various gums, nuts, pepper, flowers, and ginger.[1] It is made in huge vats and blessed on Maundy Thursday.[2] The whole process is so complicated and expensive that chrism is made and blessed only on rare occasions.[3] Besides the Antidoron given out at the end of the Holy Liturgy, they have another kind of blessed bread called a kolyba (κόλυβα). Kolybas are blessed solemnly and distributed, either in honour of some Saint on his feast or in memory of some other kind of dead person. St. Augustine's reference to the funeral feast — originally food offered to the Manes of the dead — is well known (Conf. vi. 2).[4] The Euchologion contains a great number of blessings for various occasions, of which the most famous is the blessing of the waters (the sea or nearest river) in memory of our Lord's baptism on the Epiphany. The bishop throws a cross into the water, and the faithful dive in and fight for it down below. The man who succeds in getting it then comes out and makes a collection. They have many exorcisms too. The Orthodox fast is a very serious thing indeed. It means really only one meal a day, and involves abstinence not only from meat but from butter, milk, cheese, eggs, oil, and fish as well. The only things left are bread, olives, fruit, and wine. But all the fasts except Lent are relaxed, and even in Lent the average Orthodox layman no more fasts than the average Catholic. It is bad for his health, and makes him feel hungry. So he asks for a dispensation. But they usually keep the abstinence, and on the whole there is much more fasting and abstaining with them than with us.[5] And an Orthodox monastery in Lent is a living example of what the fasting of the first centuries was. Until quite lately the art of preaching was an almost unknown thing in the Orthodox Church — strange development among the successors of St. John Chrysostom. However, in 1893 a society
- ↑ The complete list in E. d'Or. iii. pp. 129-142: Composition et consécration du saint-chréme.
- ↑ Euch. 156-160.
- ↑ Between 1850 and 1900 only four times — in 1856, 1865, 1879, and 1890 (E. d'Or., l.c.).
- ↑ Cf. E. d'Or. ii. pp. 321-331: La grand controverse des Colybés. There was a great quarrel at Mount Athos about the kolybas.
- ↑ Every Wednesday and Friday is a day of abstinence from flesh meat.
