To begin, I wish to make my conviction clear. I do not think we should try to make the Liturgy as short as possible, and that the parish Liturgy should be about an hour in length. The desire to make the Liturgy as short as possible comes from the idea that it is only an obligation that we have to do to be in the divine good will. Sometimes this idea is not completely conscious, but it is an attitude in which the Liturgy has little value in itself and is only a legal requirement. In this case, the quicker it is performed, the better, and the time spent in the Liturgy is boring. Our great-grandparents devoted more time to Liturgy, often two hours or more, and it was the most important thing they did during the week. Many outsiders are still afraid to go to a Byzantine Liturgy, because they fear how long it would take. Today, though, a strictly legalistic attitude is less common.
The bigger question is the place of the Liturgy in our life of faith. This, in turn, has been affected by the way we learn truth, or, to put it in more secular terms, the way reality is presented to us. We might say that in our Church, the icon is the window into reality, but in the society in which we live, television has become our window into the world. This touches the lives of every person, even those few who react against it and refuse to watch it. There is, of course, nothing intrinsically evil about television, for it is a gift of God, but like every benefit given us we are able to distort its value. I don’t mean simply the content of what is shown on television, but the very medium itself. By its very nature, it can make it more difficult for us to distinguish between reality and fiction. A television story can take on the feel of reality, while reality can become like just another story. More than that, it makes entertainment the most significant life value, and the Liturgy, which is not entertainment but communion with God, becomes judged by those same standards. Since television shows last about an hour, an hour becomes the maximum time a Liturgy can take, and if the quality of our worship is not “entertaining” enough, it will seem much longer.

Our great-grandparents spent much more time on Liturgy than we do, and we tend to view them as primitive and backward. However, they may have had more wisdom than we do. One of the Fathers of the Church once said that we need two hours of prayer to come into the presence of God. Again, I am very much aware that this will not be acceptable to modern sensitivities attuned to the one hour time frame, but we should be humble enough to admit that our faith in God and desire for God is weaker. At the same time, i am encouraged that there has been some restoration since the time of my youth. Then, a generation or two ago, everyone was into minimalism, and the shorter Liturgy was the ideal. Since then, we have recovered an appreciation for spirituality somewhat , though we often separate it from liturgical worship and connect it with our individual relationship to God.