Naturally, an institution that is sixty years in existence has a great many treasures, which, with the passage of years, have been little mentioned, and perhaps all but forgotten. Our parish is no exception. The task of cleaning the Old Parish House has led me to the discovery of some of these treasures.
One such item that is rich in meaning for us is a hand-written Liturgikon (what we call in Old Slavonic Sluzhebnyk), which was meticulously written and adorned by Father Petro Oleksiw, who was pastor of the church here in Miami for most of the 1960s.
The manuscript was written in a pre-bound journal of some kind, which Father Oleksiw must have bought, but the text is written entirely in an elaborate calligraphic style that is usually referred to as Copperplate. The text is entirely in Old Slavonic, so Father Oleksiw adapted Cyrillic Copperplate for the exigencies of the Old Slavonic language. For example, the Old Slavonic letter yat’, is written as a cursive Cyrillic “в” impaled with a horizontal line.
The entirety of the text is written in black, so Father Oleksiw devised strategies to make certain kinds of text stand out. The priest’s parts, which were to be said aloud, were written in a very large hand, while the prayers that the priest offers quietly can be seen to be underlined. The people’s or choir’s part is everywhere written in a small hand.
However, there is one interesting exception to the general absence of rubrics (instructions) in the manuscript. Father Oleksiw adapted a convention that was common in earlier Greek-Catholic books, but was last seen in the 1905 Liturgikon. This convention involves a tiny pictograph of two hands, either joined or raised, which are placed in the margin of the book in order to indicate the position of the priest's hands at various moments during the Divine Liturgy. Father Oleksiw has eliminated the pictograph for joined hands, but retains the pictograph that indicates that the hands should be raised aloft. The 1905 liturgical books prescribed many such moments during the liturgy, when the priest was to raise his hands (this was probably an imitation of the Latin liturgy). The majority of these instances were removed from the 1944 Roman edition of the Liturgikon, which was created to conform to Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky's Ordo Celebrationis. The use of the "hands raised" position becomes very restricted after 1944, in order to conform to the customs observed in the Orthodox Church. It is interested to note that Father Oleksiw accepted the 1944 usage in the Liturgy of the Catechumens, and, in fact, up to Горі иміим серца, but then reverts to the 1905 customs for the whole of the anaphora. He returns to the 1944 usage after the conclusion of the anaphora, for the litany before communion, and for the rite of communion. The other peculiarities of the 1905 liturgical books (ending the Liturgy with the longer dismissal, including Чеснішую, for example) are absent from Father Oleksiw's sluzhebnyk.
Without doubt, Father Oleksiw was trained using the 1905 books. What his own personal sluzhebnyk shows us is that he had accepted the inevitable triumph of the Roman editions, but still cherished a certain nostalgia for the liturgical customs of his childhood and the early years of his priesthood. One's faith is very personal. There can be nothing more personal than an individual's religion. Any change at all (even change that is ultimately for good) in this deepest and most intimate part of our soul is traumatic and painful.
The lesson, I think, for us in Father Oleksiw's sluzhebnyk is the importance of our liturgical life together as a community. Father Oleksiw loved the Liturgy and valued the Liturgy so much that he laboriously and carefully copied the whole service by hand in a calligraphy that is not easy to execute. This was clearly a man who knew the centrality of the Liturgy in his life. He knew that Christ had established the Mysteries for our salvation, and the extent to which we are saved is the extent to which we conform our hearts and minds to this Mysteries. Our sanctification is in proportion to the extent to which we have lived the Liturgy.
