditions of the West?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Orthodox Church has a preparatory season in anticipation\nof Christmas, and the bulk of its observance is concentrated in the week\nleading up to Christmas. The documents, however, do not use the title \u201cAdvent\u201d\nto define this season. Advent is adopted from the West for convenience, to\ndescribe the forty days leading up to Christmas. Historically, Holy Week\nestablishes the pattern for Orthodox Advent. The appointment of the preparatory\nfast and the intensification of the liturgical cycle in the week preceding\nChristmas are the hints. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are the highlights of Advent? How do people observe it\nin practice? And finally, do the Orthodox confront the same pastoral challenges\nassociated with Advent and Christmas posed to all Christians? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A forty-day fast<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The forty-day fast preceding Christmas begins on November 15. In practice, it is not as rigorous as the fast for Great Lent. The main challenge occurs during Thanksgiving, and the fast is lifted on that day, and often for a few days, given the inevitability of leftovers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Nativity Canon<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main liturgical feature of Orthodox Advent is the addition of the Nativity Canon to the Vigil service on each Sunday and feast, beginning with the Entrance of the Mother of God into the temple on November 21. The canon is a series of hymns sung during the Matins portion of the Nativity Vigil. In practice, the canon is a popular piece, customarily set to festive music. The hymns themselves are echoes of the Greek patristic tradition, as the first song (Ode 1) begins with the words, \u201cChrist is born! Glorify him!\u201d taken from a homily of St. Gregory Nazianzus. Orthodox are familiar with this phrase because it also functions as the greeting exchanged among people during Christmastide: Christ is born! Glorify him!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many parishes do not serve Vigils, and those that pray Matins before the Sunday liturgy often have low attendance. Some pastors have therefore affixed the Nativity canon to be sung as one of the Communion songs on the Sundays of Advent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two Preparatory Sundays<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are no special readings for Advent to speak of in the Orthodox calendar, but there are preparatory Sundays: the Sunday of the Forefathers of Christ, and the Sunday before Nativity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Sunday of the forefathers is a robust celebration of the memory of the patriarchs, prophets, and holy people of the Old Testament who prefigured Christ. The people hear about Christ\u2019s ancestors primarily through the appointed hymns of the day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Sunday before the Nativity features the appointed Gospel, Matthew 1:1-25. To this day, deacons rehearse the Gospel reading to intone and pronounce Matthew\u2019s genealogy accurately. It is feast of Old Testament Scripture, and includes mention and honor of the three holy youths in the fiery furnace, from the prophecy of Daniel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thematic connection between the Sunday of the forefathers and the Sunday before the Nativity is quite clear: both Sundays feature Matthew\u2019s emphasis that Christ is the fulfillment of the prophets and is the legitimate messiah coming from the royal line of David \u2013 in all of its messiness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The forefeast of\nChrist: December 20-24<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The liturgical intensity picks up with the arrival of the forefeast, described by Archbishop Job Getcha<\/a> as a series of liturgical offices patterned after Holy Week. The services are particularly powerful in the hymnography, as the Troparia and Kontakia refer explicitly to the birth of Christ. The primary troparion for December 20-23:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prepare, O Bethlehem, for Eden has been opened to all. Adorn yourself, O Ephratha, for the Tree of Life blossoms forth from the Virgin in the cave. Her womb is a spiritual paradise planted with the fruit divine; if we eat of it we shall live forever and not die like Adam. Christ is coming to restore the image which He made in the beginning.<\/p> (Orthodox Church in America<\/a>, web) <\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In some places, some of the hymns of the forefeast are used earlier in Advent to create a type of Advent service. This practice of using thematic material that exhorts the Church to prepare for the feast is not unusual. It is similar to the popular Passia<\/em> service of Great Lent, a Vespers typically celebrated on Sundays that features one of the Passion Gospels from the Matins of Holy Friday. Both instances \u2013 Advent services and the Passia<\/em> office \u2013 are instances of drawing from the intensity of the Christmas forefeast and Holy Week to intensify anticipation of the feasts themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christmas Eve is the most intense liturgical day, marked by a rigorous fast. Churches that observe the complete cycle will celebrate the Royal Hours, Vespers followed by the Liturgy of St. Basil, a Vigil, consisting of Great Compline and Matins, and the Divine Liturgy the following morning. (Note that the services change somewhat if Christmas happens to fall on Sunday or Monday). Not all parishes celebrate this entire order of services, but some do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Orthodox Church does not have an official liturgical office that is the equivalent of a festival of lessons and carols in the Western Churches. Eastern Orthodox people have a rich tradition of carols<\/a>, and the liturgical offices of Christmas Eve feature numerous lessons from the Scriptures (especially the Royal Hours and the Vespers with Liturgy of Basil). The Church\u2019s official hymnography continues to be used for the liturgical services. Certainly, carols are sung in Church, usually after the services on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and in some places, it has become traditional to insert carols \u2013 from both the East and the West – into liturgical soft spots.    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pastoral Challenges<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone reading this is\nfamiliar with the challenges posed to pastors on Christmas \u2013 and I\u2019m not\ntalking about achieving a donations objective! People try to attend a service\non Christmas Eve, but family obligations, travel, and the business of hosting often\nprevents people from attending more than one service, leaving pastors\nfrustrated with empty seats on such a solemn feast. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I know of three general\nresponses by pastors in the Orthodox Church, based on a series of conversations\nand observations over the years. Some pastors serve as many of the offices as\nthey can, regardless of attendance, figuring that people can then choose in\naccordance with their schedules. Others implore the people to attend\neverything, and denounce selective attendance as laziness caused by the\nsecularization of Christmas. Another group studies the liturgical order to see if\nthey can modify or fuse services in such a way to bring people to Church. This\nthird group seeks to offer a meaningful Christmas Eve service that includes the\nEucharist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This leaves pastors with a\nfew options. One option is to celebrate the Vespers and liturgy of Basil later\nin the day on Christmas Eve. If this service is offered at about 4 p.m., the\nVigil is bumped to 7 or later (since pastors and musicians also need to eat).\nAnother option is to simply affix the following morning\u2019s liturgy to the Christmas\nEve Vigil. This is a long service (about three hours), but it permits people\nwho need to go from one family to the next an opportunity to partake of\ncommunion on Christmas. Critics of this option would complain that Christmas\nDay then has no services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of the choices are tough. Delaying the beginning of the Vesperal Liturgy makes evening communion possible, but is likely to draw people from the Vigil. Moving the morning Eucharist to the evening leaves Christmas Day open. The decision, then, must be a pastoral one, where the parish makes a decision on the basis of what is best for their particular people. And, as always, such decisions should take into account the burden placed on musicians who often volunteer and sacrifice time with their own families to lead the singing for the Christmas cycle.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In summary, then, most of the thematic liturgical material that anticipates Christmas is confined to the two Sundays before Christmas and the period of the forefeast. The Church draws from the liturgical hymnography of the forefeast and the feast and moves it to earlier dates of the season to enhance a sense of anticipation and preparation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps someday the Church will perform a similar adjustment by scheduling a Eucharist on Christmas Eve, in the evening, so that many more of the faithful can partake of the body and blood of the newborn prince of peace. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

both Sundays feature Matthew\u2019s emphasis that Christ is the fulfillment of the prophets and is the legitimate messiah coming from the royal line of David \u2013 in all of its messiness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":50221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[3118,91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ars-celebrandi-new-ws","category-liturgical-year"],"yoast_head":"\nIs there an Orthodox Advent? - Home<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2019\/12\/02\/is-there-an-orthodox-advent\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is there an Orthodox Advent? 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He previously taught at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles (2010-2017). Denysenko is a graduate of the University of Minnesota (B.S. in Business, 1994), St. Vladimir\u2019s Orthodox Theological Seminary (M.Div., 2000), and The Catholic University of America (Ph.D., 2008). His most recent books are The Church's Unholy War: Russia's Invasion of Ukraine and Orthodoxy (Cascade, 2023), and This is the Day That the Lord Has Made: The Liturgical Year in Orthodoxy (Cascade, 2023). He is a priest of the Orthodox Church in America.","url":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/author\/ndenysenko\/"}]}},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/Christmas-icon-rotated.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50214"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50227,"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50214\/revisions\/50227"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}