Matins Is Already Happening

What you'll notice

The website said ten. You pulled in at 9:52, pleased with yourself, and somewhere between the candle box and the back wall it dawns on you that the service is already going. There are chanters up front and off to one side, trading lines in a style you don't recognize. The priest is swinging the censer and saying something you can barely hear. And people are still wandering in, kissing icons, lighting candles, crossing themselves, finding their spots, as if none of this has started yet. Two older women in head scarves glance your way; you smile awkwardly, they smile back, and you drift toward the rear wall and stay there. Nobody looks at you like you're late. Ten minutes later the chanting swells, the lights come up, the priest comes out in his cape, and the thing you came for starts.

You didn't get the time wrong. You walked in on the service before the service.

What it's called

It's Matins (the morning service), from the Latin for "of the morning"; Greeks say Orthros, "dawn"; Slavs say Utrenya. The Church's day begins at sunset, so on Sunday, Matins sits between Saturday evening's Vespers and the Liturgy; Vespers, Vigil, and the Daily Round has the whole cycle. The swell you heard at the end is the Great Doxology, the hymn that opens with the angels' line at Bethlehem: "Glory be to God on high, and on earth peace, good will towards men."¹

What's actually happening

The Church is doing what it does every morning of the year, which is to get up and pray before anything else. Sunday Matins tells the Resurrection out loud before the Liturgy makes it present: psalms, a long sung poem called the canon, and a reading of one of the Gospel accounts of the empty tomb, which rotate week by week so that over eleven Sundays you hear them all (the eleven Resurrection Gospels, the Eothina).² By the time the priest says "Blessed is the Kingdom," the room has already been praying for an hour. The Liturgy doesn't start from a standing start; it starts mid-sentence, on purpose.

The Great Doxology is the hinge. It's one of the oldest hymns in the daily office, older than almost anything else you'll sing,³ and it comes with the lights on, when the service tips from night into day. Hapgood prints Matins from p. 15 to p. 37 in its Russian form; the Doxology is near the end.⁴ When you hear it, the Liturgy is minutes away. If a bishop is serving, he's greeted during Matins, after the sixth ode of the canon, which is why a whole parish will sometimes turn toward the door in the middle of the chanting.⁵

Why it matters

There's a practical grace in this. Orthodox services are hard to be late for, because the beginning is so soft. Walking in during Orthros is what everyone does; the Church seems to have designed Sunday morning for people with small children and bad traffic. And there's a theological point under the practical one. The Liturgy is the center of the Church's day, but it isn't the whole day. The Church prays at sunset and at dawn and at the hours in between, and the Liturgy is what all that praying opens into. If you only ever see the Liturgy, you've had the main course without the first; most people do, and it's fine. But if you ever wonder why the Liturgy feels like it's already going when it starts, that's why. It is.

Where it came from

Christians have kept fixed hours of prayer since the apostles went up to the Temple "at the hour of prayer" (Acts 3:1); Vespers, Vigil, and the Daily Round tells how those prayers grew into the services you hear now.

Greek-practice parishes, including most Antiochian and Romanian ones in America, serve Orthros on Sunday morning right before the Liturgy, which is why you walked in on it. Slavic-practice parishes, Russian and Serbian and much of the OCA, often serve Matins on Saturday night, joined to Vespers in the All-Night Vigil, so Sunday morning may start with the Hours or with the Liturgy itself. Either way, something is usually already going on when you arrive. The parish website or the sign out front will tell you which pattern you're walking into.

What you do

If you're Orthodox: come for Orthros, or some of it. The Resurrection Gospel and the Doxology are worth the alarm clock, and the people who arrive at the Doxology miss nothing from the Liturgy and gain the whole morning. If you walk in during the canon, do your candles and icons quietly and save the greetings for coffee hour.

If you're visiting: you're not late, and you weren't early either; you're in the middle, and that's where everybody comes in. Step in, find a spot toward the back, stand or sit, and light a candle if you like (The Narthex covers how). Then wait for the lights to come up and the priest to say "Blessed is the Kingdom." That's the next entry. Nobody is counting who was there for the Six Psalms.

Field Note: it isn't a late Liturgy. If something's already going on when you arrive, it's Matins, not a Liturgy that started without you. The Liturgy has a real beginning, a blessing of the Kingdom with the Gospel book lifted and the sign of the cross, and you'll know it when it happens.

Field Note: the reader is probably a layperson. The person chanting the psalms on one note is usually a tonsured reader, a lay member of the parish with a blessing to read; sometimes a teenager, sometimes a retired engineer. The Church has had readers since the second century.⁶

Go deeper

• Luke 2:8–14, and Psalm 63 (62 in the Septuagint), the morning psalm.
• Hapgood, Service Book, Order for Matins, pp. 15–37.
• Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology.

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