 
|
|||||||||||||
              
|
Joy to the world for millions of Orthodox
Thursday, January 07, 1999 By Steve Levin, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Today, millions of Orthodox Christians will celebrate Christmas.
On Dec. 25th - 13 days ago - millions of other Orthodox Christians did the same thing.
To theologians, those 13 days - the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars followed by different Orthodox sects -- don't matter one whit.
The "two Christmases" don't affect Orthodox clergy such as the Rev. Dimitri Ermakov of the Holy Virgin Dormition Church in McKeesport, either.
For him and his 300 Orthodox parishioners, Dec. 25 was a regular workday, as it was for more than 150 million other Orthodox around the world. Today is the day he and his church celebrate the Feast of the Nativity, otherwise known as Christmas.
Dec. 25 "was an ordinary Friday for me," he said. "I've just learned to relax. There are no deliveries, no bothering with the doorbell."
Except for this ongoing Christmas date dichotomy, there aren't many other differences within the Orthodox Christian Church. Members of the 15 self-governing Orthodox churches around the world in countries such as the United States, Serbia, Romania, Greece and Russia - plus the ancient centers of orthodoxy in Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem - are united in the essentials of faith, liturgy and hierarchy.
There are much bigger differences in Christmas services and basic theology between the Orthodox and the Western Christian churches, which include Roman Catholics and, since the late 1500s, the Protestants.
The so-called Eastern and Western roots of Christianity are like siblings who argue and then harbor a lifelong grudge. This rift has lasted nearly 1,200 years, kicked off by the christening on Christmas Day 800 of Charlemagne as the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
Today, even though both Orthodox and Catholics trace their genealogy to the same source and share similarities in liturgy, and vestments, they remain enduring rivals because of a couple of critical canonical and theological differences: fealty to the Pope and wording of the Church's original creed.What does it all have to do with Christmas?
Thousands of Orthodox Christians today are in the midst of their Christmas celebration because they follow the Julian calendar, attributed to Julius Caesar. The emperor ordered the Egyptian astronomer Sosigenes to correct the existing 355-day Roman calendar, which had to add a month of 22 or 23 days every other year to compensate for lost days. Sosigenes made a new calendar with three years of 365 days and the fourth year with 366 days, beginning in January.
Until the late 1500s, the entire Christian church followed the Julian calendar. But then Pope Gregory XIII came out with his own version, to compensate for the 11 minutes of extra time each year that had been included in the Julian calendar. (By then, that 11-minute mistake had compounded to 10 days; today, it's 13 days.) The Western Church (today's Roman Catholics) and most of the western world adopted the Gregorian calendar.Not all Orthodox sects have stayed with the Julian model for Christmas. In 1924, many of the Orthodox churches - Greece (outside of Jerusalem), Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Romania, Bulgaria and Cyprus - adopted the Gregorian calendar.
Many others, including the Serbian Orthodox, did not. For them, Christmas Eve began last night. Outside many churches, a branch of a young oak tree, signifying Christ's cross, was broken into pieces. Services began with prayers announcing the birth of Christ. Churches and their elaborately painted and frescoed interiors full of icons were illuminated with candles and suffused with incense, while priests chanted prayers and bells rang.
After receiving blessings last night for a year of peace and prosperity, families returned home. At the Rev. Stevan Rocknage's home in McKeesport, his oldest son then brought straw into the house and placed some under a table. The priest's wife, Jo Ann Rocknage, tossed coins into the straw, which symbolizes the stable and manger, "for good luck in coming to Christ," said Rev. Rocknage, priest at the St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Church.
This morning, the 40-day-long Phillip's, or Nativity, fast was broken with Eucharist during the Divine Liturgy service. Once home, many families will enjoy a meal of roast suckling pig or barbecued lamb.The celebration of Christmas is not the only calendar conflict. There is a 13-day difference between the Julian Orthodox churches and other Christian churches for every single feast day and celebration except Easter, which virtually all Orthodox celebrate according to the Julian calendar. Because of the vagaries surrounding how the Orthodox determine the yearly date, once every few years the Easter observances coincide for all the Christian churches. This year, the Orthodox will observe Pascha on April 11; the rest of Christendom will do so on April 4. The next time both will observe it on the same day is in 2001.
The Eastern Orthodox have retained the Julian calendar, said Aristeides Papadakis, both a professor of history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, because of the schism that already existed between them and the Western Church.
|
||||||||||||
