Vol: 4 Issue: 10
Baba 1727 / October 2010
Prostrations in the Orthodox Church Rite By: H.G. Bishop Mettaos The Coptic Church, in its humble and meek spirit, teaches her children three types of prostration, or metanias (bowing). These are: prostrations of worship, repentance, and honor. 1. Prostrations of Worship These are the prostrations offered to God during our individual or public worship, such as at the beginning of each of the hourly prayers when we say “Lord have mercy….” St. Isaac said about such prostrations, “Bow at the beginning of your worship, asking God from your heart, with humiliation, to give you patience and control over your thoughts during prayers.” St. John Cassian said about the monks in Egypt, “I saw them in prayer. When they have finished reciting the Psalm they do not prostrate themselves in a hurry, as if it is a duty they want to get out of the way, like many of us do, on the contrary, they stand for a while to raise a short prayer, then they prostrate themselves in awe and great devotion. After that, they get to their feet in a brisk manner, standing uprightly with all their thoughts absorbed in prayer.” The Church’s Canon defines the number and arrangement of such prostrations by saying, “the worshipper starts his prayer either with one or three prostrations. He should kneel down after each psalm or praise, or whenever the words “kneeling down” are contained in the prayer.” Believers (and in particular monks) who prostrate themselves as a daily routine during prayer follow these regulations. The aim of prostration is to offer thanks to the Lord for His great mercies, or for His help in a certain matter. These are known as thanksgiving prostrations. Another aim of prostrating in prayer is to implore the Lord to grant us certain virtues or to pray for other people, saying such things as, + “Thank You my Lord Jesus Christ, for You have saved us“, or,
+ “Grant me, O Lord, the life of purity”, or, + “Grant me, O Lord, the life of patience and tolerance”, or, + “Grant me, O Lord, the life of complete love”, or focusing on any of the other virtues. The Church does not allow prostration on Saturdays and Sundays or during the fifty days of Pentecost or after having Holy Communion, because these occasions are considered to be joyous occasions. 2. Prostrations of Repentance There are two types of these prostrations: + Offering metanias to God, asking Him to have mercy on us, to give us the life of repentance and to forgive us our sins. These prostrations may be given as a task from our father of confession for the repentance of a certain sin, either for practice or as a corrective measure. + Offered by a person to his brethren after a meeting of discussion or reconciliation. The other party should accept these metanias and offer a similar metania in return, then they should shake hands in love, reconciliation and forgiveness, as it is written in the Bible, “Take heed to yourselves. If your brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times a day and returns to you, saying, ‘I repent,’ you shall forgive him” (Luke 17:3-4). The word “metanoia” is a Greek word which means repentance, that is, to change the mind from that which is wrong to that which is right. St. Paul says, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God” ( Romans 12:2). Prostrations offered from the heart are a powerful action in attempting to attain the forgiveness of those whom you have transgressed against. If sincere, they can wipe out all effects of insult or transgression, and refill the heart with a love greater than it felt before. 3. Prostrations of Honor There are two kinds of these prostrations: Metanias offered to the martyrs and saints, and those offered to the fathers of the church. +Metanias offered before the bodies of the martyrs and saints to honor their bodies because they endured devotion, hunger, thirst, tears and sweat on account of their great love for our Lord, Jesus Christ. Through this they became a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit. We honor them according to the promise of our Lord, Who said, “For those who honor Me, I will honor, and those who despise Me, shall be lightly esteemed” (1Sam.2:30). With such prostrations we also honor God, Who worked in them and led them to the shores of eternal peace. +Metanias offered to the fathers of the Church, the Patriarch or bishops, are the second type of Prostrations of Honor in which we honor them as a sign of our love and obediPage 2
ence as they are ambassadors for Christ and successors of the Apostles in the holy Church. We also prostrate in worship to the Holy Spirit which dwells in them, through which they consecrate Altars and ordain priests and deacons. The Holy Bible is full of evidence that Prostrations of Honor to the clergy are proper. (An excerpt from the Book, Spirituality of the Rites of the Holy Liturgy.)
The body aids the soul in prayer The effort of bodily prayer can help those not yet granted real prayer of the heart. I am referring to the stretching out of the hands, the beating on the chest, the sincere raising of the eyes heavenward, deep sighs and constant prostrations. But this is not always feasible when other people are present, and this is when the demons particularly like to launch an attack and, because we have not yet the strength of mind to stand up against them and because the hidden power of prayer is not yet within us, we succumb. So go somewhere apart, if you can, hide for a while in some secret place. If you can, lift up the eyes of your soul, but if not, the eyes of your body. Stand still with your arms in the shape of the cross so that with this sign you may shame and conquer your Amalek (Exod 17:11). Cry out to God, Who has the strength to save you. Do not bother with elegant and clever words. Just speak humbly, beginning with, "Have mercy on me, for I am weak" (Ps. 6:3). And then you will come to experience the power of the Most High and with help from heaven you will drive off your invisible foes. The man who gets into the habit of waging war in this way will soon put his enemies to flight solely by means of spiritual resources, for this is the reward God likes to bestow on those who put up a good struggle, and rightly so. (From The Ladder of Divine ascent, By St John Climacus)
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Stand up for Prayer By: Fr Anthony St Shenouda “If prayer is fulfilled together with its outward forms, then this is the fulfilment, not only of psalmody, but also of all the virtues.” St. Isaac the Syrian As part of my duties in the monastery is taking care of the retreat house, so many times I have walked into one of the rooms to find someone lying down with a Bible in his hand. At first I thought it was a way of getting out of doing work but I eventually realised that it was becoming a common practice among youth in their private prayers to read the Bible laying in bed or at best sitting up on their bed. When I come to speak to them they came up with the most ridiculous excuses such as “I am too tired” or “I concentrate better or isn’t it better to do it while I am comfortable than not to do it at all.” In this article I would like to mention what the church & church fathers had to say about this. First of all it must be clear that what we do spiritually affects our outward movement of the body and vice versa. For example King David was so spiritually overwhelmed that he could not stop himself dancing in front of the Ark of the Covenant. On this topic, a contemporary monk actually told me once, that if you are not unintentionally moved during prayer, to raise your hand or to prostrate to the ground, then you have not experienced true prayer. The liturgy of the church teaches us that there are times to stand and a time to prostrate. Before the Gospel reading a deacon calls out “stand up in the fear of God and listen to the Holy Gospel.” Originally the churches did not have pews, you can see this today in the old monastery churches. This is not only so that people would not sit down but also to give them a chance to prostrate to the ground freely during the liturgy. In fact in the fourth century a heresy came out called Messalianism (meaning ‘those who pray’). This heresy rejected the church sacraments, and ascetical practices. They regarded prayer as the only practice through which one reaches different ecstatic states. They also rejected any physical form of prayer such as prostration or even making the sign of the cross. This heresy was rejected by all the fathers of the church. One of the fathers who wrote against this heresy was St. Isaac the Syrian, in an article called “On prayer and its outward forms”. In this article St. Isaac teaches that outward physical expressions conductive to our inward progress towards pure prayer. Page 4
“It is in proportion to the honour which someone shows in his person to God during the time of prayer, both with his body and with the mind, that the door to assistance will be opened for him, leading to the purifying of the impulses' and to illumination in prayer. Someone who shows a reverential posture during prayer, by stretching out his hands to heaven as he stands in modesty, or by falling on his face to the ground, will be accounted worthy of much grace from on high.” He further clarifies that the external signs of reverence that we make in our worship are only beneficial to us. “You should realise, my brethren, that in all our services, God very much wants outward postures, specific kinds of honour, and visible forms of prayer, not for His own sake, but for our benefit. He himself is not profited by such things, nor does He lose anything when they are neglected; rather they are for the sake of our feeble nature. But as for those who neglect the outward expression of worship (i.e. messalians) he admonishes saying: “Many people have despised these outward postures in their thoughts and supposed that prayer of the heart suffices by itself for God, claiming as they lie on their backs or are sitting in a disrespectful manner, that there should only be an interior recollection of God... .This is because they have not perceived the might of the adversary they have, and as a result they are handed over to the working of falsehood, not having understood that they are still mortal and liable to be stirred up by their soul, which is subject to backsliding.” To conclude, our ‘Bible Reading’ time is not a reading time, but prayer time. The more you treat it that way, the more we will reap its fruits.
Judging a book by its cover.
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Gesture By: Columba Stewart OSB Enacted assimilation of the text, points us beyond the mind and heart to consider another dimension of monastic prayer, the use of the body. We know from all of the monastic literary sources that bodily postures and gestures were integral to the practice of prayer. The typical posture was standing, with kneeling or prostration regularly practiced to emphasize humility, penance, and adoration. The typical gesture was to pray with outstretched hands, and to make frequent use of the Sign of the Cross, traced simply on forehead, lips or breast rather than in the later form of a larger cross made by touching forehead, breast, and shoulders. In these practices, Egyptian monastics simply followed the standard Christian custom of the early Church as described by Origen and other writers. Everyone used these gestures. The Pachomian communal practice described earlier had its individual counterpart in John of Gaza’s summary of Scetic practice handed on to monks in Gaza. Anyone familiar with later Byzantine monasticism or, indeed, contemporary monasticism in the eastern Christian churches, knows the importance attached to prostrations. Whereas the early monastic traditions reckoned the number of text plus response units by calling them simply “prayers,” later traditions used another way to describe spiritual practice by referring to the number of prostrations (of course accompanied by prayers) to be done in the course of a day. The intensity of monastic practice has been underscored by recent work at St Stephen’s basilica in Jerusalem (the church at École Biblique). Although the burial vaults at the basilica date back to the Iron Age, they were reused by monks associated with the church and monastery built in the fifth century by the Empress Eudocia to commemorate the martyrdom of Saint Stephen alleged to have occurred on that spot. A unique collection of thousands of monastic bones was preserved in these vaults and has recently been analyzed by a team from the University of Notre Dame. The most surprising feature of the skeletal remains of these well-nourished ascetic men, most of whom lived into their 40s and 50s, was evidence of severe arthritis of the lower limbs, explainable only by repeated genuflection and/or prostration over decades of monastic life. The athleticism of early Christian prayer cannot be over-emphasized in a modern western context like ours where prayer tends to be associated with stillness, sitting or kneeling, and closed eyes. Early monastics, like their Christian brothers and sisters, prayed with the whole body and typically with eyes open. Catechesis on prayer emphasizes the importance of raising the eyes to heaven as a sign of beseeching and confidence; Origen regarded this as part of the body’s iconic expression of the proper state Page 6
of the soul at prayer. Archaeological evidence from Egypt suggests that the visual aid of a painted cross was standard in monastic cells. This brings us to the issue of place. Though ascetics could pray anywhere (and if they were to pray always, they had to be able to pray anywhere), there were privileged places to pray. Extensive excavations of monastic cell complexes at Kellia in Egypt have suggested that even the oldest and simplest cells dating from the fifth century had a separate oratory, or prayer room. Manual labor with its accompanying gesture and periodic response would be done in another room or outdoors, but the canonical prayer of the hours twice a day and other devotions with accompanying gestures would have been done in the oratory. On the walls of these oratories, archaeologists have found painted crosses. Some are quite simple, others are more elaborately developed to appear as if they were fashioned from palm trees, or are ornamented with the geometric playfulness familiar from later Coptic art. One well-known example from a communal oratory dated to the seventh or eighth century superimposes on the standard cross a haloed figure of Christ in blessing. In the same room was found an inscription justifying and explaining the use in monologistic prayer of the name of Jesus, a valuable witness to the monastic origins of the tradition of the Jesus Prayer in eastern Christianity. On the eastern wall of the oratory a niche was typically carved into the wall to indicate orientation for prayer. Facing east to pray was another distinctive marker of early Christian prayer, typified most powerfully in the Vigil of Easter, when the catechumen turned west to renounce the dying sun of sin and then east to profess faith in the new life found in the Risen Christ. Inscriptions are everywhere in the excavated cells of Kellia, and can be seen today in other ancient monastic complexes such as the Red Sea monasteries of Saint Paul and Saint Antony, and the White and Red Monasteries near Sohag. There are not only the formal inscriptions that one finds accompanying wall paintings in the monastic churches, but also the graffiti, the prayers, and requests for prayers, written by individual monks. The power of these simple, heartfelt messages is dramatically (and mysteriously) evident in one of the anonymous Apophthegmata about a monk who comes to the monastery at Sinai. Trained as a scribe, he finds in his cell a wooden tablet with this inscription: “Moses to Theodore: I am present, and I witness.” Each day he would look at it, and ask, “Where are you now, you who say ‘I am present and I witness’? In what world are you now? Where is the hand that wrote this?’. He became obsessed with the inscription, which became for him a constant memento mori. He wept continually, and despite being given scribal commissions and bundles of papyrus, he never wrote a thing except a brief note he would send back to his customers with their unused papyrus: “Pardon me my lords and brothers, for I have a little business with someone and because of that I did not have time to write for you.” (Columba Stewart OSB “The practices of monastic prayer: origins, evolution, and tensions” Proceedings of a Symposium at the University of Minnesota March 6.9. 2003 )
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The Latest Monastery Publications Stories From the Egyptian Desert, By: H.G. Bishop Macarius This is a group of spiritual short stories, Some of them are true, they did happen, Others are true in part, The rest are fiction. Each story contains a certain idea to deliver a spiritual lesson. This is an opportunity for the reader who could not visit the monasteries to learn about the monastic life, the struggle of the fathers and the wars of the devil.
The Ethiopian Servant of Chrst, By: H.G. Bishop Macarius Fr Abd el-Mesih el-Habashi is one of the twentieth century’s great ascetics who lived in the Egyptian desert. He life is a witness to the continuity of the desert spirituality of the 4th century. He was a man who was not concerned about anything or for anyone. His only concern was for the One; his eyes were directed towards eternity. He was content with enough food sufficient to keep him alive and enough clothing to cover his nakedness. He chose God as his way as well as his means. All the information in this book are documented in either voice recordings or written accounts of Metropolitans, Bishops, Priests, Monks, or Lay people, who gratefully shared their stories and photos that they had for this great father.
Practical Spirituality By: Fr Athanasius Iskander Born again in baptism, we receive the Holy Spirit which dwells in us, and works in us so that we may reach spiritual perfection, although the Bible tells us what we need to do to reach such perfection and earn Eternal life, it does not tell us how. Fr Athanasius Iskander borrowed methods and techniques from these Holy Fathers and provided wise instructions on how to practically apply them to the struggles faced by young Orthodox people living in the Twenty First century.
To or der Copies for your church or youth group please contact the monastery Page 8