Eastern Liturgical Traditions

L'article analyse le troisieme des offices quotidiens dans le Livre des heures armenien. L'A. etudie les temoignages ecrits les plus anciens de cet office, qui remontent au VIIIeme siecle pour les premiers, ainsi le concile de Duin, pour reconstituer hypothetiquement son histoire primitive, montrant son developpement et son extension a travers l'Armenie et le role des monasteres.

Jesus Christ’s descent to the realm of the dead, called Sheol in Syriac, is a central motif of the Syriac-speaking churches to describe the paschal event. This dissertation investigates the motif in the early Syriac literary and liturgical traditions and analyzes its appropriation by the liturgy of the East Syrian Church as set out in the contemporary printed editions of its Missal and Breviary.
Because of the Syriac tradition’s preference for symbol, metaphor, and poetry as vehicles to articulate and contemplate the Christian faith, this dissertation employs a hermeneutical approach that accounts for the interplay of literary and liturgical genres, attends to the multilayered sedimentations of language, and addresses the dynamic assimilation,
transposition, distortion, and refiguration of the theme.
Chapter two sets out the language and imagery of Sheol in the Syriac Bible (Peshita), identifying the cumulative impact of the biblical imagery that the Syriac writers took up in a privileged way.
Chapter three presents and evaluates the literary history of the descent
motif, discerns the meanings that emerge in particular historical, cultural, and theological contexts, and identifies the compositional strategies that influenced the motif's development, in particular reinscription, amplification, and embedding.
Chapter four demonstrates how the liturgical tradition extends and advances interpretative horizon of the Syriac literary tradition. The analysis focuses on the East Syrian tradition’s liturgies for Pasch, Epiphany (Denha), baptism, and eucharist in their ritual contexts. These
texts refigure the descent myth and its symbols to mediate the meaning of Christ’s redemptive work for the community of faith.
The final chapter reflects theoretically on the interweaving of discourses in East Syrian liturgy. The intention is to delineate the ‘appropriation’ o f the descent motif by the East Syrian liturgy, explicate how the motif generates theological meaning through the genres of liturgy, and elucidate how the motif in the Syriac liturgical tradition contributes to the wider
theological tradition in terms of eschatology, pneumatology, and soteriology. The doxological character of liturgical language demands that when it appropriates an image, motif, or metaphor, it reconstitutes and reorients it. In these liturgical texts, the tradition’s language is broken and refigured to emphasize the assembly’s participation in the new life that comes from Christ’s Pasch.

Surely one of the most poignant and dramatic liturgical ceremonies of the Armenian Church is Dṙnbac‘ēk‘, “The Opening of the Door,” which takes place in the evening of Palm Sunday. Even in the substantially reduced form in which the ritual is conducted practically universally today in Armenian monasteries and parish churches, the ceremony culminates in a dramatic dialogue between two clergy positioned on either side of the closed church door (or, more commonly today, the altar curtain). Around a lattice of plaintive hymns derived from Psalm 117(118):19-20, one clergy, speaking on behalf of the people, knocks on the door and pleads for admittance, while the other, speaking on behalf of the heavenly Judge, defends the gates of the Kingdom against encroachment by the unworthy. The ceremony reaches its denouement as the door (or the altar curtain) is opened and the people enter the church. This essay compares the the ceremony with similar services in other traditions, and explores its possible origins in connection with the strange custom arising in some medieval Armenian monasteries of expelling the people from the church for the duration of Great Lent and shutting the doors. A complete English translation of the service is included.

One of the enduring issues in the field of liturgical theology is the relationship between Word and Sacrament. Recent scholarship in liturgical theology is clearly attempting to reconcile what has been, at times in the history of Christian dogma, a stated or perceived divorce of Word and Sacrament in the life of the Church of Jesus Christ. The current essay draws attention to the "unfailing" or "infallible" Word of the Lord, a formula found in the sacramental prayers of eastern Christian tradition. Invoked as the ultimate authority and power justifying the sacramental action or claim, the formula steers us toward the recovery of a pre-Scholastic eastern, patristic, ecumenical sacramental theology which understands "Word" and "Sacrament" as one and the same.

In 313, the emperors Licinius and Constantine the Great directed a letter to the administrators of the Eastern Provinces. In this letter they admitted the rights for the Christians to freely practice their faith. This document, known as the “Edict of Milan”, directly affected the dynamic growth of the Church.
This article tries to answer the question how the “Edict of Milan” affected the Christian liturgical tradition. Article shows the development of a written tradition, changes in Church architecture as well as its influence on the development of liturgical practice. In the text the most characteristic new elements of the liturgical tradition of the fourth and early fifth century were depicted.

In 313, the emperors Licinius and Constantine the Great directed a letter to the administrators of the Eastern Provinces. In this letter they admitted the rights for the Christians to freely practice their faith. This document, known as the “Edict of Milan”, directly affected the dynamic growth of the Church. This article tries to answer the question how the “Edict of Milan” affected the Christian liturgical tradition. Article shows the development of a written tradition, changes in Church architecture as well as its influence on the development of liturgical practice. In the text the most characteristic new elements of the liturgical tradition of the fourth and early fifth century were depicted.

“So it all kind of depends… even in men compared to men, and women compared to women, you would have to have a counterpart to judge something as yin or yang—you are never statically just yin or just yang…”

Elisa Fon is a student of acupuncture, graduating this semester from Yo San University in Santa Monica, CA.  She also studies reiki, energy healing, meditation and yoga.  Elisa and I have known each other for most of our lives as friends, as one another’s support and as chosen family.  Over the last few years, however, we have more consciously fostered an intentional aspect of our intimacy: a challenge to each other to live more authentically, to walk counter-abusively and to live towards physical, spiritual and emotional empowerment.  One privilege of this relationship has been the opportunity to create a language together in order to speak across our differences and share our respective passions: feminist theo/alogies (mine) and Chinese medicine/ healing arts (Elisa’s).