Incognitus wrote:
Just as an exercise - and anybody with a stopwatch can do this - try timing how long it takes to sing a small ektene, or the litany before the Lord's Prayer - and then ask yourself what you must do that is so overwhelmingly important as to necessitate dropping those elements from the Divine Liturgy.
Well put. Do we really want to make it a liturgical norm to drop these litanies? For example, the Litany of Thanksgiving is abbreviated so as to remove this prayer:
DEACON: Asking that the whole day may be perfect, holy, peaceful, and without sin, let us commend ourselves and one another, and our whole life to Christ, our God.A similar petition is part of the Litany before the Our Father:
DEACON: That this whole day may be perfect, holy, peaceful, and without sin, let us beseech the Lord.
PEOPLE: Grant it, O Lord.I may be mistaken, but the Revised Liturgy (as posted by Father Deacon Lance) does not appear to contain the phrase "that this whole day may be perfect, holy, peaceful, and without sin" any longer in either litany or elsewhere in the Divine Liturgy.
