Nativity Vigil

This year I celebrated the feast of our Lord's Nativity with a vigil at a women's monastery on Hymitos mountain, must be Koropi. The monastery's katholikon is dedicated to the Nativity and is known as "Bethlehem." We started at about 10:30PM and finished around 6:30AM. I was on the road back to Piraeus by 7AM and caught the 8AM boat back to Aegina.

There's always alot of talk about how "beautiful" Christmas is in the West (i.e. US, UK, Germany, etc.), but I think there's no match to the spiritual stregnth that should and could be.

In recent years, apparently influenced by powers not known to me, there is a push to begin services later and later. The idea is that people can't wake up early for Church. When I came to Greece for studies the first time, back in 1988, I remember entering a Church on Christmas morning at 5:15AM and not finding a seat! The announced time for the start of the service was 5AM. If you check the old "Farlekas," you see that ten, twenty and thirty years ago the services began even earlier—3:15AM, 4AM. We would call this a "Sunrise" service in American Protestant circles. It's basically an abbreviated vigil service for the parishes.

The monastic diataxis begins with the Great Apodeipnon up to the doxology and then finishes the vespers that was not completed in the morning by going directly into the Lity, Aposticha, Blessing of the loaves and then continues as would any other vigil, with the reading, hexapsalmos and the rest of the orthros followed by the hours, metalipsis, typika and divine Liturgy.

The parish diataxis (Konstantinos/Biolakes typika) begins with a kind of mesonyktikon, followed by the orthros and divine Liturgy.

In America most Orthodox Churches are mostly empty on Christmas morning. The parishes with more than one priest, with the blessings of the bishops, have moved the services to early afternoon. This means all the larger cathedrals. People wanna come to Church early in the evening, take communion and then go home, open presents and feast. Christmas morning becomes a sleep-in day.

How is this a "beautiful" Christmas?

Christmas is not lights, decorated trees, presents and richly laden tables…

"O Lord my God, I know that I am not worthy, nor sufficient, that Thou shouldest come under the roof of the house of my soul, for all is desolate and fallen, and Thou hast not in me a place worthy to lay Thy head. But even as from on high Thou didst humble Thyself for our sake, so now conform Thyself to my lowliness. And even as Thou didst deign to lie in a cave and in a manger of irrational beasts, so also deign to lie in the manger of mine irrational soul and to enter my defiled body."

This is the attitude the Church fathers brought to Christmas prayer.

Somehow, it seems to me that the situation in America is more than assimilation. Something else is operative. Something un-American. To what extent do allow a weak, Anglo-Protestant worship life to infiltrate into our rich Orthodox Christian heritage? God forbid anyone take the tyropittes, spanakopittes, pastitsia and feta cheese off our Christmas dinner menu. Then we'd get upset!

Have we maybe taken something much more worthy off our "table"?