Liturgy Quick-Start Guide #6: The Liturgy after the Liturgy

Hello, fellow pilgrims. I want to share with you a quotation from St. Gabriel the Confessor of Georgia. He wrote, If you only knew how great a blessing comes from the Divine Liturgy, then you would collect even the dust from the floor of the church to wash your faces with it.    His words about Orthodox worship put my sometimes sleepy and distracted Sunday-morning attitude in perspective. We’ve traveled the entire…

Liturgy Quick-Start Guide #5: Ascending the Summit of the Eucharist

As we’ve been going through the nine parts of the Divine Liturgy, I’ve been using the metaphor of hiking a trail because the Liturgy truly is a mini spiritual journey within our larger spiritual journey of life. And of course, because of where I live, I keep referring to hiking in the Rocky Mountains rather than, say, the Appalachians or the Northern California coast.   In the Rockies of Colorado there is…