Jean-Serge wrote:Barbara wrote: Everybody MISSES those beautiful traditional Russian services. Where else are they to be found ?
If one is just attending the service, one can mentally cancel out the Patriarch Kirill commemorations.
Missing a service is not a reason for praying with heretics. Common prayer is an expression of common faith. If you have no church, you pray at home, that's all. Church is not an esthetical experimentation or experience or a concert that you are to attend, because you miss it.
Correct, Jean-Serge. If we pray with heretics, that makes us complicit with them because the Holy Canons state that we must never pray with heretics, and this includes our friends and relatives.
When I was visiting my mom just after my dad died, I deliberately came late to meals missing the family blessing led by my heretical non-denominational brother, who was not a minister of any church, nor a faithful member of the laity. He had become an itinerant preacher, preaching to any who would listen. At the family dinner, encouraged by my mom, he would pray, preach a homily, and then read a few passages from the bible, and preach some more. Total time for all this monkey business would be 30 minutes to an hour, and by that time, all the food would be cold anyway. Oh, yes, they would celebrate the Lord's Supper, so there was no way I could join the meal.
Anyway, I would just wait until the dust settled, walk into the dining room, grab a plate, fill it with food, say "thank you" with a smile to those who prepared it, and then leave to eat in another room. They knew that I was an Orthodox Christian, and that I could neither pray with them, nor break bread together with them. Most certainly, I did not want to stay, dissect my brother's sermon with the family, share grape juice and little cubes of bread, and say such wonderful awesome things about what had just transpired.
This should not have been strange to them because when I was 19, my parents left the Roman Catholic Church, and told me that I was being disobedient for not following their guidance in joining the heretical Church of Christ, the heretical Baptist Church, the heretical Presbyterian Church, and the local heretical Bible Chapel down the street. They wanted me to follow their lead and go from one church to another because once they had left the Roman Catholic Church, they had become heretical "Roamin" Christians. In fact they even laughed as they told me the joke, "How do you spell "ex-Catholic"? Answer, "Roamin Catholic." Something was always wrong with each Protestant Church they visited or joined. If it wasn't the preacher who could not give a decent sermon and properly "feed" them, then it was the preacher's wife with all her heavy eye make-up, fake tears, and black streaks on her face. They must have been baptized in at least four or five Protestant churches, and then promptly left while their wet hair was still drying. I tired of their gossip.
At that time, they had the gall to tell me that I was not worshipping their god! Well, at that point, I certainly did not want to worship their god, neither I was not happy with all the post-Vatican II changes in the Roman Catholic Church either, so I began my slow journey into Holy Orthodoxy. And believe it or not, my mom and dad were very happy that we (my husband and I) had finally left Catholicism for Orthodoxy, not because we had become Orthodox, but because we were no longer Roman Catholics. If we had become Protestants, they would have rejoiced even more.
And no, I will not add this to my autobiographical account of my Orthodox Christian conversion, because it might scandalize some good protestants who are looking into Holy Orthodoxy. I only mention these incidents so the reader can understand how difficult it is to avoid praying with heretics. Yet, it must be done charitably, if at all possible. For me, it was extremely difficult, because my brother, an itinerant preacher, who thought he had a direct line to God alone, would use every opportunity to condemn me and Holy Orthodoxy, and preach his heresies, which my two other brothers and one sister likewise condemned as they attended different Protestant churches. It was not a peaceful meal. Therefore, I could not partake of it.
