The meaning and creative structure for poetic compositions in the Church comes from its order. If the Holy Trinity created the universe that orders our earthly experience into morning, day, and night, likewise prayer is going to be ordered similarly. Because of secularism, Christians tend to become skeptical of worship that doesn’t make much distinction between ordinary life and Sunday church attendance. In economics, business hours work on a financial cycle and the Romans used cycles to order provinces, indictions, and censuses. Order also helps Christians make a strong effort on earth, which we call asceticism or struggle. Metropolitan Hilarion explains that the meaning of Vespers can be found in its order of prayers. The Church chose which psalms and poetic compositions, and hymns will be used to create order of worship so that it can work on us in a certain way depending on the time of day, feast, or fast. The Church directs our attention and remembrance to certain parts of the Christian life. If it were not permissible to order worship, other kinds of ordering would fill its place. During Vespers, the priest reads the “prayers of light” that are tied to different psalms from the Bible. Themes of these prayers include creation, supplication, and how light exists even in the darkness of night. That informs how Christians live daily under whatever circumstances or time. A song called “O Gladsome Light” is sung during vespers, and its origin is likely from an early martyr Athenagoras (Athenogenes) who is said to have “held on the Spirit” at his death. It is a song sung during the lighting of the lamps that is a specific practice only really kept well by Orthodox Christians nowadays. This chapter also explains some common terms such as troparion, kathisma, prokeimenon, aposticha, litiya, and pericopes. Prayer helps us remember God, the Gentle Light, as the Greeks translate it, and it’s also a remembrance of our own evening that symbolizes our final day, our death.
The daily services of prayer have a compositional characteristic that can be adapted to other compositions. Prayers have a thematic and biblical content that hinges on Church tradition for its interpretation. Services are composed of heartfelt prayers that help us practice Christian virtue and disciplines, not simply serving as nice imagery for roundtable talks. Poetry is a language of the noetic human being. It’s an important medium of communication in the fullness of that word’s meaning and effects. Prayer also organizes our day as a year or year as a day. We begin to live in the heavens while we conduct ourselves on earth. We develop an aionian existence “of the ages and ages” with the Holy Trinity.
Matins is the longest of the daily services at twilight. It begins with the prayer of thanksgiving to God “who has shown us the light.” The Six Psalms are sung with no lamp lit. Electricity and lightening have changed a lot of ways of operation. Ancient people would sleep around sundown and wake up at sunrise. Monks, however, reduced sleeping to increase times for prayer as a very developed form of asceticism. In the midnight office, Psalm 118 was chosen to be sung because of its Christological focus and the condensed teaching of the ascetical life.
The mystical tradition of the Church produced the Holy Scriptures and the Psalter, which in turn produced Christian hymnography that continues Orthodox mystical tradition. Songs are part of human nature, and how God created people and our noetic tongue. Questions about personal identity, authority of interpretation, and the Bible’s meaning are answered within the Orthodox tradition of hymnography. The hymns of the Church explain to us many teachings, practices, and dogmas about light, love, mercy, time, death, life, ascesis, prayer, services, the commandments, and repentance. The Typikon, then, gives us examples of songs found in the Old Testament that are included in the service of matins called the Ten Biblical Canticles. Each has its own troparion at the end. Some of these canticles sing of Moses at the Red Sea, Hannah’s song, the Prophets Isaiah, Habbukuk, and Jonah’s song. The Three Holy Youths’ song, the song of the Most Holy Theotokos and Zacchariah’s song completes the ten canticles.The Bible is the Song. Personal identity is formed in the liturgical and daily services because our song is found through the scriptures, prayers, and hymns. Matins is also a monastic survival in current parishes. Metropolitan Hilarion points out that technology makes long monastic teachings unnecessary since the availability of texts is widespread now.
The hours most likely developed out of matins (orthros). Three psalms, a daily troparion and kontakion, and the prayer “Lord have mercy” said forty times is the common structure of all the hours. The daily services lead up to the Lord’s Day, Sunday, when Orthodox Christians gather into one place to partake of the Eucharist, the Mystical Supper of our Lord, the end of time. When Christians begin to practice the liturgical life, the ideas of time, creation and humanity are stretched to new dimensions. The effect is a moral change and inner renewal that happens through the Eucharist, the source of all life.