I'll try this again.

Where are the Tabernacles located in Syriac Orthodox
Churches ?
What do they look like ?
How do you express worship of Lord Jesus in His
Eucharistic Presence in the Tabernacle (Roman
Catholics genuflect, Greek-Rite Orthodox bow , etc.)?

I'm surprised not to have recieved an answer to
questions any practising Syriac Orthodox person could
answer, without looking anything up, with very little
effort.

Steve

__________________________________________________
Terrorist Attacks on U.S. - How can you help?
Donate cash, emergency relief information
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/US/Emergency_Information/

Mr. Dennehy,

Much happened in the US and around the world since Sep 10th when you
first posted this message, that responding to a SOR-Forum message was
not the priority for most of us... It is perfectly fine to be
persistent, but I would request you to be more sensitive in your
messages to the list.

As far as I know, traditionally Syriac Orthodox Churches (in India)
store any host left over from the celebration of the divine mysteries
in a pyx which is also used for carrying the host for administering
last rites. Some of the more modern Syriac Orthodox Churches in India
have a tabernacle placed on the altar ledge; however, I don't believe
that it is very typical. I have seen tabernacles in Syriac Orthodox
Churches in the Middle Eastern diaspora but I am not sure whether the
tabernacle is standard.

The Syriac Orthodox make the sign of the cross as they come into the
church and in front of the altar. In addition, they may also bow
their heads in front of the altar.

As an aside, while the Syriac Orthodox prostrate during regular
prayer services, they do not prostrate on Sunday (starting Saturday
evening prayers to Sunday ninth hour prayers including the divine
liturgy) as well as between Easter and Pentecost, the days
commemorating and celebrating the ressurection of Christ.

Thomas Joseph


--- In SOR-Forum@y..., Steve Dennehy <svjd@y...> wrote:
> I'll try this again.
>
> Where are the Tabernacles located in Syriac Orthodox
> Churches ?
> What do they look like ?
> How do you express worship of Lord Jesus in His
> Eucharistic Presence in the Tabernacle (Roman
> Catholics genuflect, Greek-Rite Orthodox bow , etc.)?
>
> I'm surprised not to have recieved an answer to
> questions any practising Syriac Orthodox person could
> answer, without looking anything up, with very little
> effort.
>
> Steve
>
> __________________________________________________
> Terrorist Attacks on U.S. - How can you help?
> Donate cash, emergency relief information
> http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/US/Emergency_Information/

Open to us, Lord, your great Door, 0 Fountain of all mercy, hear our
prayer and have mercy on our souls. Lord of the morning and ruler of
all seasons, hear our prayer and have mercy on our souls. Shine upon
me, Lord, and I shall be Light like the day; I will sing your praise
in Light while I marvel; may the morning awaken me to the praise of
your Godhead and I will pursue the study of your Word all the day
long. With the day may your Light shine on our thoughts and may it
drive away the shadows of error from our souls. The creation is full
of Light, give Light also to our hearts that they may praise you with
the day and the night.

(Syrian Orthodox Prayer)

Rise up, 0 children of Light, and let us give glory to the Lord who
alone can save our souls. 0 Lord, as you withdraw sleep from the eyes
of our body, grant us wakefulness of mind so that we may stand before
you in awe and sing your praises worthily.

(Syrian Orthodox Prayer)

Under the co-chairmanship of His Eminence Metropolitan Bishoy of
Damiette of the Coptic Orthodox Church, and the Rt Revd Dr Geoffrey
Rowell, Bishop-Designate of Gibraltar in Europe (the Church of
England Diocese in Europe), Anglican and Oriental Orthodox
representatives, delegated by their Churches, met to consider the
recommendations of the Lambeth Conferences of 1988 and 1998 and
decisions of Oriental Orthodox Churches that the Anglican-Oriental
Orthodox dialogue be upgraded from a Forum (1985-1993) to a Commission

For more details please visit
http://www.anglicancommunion.org/documents/aooic/200107.html

by Roy Hange, Mennonite Central Committee Syria.

AIn the Christian Quarter of Old Damascus, 20 yards from the street
called "Straight," thirteen of us gathered around the long table in
the vaulted dining room of the Syrian Orthodox Seminary. Our simple,
evening meal began with the prayer Jesus taught chanted in a dialect
of the language Jesus spoke, Syriac. The Lord's Prayer was lead by
the spiritual director of the seminary, a gentle and wise monk named
Father Issa. The English equivalent of his name is Jesus.
Father "Jesus" sat at the head of the table which happened to include
12 others that evening. The dining room was framed by two pictures of
the Lord's Supper.

To read more please visit.....
http://www.mcc.org/ask-a-vet/supper.html

Molotov cocktails have been thrown through church windows at
Lidcombe's St John Vianney Church, Greenacre Memorial Uniting Church
and the St Ephreim Syrian Orthodox Church under construction at
Lidcombe.

Pro-bin Laden slogans such as "Osama bin Laden is Great", "Muslims
Rule" and "Kill Jews 1 by 1" were spray-painted on the Syrian
Orthodox church.

For more details please visit....
http://news.f2.com.au/2001/10/12/FFXROCSVOSC.html

But you muster your courage and venture inside. You see a Greek
Orthodox monk lighting candles. You hear the Armenian Orthodox choir
singing their Liturgy. You pass by a small chapel where a Copt
Orthodox priest devoutly says his prayer and nearby a Syrian Orthodox
monk recites his. You continue on and meet a Franciscan friar
preparing an altar for the celebration of the mass.

This is too much for your pious expectations. Where have you ended
up? Is this the place that has played such an important role during
the centuries? Is this what you had expected to see? But then, all of
a sudden it dawns on you and it starts to sink in.

To find out were you are.... please visit.....
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/jhs/TSspintr.html

Fr. Thomas Varghese Mullamkuzhy, Omalloor (37) one of the eminent
young priests of Southern Diocese of Malankara was called to the
heavenly abode on Friday afternoon (12th October 2001).

George Varghese
Kuwait
varghese@...

The Three Stages of Spiritual Life

Joseph the Visionary, An Introduction

JOSEPH HAZZAYA, or the Visionary, was born into a Zoroastrian family
some time around 710. As a child of seven he was taken captive during
a raid, to be sold first to an Arab, and then to a Christian in the
region of mount Qardu (north Iraq). Impressed by the example of some
local monks, he sought baptism, and when his owner subsequently
liberated him, Joseph became a monk himself. For two separate periods
in his monastic life he lived as a solitary, but he also twice served
as abbot of a community.

Joseph has left a considerable number of writings, some of which were
circulated under the name of his brother and fellow monk, Abdisho. A
number of these writings were included by A. Mingana in his
work "Early Christian Mystics." Among his Letters is an important one
on the three stages or degrees of the spiritual life, wrongly
attributed in the manuscript tradition to Philoxenus. Although the
pattern is based on John of Apamea's threefold division, Joseph
adapts it to incorporate features from other writers, including
Evagrius; we thus have the following main correspondences:

(1) The first stage is that of the body (pagranuta); this is
concerned with external practices, fastings, vigils, and prayer
centered on psalmody and readings. This corresponds to the cenobitic
life and is symbolized by the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt
(i.e. the world) and their passage through the wilderness; it also
represents the state of a servant who is subject to commandments. The
aim is purity, and the stage corresponds to the Evagrian praktike and
the Dionysian 'purification'.

(2) The stage of the soul (nafshanuta) belongs especially to the
solitary life, and is concerned above all with the practice of the
interior virtues, in particular humility. The transition from the
stage of the body to that of the soul corresponds to the crossing by
the Israelites of the river Jordan, and the ensuing fight with evil
demons reflects the Israelites' fight with the inhabitants of the
Land of Promise. This is the state of a worker who awaits his daily
pay. The aim is 'limpidity' or 'transparency' (shafyuta), and this
stage corresponds to the Evagrian 'natural contemplation' and the
Dionysian 'illumination'.

(3) The third stage, that of the spirit (ruhanuta), is concerned
primarily with the activities of the mind; it constitutes the entry
into 'perfection' (or 'full maturity'), and represents 'the glorious
Zion'. This is the state of a son (and no longer that of a servant or
worker), and the most characteristic feature of it is the vision of
the Formless Light of the Trinity and of the Risen Christ. This stage
corresponds to the Evagrian theologia and the
Dionysian 'unification'.

Two excerpts from Joseph's works are translated here. The first is a
short unpublished text on 'spiritual prayer'. Joseph's description of
this exalted form of prayer indicates that he has in mind something
rather different from Isaac's 'spiritual prayer'. The second excerpt
(transmitted under the name of Abdisho) is taken from a longer work
of advanced teaching on prayer entitled 'On the stirrings, or
impulses, of the mind during prayer'. Here Joseph compares the soul
to a ship at sea with the mind as the helmsman, trying to cope with
the various winds, which are the impulses which arise in the mind
during prayer. A detailed analysis of the different kinds of impulses
is given, and the extract ends with a description of the vision of
the Light of the Holy Trinity.  (to be continued)

Sebastian Brock, "The Syriac Fathers On Prayer and the Spiritual
Life," Cistercian Publications

NEW YORK TIMES
'Body of St. Luke' Gains Credibility
October 16, 2001
By NICHOLAS WADE

A new DNA analysis gives tentative support to the belief that the
remains in an ancient lead coffin are those of St. Luke,
traditionally considered the author of the third Gospel and the Acts
of the Apostles.

Dr. Guido Barbujani, a population geneticist at the University of
Ferrara, Italy, has extracted DNA from a tooth in the coffin. He
concluded that the DNA was characteristic of people living near the
region of Antioch, on the eastern Mediterranean, where Luke is said
to have been born. Radiocarbon dating of the tooth indicates that
it belonged to someone who died between 72 A.D. and 416 A.D.

A report by Dr. Barbujani and colleagues appears today in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

The Evangelist, according to ancient sources, was a physician who was
born in Antioch and died at 84 in about 150 A.D. in the Greek city of
Thebes. The coffin with his remains was taken to Constantinople, the
capitol of the Byzantine empire, in 338 A.D. and later moved to Padua,
Italy.

Dr. Barbujani and his colleagues speculate that the coffin may have
been sent out of Constantinople for safekeeping, either during the
reign of the Emperor Julian, who tried to restore paganism, or during
the iconoclast period of the eighth century, when many religious
images and objects were destroyed.

The coffin is known to have been in Padua at least since 1177 A.D. It
was placed in a marble sarcophagus and kept in the Basilica of Santa
Giustina. It was last opened in 1562 A.D. and seems to have been
somewhat ignored until October 1992. At that time the bishop of
Padua, Antonio Mattiazzo, received a letter from Hieronymos, the
Orthodox Metropolitan of Thebes, asking that part of the relics to
be donated to the site of Luke's tomb in Thebes.

Bishop Mattiazzo, according to an article in November 2000 in Traces,
a Catholic journal, decided to investigate the relics under the
leadership of Dr. Vito Terribile Viel Marin, a pathologist at the
University of Padua. In 1998 the 400-year-old seals were removed from
the lead coffin, and the study began.

The dimensions of the coffin exactly fit the tomb in Thebes onsidered
to be Luke's. In the coffin was a skeleton, but not the skull.

Dr. Barbujani and his colleagues say the body appears to have
decomposed in the coffin because of matching insect marks on the lead
and the pelvis, which has fused to the lead.

The spread in the radiocarbon dating indicates at least two
possibilities. One is that the body is that of Luke or a man who died
at the same time, the other is that for some reason, a new body was
put in the coffin in Constantinople around 300 A.D.

To help distinguish between the two, Dr. Barbujani, an expert on the
genetics of European populations, analyzed fragments of DNA from the
tooth, a canine, found on the floor of the coffin, and sought to
compare them with likely living representatives of the ancient
populations of Antioch and of Constantinople. An Antioch match would
suggest the body could be Luke's.

Since the present population of Antioch includes many Kurds, Dr.
Barbujani sampled the DNA of Syrians from nearby Aleppo. In place of
the inhabitants of ancient Constantinople, now Istanbul, he tested
Greeks from Attica and Crete.

The DNA from the Padua tooth, a type inherited only through the
mother's line, turned out to resemble Syrian DNA more than Greek DNA.

"Our data tell us the body is absolutely compatible with a Syrian
origin," he said. "But I am aware of the limitations of the DNA data,
and though a broad spectrum of ages is possible, the most likely is
300 A.D." Hence both possibilities should remain open, he said.

The body, if indeed it is Luke's, has experienced a simpler voyage
through history than the head, which was removed by the Emperor
Charles IV in 1354 and taken from Padua to Prague, where it rests in
the Cathedral of St. Vitus, in the Prague Castle.

"There were officially two heads of St. Luke, one at Prague and one
in Rome," Dr. Barbujani said. At Bishop Mattiazzo's request, the
Prague skull was brought to Padua and found to fit perfectly to the
topmost neck bone. The tooth, found on the floor of the coffin, also
fit into the right socket in the jawbone.

Though many relics turn out to be forgeries, executed in modern or
medieval times as demand arose, the Padua body seems more likely than
most to be what it is claimed to be, although exact proof is lacking.

"I think we should accept that there is no way to tell if it was the
Evangelist Luke, but the genetic evidence does not contradict the
idea," Dr. Barbujani said.

Last October, according to the Traces article, at least part of the
body completed the circle to its original resting place. Bishop
Mattiazzo sent a rib from the skeleton for Metropolitan Hieronymus to
place in the empty Theban tomb.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/16/science/social/16TOOT.html?
ex=1004247402&ei=1&en=b4f1265f564f16fe

If you have trouble getting access to this article in the NY Times,
try the BBC site which has another article.

http://news.bbc.co.uk

Zoom down to the bottom and look for SCI/TECH (with photographs of
Saint Luke's teeth)

Holy Qurbono celebrated by Nine Metropolitans Of Malankara at
Mulunthuruthy Mar Thoman church, Kerala, India. In connection with
the preliminary concluding session of the centenary celebrations of
St. Gregorios Bawa -  3rd Nov, 2001.
To view the picture, please visit
http://www.malankarachurch.org/PARUMALA/Mass.htm

Do we have a catechism?
If so, do we have any English translations of it?

Thanks,
mike

Mike,

The Shorter Catechism of the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch
By the late Patriarch Ephrem I Barsoum
Reprinted by The Archdiocese of the Syrian Orthodox Church for the
Eastern USA, 1999. (Published originally in 1912, English translation
1950).

The book is also available from the Western US Archdiocese in LA. I
think it costs $2.00.

- Thomas

--- In SOR-Forum@y..., maurnicus@a... wrote:
>
> Do we have a catechism?
> If so, do we have any English translations of it?
>
> Thanks,
> mike

Shlomo w'MorYo Yeshu'a MeshiHo,

Dear brethren,

 The seven prayer times are:
 +Evening prayer or vespers
 +Compline or prayer upon retiring (Sootoro)
 +Midnight prayer
 +Morning prayer (Matins)
 +Three O'clock prayer (9:00 am)
 +Six O'clock prayer (12:00 pm, Noon) 
+Nine O'clock prayer (3:00 pm)

I want to know the posture when we pray above. According to the books that I have read  which is our posture is similiar like Moslems do. Here is the argument of the books:

1. The picture which is showed below that ancient Judaism pray like Moslems do.

 
I quote this picture from the book under title "Menuju Dialog Teologis Kristen-Islam", by Bambang Noorsena, Yayasan ANDI, Yogyakarta, 2001, page 13. And the source of this picture is from "The Unger Bible Dictionary".

2. According to footnote of the book above (page 12), from the source book (al-Kanisat as-Suryaniyat al-Anthakiyat al-Orthodoksiyat, Damascus:Alif-Ba'al-Adib lil Nasyir,1080,page 15) by Mar Ignatius Ya'qub III, I quote like this: "The Syrian Orthodox Church still continuing the rite of Judaism (on the posture such as ruku' and sujud/bow and forehead/face onto the ground) and some eastern rites, which is maintained by Moslems at present day"

One more thing I quote from Mathew 26:39 : "VA NAFAL NEL AFUVHAY VA MATSALA....so on" it means that He prayed with His face onto the ground

If the statement above is invalid would you tell me please the specific books/information that you have. If valid, how is it? is it same or has been modified at present day?

Thank you inadvance.

Alaha natirokh,

Rudolf A. Luhukay

I have a question about prayer with other faiths.  Is there any ruling
against praying with those who are non-Oriental Orthodox?  I didn't think
that there was considering all the ecumenical efforts by our patriarch.  The
Byzantine Orthodox it seems, are not permitted to pray with anyone who isn't
Byzantine Orthodox.  Naturally, I was wondering if there were any similar
views from our side.

Thanks,
mike

Shlomo,

I am in need to know the ablution (wudhu) of the SOC both in the past time and present day.

Thank you.

Rudolf

I am not aware of a prohibition of prayer with other faiths as such.
The joint celebration of the divine mysteries and other sacraments is
however permitted only where a common confession of faith exists and
today that is restricted to the Oriental Orthodox churches.

- Thomas



--- In SOR-Forum@y..., maurnicus@a... wrote:
>
> I have a question about prayer with other faiths.  Is there any ruling
> against praying with those who are non-Oriental Orthodox?  I didn't
think
> that there was considering all the ecumenical efforts by our
patriarch.  The
> Byzantine Orthodox it seems, are not permitted to pray with anyone
who isn't
> Byzantine Orthodox.  Naturally, I was wondering if there were any
similar
> views from our side.
>
> Thanks,
> mike