Found Objects

Congregation: between 15 and 30 at various points in the service. Several people left during Matins when they realised there was no priest.
Crew: Nobody here but us chickens: 1 alto, 1 tenor and for slightly more than half the time 1 (mezzo-)soprano. Some of the singing went very well, especially after the soprano had turned up: notably the Beatitudes. That setting is in fact better without a bass than with one.
Coordination: good; joins between parts were seamless, intonation was decent.
Voice: adequate, except from the Doxology at the end of Matins until the Second Antiphon in Typika when someone was smoking outside in front of the open doors and the smoke found its way to the choir and immediately got on my throat.
Strangeness: Last week, just after the outbreak of war in Georgia, there were neither Georgians nor Russians in church; this week, now that things seem to have settled down a bit, there were both Georgians and Russians. I think they all stayed home last week to avoid embarrassment, because of course they have nothing against each other even though their countries are at war.

In Psalm 62 (Western 63), one of the Six Psalms at the beginning of Matins, verse 10 reads in our Dutch translation, translated again: “They will be subject to the violence of the sword; foxes will prey on them”; I’ve been thinking for weeks that it would be more likely to be “jackals” in the Middle East, and anyway foxes prefer fresh meat unless carrion is all they can get, so they’d be unlikely to prowl a battlefield. Today I looked up the verse in the New King James version, and indeed, “They shall fall by the sword; they shall be a portion for jackals.”

Disclaimer: if you’ve come here from either of my relevant mailing lists —you know who you are— and you disagree, please argue here, not there. I don’t want to cause conflict in a safe venue. Also, I’m not seeking debate, I only want to put my thoughts in order and vent them.

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Q: May I/we come in?
A: Yes, that’s why we put “Welcome” on the door in large friendly letters.

Q: Is there an entrance fee?
A: No, but you’re free to put something in the collection box.

In fact this isn’t such a frequently asked question, but some people do ask it. I don’t know how many people don’t come in because they’re afraid to ask. Perhaps we should put “free entrance” in small friendly letters under the large friendly letters saying “Welcome”. I wonder if we would get more in the collection box if we put “voluntary contribution” too.

Q: Do you still hold services here?
A: (usually after a suppressed giggle) Every Saturday night, every Sunday, on the eve of every great feast, occasionally on the day of a great feast but only in the school holidays because the priest has a day job as a physics teacher, and in Holy Week almost full-time from Wednesday night to Sunday afternoon.

This one never fails to baffle me. People seem to think that we’re a museum, or at least something obsolete, not an active, working, growing community.

Q: How large is your community? (looking at empty space with about half a dozen chairs along the walls)
A: There are a hundred people on the roll, and on a normal Sunday about sixty in the service.

Q: Do they bring their own chairs, or what? Sit on the floor?
A: It’s customary to stand, but if you can’t it’s okay to sit, that’s what the chairs are for.

Q: Aren’t your services terribly long?
A: Not terribly, no. About an hour and a half on Sunday morning and two hours on Saturday night. One gets used to it.

Q: Are you all Russian?
A: (Prima, English-rose complexion, red hair and freckles, completely deadpan:) No.

Q: Well, you must have some connection with Russia.
A: No, in fact most Dutch people here don’t.

Q: Well, how many people in the congregation are actually Dutch?
A: More than half, and the rest are from a dozen different countries: Russian, White Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Greek, Serbian, Azeri, Uzbek, Eritrean and Ethiopian.

This is not counting the English/French couple who are moving to France, and the Frisian who reads the Gospel in Frisian at the Easter service.

Q: But the Dutch people are all converts, aren’t they?
A: (Prima, fourteen:) I was baptised Orthodox as a baby and so were my sisters.

There are in fact some Dutch adults in the parish who have been Orthodox from birth, or at least baptism: the priest’s son and daughter, for instance, both in their twenties.

Q: I never knew there was a church here! How long has it been here?
A: For fifty years in this town, for eight years in this spot.

There are people who pass the church every day and have never noticed it, even though there’s a rather visible sign over the door.

Q: Who founded your church?
A: Russian emigrants who came to the West as children in the Revolution. Lots of people fled to Paris at that time and formed a Russian community. Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow told them “I’m compromised and I can’t lead you, turn to the Patriarch of Constantinople” and they did, and that resulted in our diocese. Some of them came to live and work here in the 1950s and started the church, but we don’t have any of their descendants in the parish at the moment.

Of the descendants I know some have left the church altogether and some have left our culturally Dutch and politically neutral parish for culturally and/or politically Russian parishes, but that’s none of the visitors’ business.

Q: Does the priest stand with his back to the people?
A: (going to stand in front of them, facing the altar) Am I standing with my back to you, or are we all facing the same way and I just happen to be in front?

This actually enlightens most of the people who ask the question; very interesting discussions have come from it.

Q: Do those stairs lead to the organ?
A: No, to the office and the library.

This never fails to baffle the asker. Not that we don’t have an organ, apparently, but that we have such mundane things as an office and a library upstairs.

Q: What are those cloths hanging over some of the icons for?
A: For decoration.

Q: Why are they on some icons and not on others?
A: Because those icons are on thicker wood so the cloths don’t fall off.

One person honestly thought that the icons with cloths were somehow of higher status than the ones without, but I don’t think so.

Q: Do you have some kind of patriarch? And does he serve here every Sunday?
A: Well, we would like the patriarch to visit and serve, but most Sundays it’s just the priest.

I think that people who ask that think that “patriarch” is the word we use for “priest”, but that doesn’t make it less funny. Poor Bartholomew, commuting to Deventer every Sunday!

Q: Is the patriarch a kind of pope?
A: No, the pope is a kind of patriarch.

Prima got that question; I’ll remember her answer. I like the variant I got once, “Do you believe in the pope?” to which I answered “Yes, the pope exists.” And then, of course, explained that the pope is a patriarch all right but happens not to be our patriarch.

And some personal questions:

Q: Do you (singular, not the church) actually believe in God?
A: Yes.

Q: But how do you know?
A: I don’t know, but things happened in my life that made it likely. It’s an emotional conviction, not a rational conviction.

And usually, this sparks the whole “if there is a God, how come there’s so much evil in the world?” debate, which can either lead to a really good discussion (as it did last time) or leave me frustrated and defensive because I’m called upon to explain all that.

Q: Do you (plural) see God as a man? (not “human being”, but “adult male”)
A: Not as such (quotes Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”) But God is the Creator and that’s usually seen as a male principle.

Q: But when God became incarnate (in various shades of theology-speak) He came as a man, right?
A: Yes; He had to be either a man or a woman because people usually only come in those two sorts, and in that time and place He could do so much more as a man.

Not very theologically sound —I don’t like to use the “in that time” argument— but it does the job and usually saves a whole screed of “don’t you feel short-changed as a woman in the church”. Though we get that question too, and can shock people by saying we aren’t protesting against it.

We keep the church open every Saturday from the end of June until the end of August for the benefit of whoever wants to come in and have a look. Two volunteers per Saturday, and today it was my turn. Our “CHURCH OPEN” sign couldn’t face both sides that people were likely to come from at once, so I ran upstairs and printed a “CHURCH OPEN, Welcome!” sign to tape to the open door on the other side. Still, about half the people who came in asked “may I come in? may I have a look around?”

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I started wearing a headscarf in church —and kept it up once I’d started— mainly because I wanted to have a visible, tangible sign that church was different from the world outside it. Altar folk have their vestments, and I could have something too. I could think of oodles of reasons not to have it, most of which I will refute in a moment, but the thing that most kept me from just going ahead and covering my head was that I didn’t want to be seen as a wannabe Russian.

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Services sung: 9
Services to go: 0
Services at which I was the only alto: 3 1/2
Time: 0:32 Total: 3:52 Grand total: 19:47
Congregation: about 40, hard to count because many of them were very small
Crew: Altar: priest, 2 adult acolytes, 3 boys Choir: 8 (3 sopranos, 2 altos, 1 tenor, 2 basses)
Coordination: chaotic, but that’s normal for this service
Knees: excellent
Voice: adequate again, though I didn’t dare read the verses
Strangeness: The strangest thing about this service is that it’s the last, without having real closure: we expect to have something to go to in church tonight or at the latest tomorrow, but we’ll have to wait until Saturday!

Services sung: 8
Services to go: 1
Services at which I was the only alto: 3 1/2
Time: 3:20 (with a long procession!) Total: 3:20 Grand total: 19:15
Congregation: 150 or more at the procession, about 60 at the final blessing. Some left after Matins, some after the Gospel. People with small kids will probably turn up at Vespers.
Crew: Altar: priest, 3 adult acolytes (all of them!), 3 boys (the youngest my nine-year-old godson) Choir: 9 (4 sopranos, 2 altos, 2 tenors, 1 bass
Coordination: good enough
Knees: too busy to notice
Voice: in the circumstances, splendid. I thought I wouldn’t be able to sing at all, prayed hard and tried anyway, and about halfway through the service my voice was back to its usual Easter-night in-need-of-beer but still serviceable dryness. If our parish was a Greek parish, I’d have a silver larynx made (because I don’t think they sell those in the votive-junk shops) and hang it from the icon of the Resurrection, or of the Archangel Gabriel because that’s who I prayed to (I wanted to sing the megalinarion; there was nobody else present who knows that part).
Strangeness: When I looked out of the window at 11 pm the whole crowd of local Russians who come to church once a year (er, the kind of people I don’t like to associate with) were already standing in the street. They trailed at the end of the procession and stood just outside the church at Matins; I don’t know when they left but they were gone at the Gospel reading.

The Gospel was read in nine languages: Dutch, Russian, Macedonian, Georgian, Ge’ez, Greek (and the little Greek boy shouldn’t have sniggered at that), Frisian, English and French. Next year we’ll be without the English and French speakers because they’re moving to France in the summer, but perhaps we can get one of the Romanians to read.

Services sung: 7
Services to go: 2
Services at which I was the only alto: 3 1/2
Time: 3:00 Total: 5:30 Grand total: 15:55
Congregation: about 20 (in and out all the time; some people, especially with small kids, came only to see the church made white)
Crew: Altar: priest, 1 adult acolyte, 3 boys. One of the boys was very small, it was his first time to serve, his grandmother was very proud. Choir: 7 1/2 (3 sopranos, 1 1/2 alto, 2 tenors, 1 bass). I had to drop out halfway through, because I didn’t want people to think they could depend on me when I couldn’t even depend on myself.
Coordination: Okay. There was nobody in the church who took the initiative for the white-making so some of the choir had to start it, but after that it went swimmingly.
Knees: never thought of them.
Voice: horrid. I thought it was sort of okay and was getting better until I had to sing the glorifications, which are loud and high, and then it gave up completely. I stood in the nave for the rest of the service.
Strangeness: I’m very much not used to not being in the choir. The other alto did okay (though she couldn’t come to most of the practices, and it showed) so I had another bout of thinking that this was my punishment for pride. And I felt that there was not really a place for me, though nobody else seemed to think that so it was all right after all.

I must have been asleep on my feet at this service for the last ten years or so, because I noticed for the first time (at least it felt like the first time) that it’s already got a real Resurrection gospel from Matthew 28. We do turn the church from black to white between the Epistle and the Gospel, so it figures.

After the service there was the traditional rice and stewed fruit, but not many people came. Half the people who did come started lugging furniture for the Easter feast almost immediately, so it wasn’t a nice social gathering as it usually is on this day, especially as I still felt horrid and many other people weren’t feeling too well either. Ah well, Easter will clear everything up. I did buy a cheerful skirt (reversible mustard-yellow wraparound) in the market to wear tonight.

Services sung: 6
Services to go: 3
Services at which I was the only alto: 3 1/2
Time: 2:30 (with a procession!) Total: 2:30 Grand total: 12:55
Congregation: about 20 at the beginning, about 8 at the end.
Crew: Altar: priest, 2 boys, 2 men. Choir: 6-7 in varying composition: started out with 4 sopranos and one each of ATB, one soprano sang alto for a while, then went home and her husband came to sing bass, another soprano also went home, so we had 2 sopranos, 1 alto, 1 tenor and 2 basses.
Coordination: very good,
Knees: noticed right one about halfway through the service, not much bother.
Voice: better still but not up to scratch yet. During the Great Doxology I had the strange thought that my voice problems were God’s way to punish me for pride, or rather teach me humility, by getting me at my only strong point (or at least the only one I acknowledge as such), but it affects so many people apart from me that I didn’t want to believe that. Anyway, I don’t want to believe in the vindictive God that it would imply.
Strangeness: having a procession at about 10 in the evening while people are still sitting in restaurants, and other people are walking in the street, is… interesting.

Services sung: 5
Services to go: 4
Services at which I was the only alto: 3
Time: 1:20 Total: 6:23 Grand total: 10:25
Congregation: about 25
Crew: Altar: priest, 2 boys and 2 men Choir: 7 (2 of everything except basses)
Coordination: good enough
Knees: normal
Voice: slightly better than at the Hours, but still not good enough to sing the Alleluia verses.
Strangeness: it’s certainly strange to hear someone else sing something I’ve been doing for the last X years, for quite a large value of X. It was very good indeed, but quite different.

Services sung: 4
Services to go: 5
Services at which I was the only alto: 3
Time: 1:58 Total: 5:03 Grand total: 9:05
Congregation: 5-7
Crew: Altar: priest, 1 adult acolyte, 2 boys Choir: 5 (SSATB)
Coordination: excellent
Knees: didn’t notice them, so must have been okay
Voice: a whole tribe of frogs have taken up residence in my throat. Tried to read the First Hour, and later one verse, without much success. Reluctantly gave up the sung Alleluia verses at Vespers, because that’s very much the thing I do.
Strangeness: Every Royal Hour has three stichera with two verses in between (followed by prokeimenon and readings) except the ninth: that has two stichera but still two verses. We don’t know whether we should skip the verse or repeat the sticheron, so we do neither, leaving the second verse hanging in the air.

Also, nobody seemed to be able to sing a completely normal troparion in the second tone. Next year we’ll put it in the alternative second tone, much easier.

This is the service with the 12 Passion Gospels.

Services sung: 3
Services to go: 6
Services at which I was the only alto: 2
Time: 3:05 Total: 3:05 Grand total: 7:07
Congregation: 7 (3 of which were offspring of people in the choir)
Crew: Altar: priest, 2 men and 2 boys. None of them were actually in the altar much. Choir: 7 (3 sopranos, 1 alto, 1 tenor and 2 basses; one bass left before the end of the service but not by much)
Coordination: Frankly, lousy. Everybody was good-natured about it, though. We appeared to have a subtly different book from the priest, and both the priest’s book and the choir book had errors and of course they were different errors. Also, we sang the wrong version of “Lord, have mercy” several times, and Choirmistress left the choir to venerate the cross confident that I could intone the chant for venerating the cross, but that’s the one thing I can’t intone cold. Now I have it as an earworm, of course. But at least this year we didn’t skip anything like we did last year.
Knees: Pretty decent.
Voice: Adequate, until it kind of broke near the end, and now I have a sore throat.
Strangeness: When we crossed the three meters from our front door to the church door it was drizzling; as soon as the first Gospel was read, rain started drumming on the skylight and didn’t stop until the third or fourth Gospel. Seeing that the first gospel is long (three and a half chapters of John) it was quite a lot of rain. It gave a strangely intense atmosphere to the readings.

This used to be my favourite service of Holy Week, but tonight I noticed for the first time (consciously) that it’s a rag-bag of music without any unity. It offends my sense of liturgical propriety. Plain and simple stuff, blatant kitsch (even now that we’ve replaced some of the most blatant nineteenth-century Russian only-for-huge-choirs kitsch by simpler stuff), high drama (the minor-key tones, splendid but difficult, especially 4 but also 8; we can manage 7 now), not-so-plain but okay pieces, absolutely beautiful stuff (the exapostilarion, The Good Robber, and the thing I can’t intone for venerating the cross), and my pet hate, the ikos that makes the Mother of God look like a silly goose:

Beholding her own lamb led to the slaughter, Mary followed with the other women, in distress and crying out: Where do You go, my child? Why do You run so swift a course? Surely there is not another wedding in Cana to which You now hasten to change water into wine? Shall I come with You, my child, or shall I wait for You? Give me a word, for You are the Word. Do not pass me by in silence, for You kept me pure.

The Dutch version has “innocent” for “pure”, and that’s a very old-fashioned value of “innocent”.

And as an afterthought: I still think it’s silly to call out “Aposticha in the first tone” when all the aposticha, except the first and the last, are in the second tone.

Services sung: 2
Services to go: 7
Services at which I was the only alto: 1
Time: 2:10 Total: 4:02
Congregation: 12-16, people kept trickling in when the service had already started, with a small peak at 10:30 (that’s when people expect services to start)
Crew: Altar: priest, 1 adult acolyte, 2 experiences boys with too-short sticharia. As someone said over post-service coffee: “The problem is not that the sticharia are too short, but that our altar-boys grow too fast.” Choir: 5 (SSATB)
Coordination: Okay, apart from the usual glitches. Another service we haven’t practiced much. Choirmistress is too short to read the first line of “Son of God”, which we sing all the time, and if we’d practiced it we’d have known and made a more readable version.
Knees: okay. Must remember to bend them every once in a while, especially tonight, or I won’t be able to kneel to venerate the cross.
Voice: so-so at the beginning (the hay-fever had taken me by the throat) but getting better towards the end.
Strangeness: Realised somewhere during Vespers what this Holy Week is about. It’s about something else every year: last year it was about mastery, the year before about politics games. This year it seems to be about voluntary suffering and sacrifice: Christ goes to his ordeal with his eyes wide open, he knows exactly what’s happening and what’s going to happen, and still submits. This makes it worse, somehow, than if he’d really been an unwitting sacrificial lamb. I may expand this in a separate post when I’ve finished putting crosses on all those eggs.

Services sung: 1
Services to go: 8
Time: 1:52
Congregation: 20, give or take a few. Some came late, some left early; one was in the congregation first and in the choir later.
Crew: Altar: priest and 3 boys. There was barely enough work for one boy, but the other two, who came later, wanted to serve very much. Choir: 8 (4 sopranos, 2 altos, 1 tenor and 1 bass). There were actually two tenors present, but their voices are so different that they have a hard time singing the same part, so one sang the first part of the service and when he went home the other took over.
Coordination: For the first service of Holy Week, not bad. We did pitch one piece way too high (sang it three times; I managed only the first) and it was very clear that we’d practiced from the end this time, so we never got round to practicing this service at all.
Knees: decent.
Voice: considering the fact that I currently have my worst bout of hay fever since years (plane trees are in flower), perfectly reasonable.
Strangeness: The First Hour has an Old Testament reading (Jeremiah) preceded and followed by a prokeimenon. One would expect another reading, but it continues with the fixed part of the First Hour as if someone ripped a page from the book before copies were made of it.

There’s always a point in Holy Week when I suddenly realise that the machinery is in motion, and that I won’t stop until it stops. Usually it’s either in the middle of this service (like last year, sitting on the edge of the choir dais while someone was reading psalms) or in the middle of the Liturgy of Holy Thursday. This year it came before any service, in the afternoon, on the bike coming back from the supermarket. The mundane things that I do in Holy Week, everything that belongs to it except the services —strange shopping, special cooking— have come to count too.

Literally.

I have 160 red (well, kind of red; some of them didn’t take the dye as well as my skin did) Easter eggs waiting for crosses and the letters XB to be painted on.

In Holy Week, being Orthodox is full-time job. Our Australian house-guest remarked that I was “quietly” doing a lot of work for the church and wondered if we didn’t have a Ladies’ Guild. Fortunately not! If we had a Ladies’ Guild organising the volunteer work, I don’t think I’d want to volunteer. It’s much easier and less embarrassing to do the things I’m good at, informally, yes, quietly.

Also, there’s no “women’s work” in our parish: anything except altar work, which you have to be a man for, is anybody’s work. That, according to our Australian, is probably due to modern Dutch culture; in which case I approve of at least this bit of modern Dutch culture.