The other night I had the opportunity to listen to Fr. Thomas Hopko tackle the topic of "Creativity and Asceticism: With Regard to Composing and Singing Liturgical Music" at the Orthodox PSALM Conference. It was an excellent conference and Father Thomas gave a fine talk.

Father Thomas noted: "you cannot speak of God in prose." Also, spending a few evenings hearing "unto ages of ages" and "Orthodox Christians" in services got me thinking.

What role does poetry have in our liturgy?

For example, "Now and ever and unto ages of ages" has a certain ring in the ear that "now and ever, and forever" lacks.

What sort of poetic considerations were taken in recasting the Divine Liturgy?

In Christ,

John

Well, none, can't you tell. Those phrasings, which should be part of our Liturgy weren't corrected. They were too busy skinning down the Antiphons & Litanies, and focusing on Inclusive Language. Now, had they just made corrections to the Red Book, we may have had something a little more poetic.

Why not correct the red book?

Good question. I think we keep dancing around that issue. Maybe Fr. David can answer that question, because I honestly don't know the answer.

I only know that there are four parishes in the Parma Eparchy (that I know of) who use the Red Book, and the people love it.

Those who can read liturgical Greek are aware that the bulk of the material in the service-books (the exact number of the service-books varies depending on the edition, but it's usually close to twenty) consists of poetry, in metre, which is great for Byzantine chanting but poses some difficult problems for translators.

There have been attempts to translate the Greek poetry into English poetry - as one might expect, the attempts are not entirely successful. But some of them are at least worth looking at.

J. M. Neale was quite an enthusiast for this work; some of his hymns translated from our liturgical poetry are still to be found in Anglican hymnals in current use.

Fr Serge