Sarx

The following is from the introduction to New Skete’s Book of Prayers, their communities’ Horologion:

HE RESULT Of all this study and experience, therefore, is a schema of the canonical hours which is both a reform and a restoration and, precisely because it is such, it is also a renewal. It is a restoration because it resurrects certain concepts, ideas, and ideals, certain characteristics and practices, certain usages of the parent traditions of Constantinople and Jerusalem. It is a reform in that it attempts to eliminate certain present usages of baroque character, to remove or adjust certain elements or uses obscuring the themes and purposes of each hour, to eliminate excesses in texts and ceremonies, and to rearrange other elements in favor of a more pastorally simple, integrate, and manageable form. It is a renewal because it endeavors to bring back what has been lost – the power to give life – by realizing the offices in the way that they were originally intended to be: suitable, appropriate, and relevant to the celebration at hand. Such offices give us new life; and they renew us.

It’s worth noting two things: to liturgical traditionalists inside the Orthodox Church, these men and women of the New Skete Communities are all Orthodox. Their studies are – and have been – under the omophorion of the Metropolitans of the OCA. That either proves your assumptions of modernist heresy or else makes it hard for you to sleep at night. For traditionalists outside the Orthodox Church, by way of comfort, no canonically Orthodox parish, to my knowledge, uses their liturgical resources, so you can rest easy – Orthodox Baroquery isn’t going away just now. New Skete may be the precursor a liturgical “Vatican II” in Orthodoxy – but that’s still several (hundred?) years in the future.

For the rest of us, however, the introduction speaks directly to and against the idea that the liturgy we currently see is in anyway the final or divinely-ordained form and urges us to continued research, restoration, renewal and reform.