In a recent encyclical issued by Metropolitan Saba of the Antiochian Eastern Orthodox Archdiocese of North America (AOA), dated February 19, 2026, one of the proposed liturgical changes was the complete removal of the two instances of the Lenten Prayer of St. Ephraim from the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. This elimination of a seemingly longstanding practice within the AOA caused confusion and consternation among the ranks of the Antiochian clergy and the faithful. At the suggestion of a colleague and friend, I was asked to shed some light on the issue and attempt to resolve the conundrum. Below is my response.
After carefully reading Metropolitan Saba’s encyclical—and I am speaking here as a fully objective scholar of Eastern Liturgy and as a Greek Orthodox priest—the proposed reforms are not pastorally unreasonable or incorrect. I will explain.
First, the changes generally bring Antiochian practices more in line with Greek practices, which is not unusual, since Antioch and Constantinople, together with Jerusalem, have always belonged to the same liturgical zone known as Oriens, which typically followed the Emperor Diocletian’s imperial and military division of the Roman Empire in the late third century A.D.1 Some of these practices, like the opening of the holy gates at the Beatitudes in the Ninth Hour, the standing vs. the kneeling of the people at the priestly acclamation “the Light of Christ illumines all”,2 and the stacking of Lambs on the paten at the previous festal Liturgy for the week’s Presanctified Liturgies, are either just matters of preference which became local or regional convention, or simply common sense and practical. Some of the other changes reflect Eastern Byzantine customs, again more in line with Constantinopolitan and Church of Greece practice.
As for the beautiful Prayer of St. Ephraim, it is the Greek practice NOT to recite it during the Presanctified Liturgy. According to the Slavonic practice, the prayer is recited twice: (1) once immediately following the incensation that accompanies the penitential antiphonal psalmody and refrain, “Let my prayer arise in Your sight as incense”; and (2) immediately following the Great Entrance with the Presanctified Gifts, just before the concluding Vesperal litany.
The Slavic practice that the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America (AOA) faithfully followed for several generations under the late Metropolitan Philip Saliba and his predecessors was chiefly the result of the powerful influence of Slavic liturgical practices and conventions on Antiochian Orthodox clergy. For virtually the entirety of the twentieth century, if not longer, many Antiochian hierarchs were “Slavicized” in Russian theological academies and schools, leading to the adoption of
Russian practices and thus conditioning the inclusion of the Lenten Prayer of St. Ephraim in the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. Even St. Raphael of Brooklyn, whose command of the Russian language and Church Slavonic was flawless, was also a product of these Russian academies,3 so his statement in his Euchologion that this is a Russian practice is consistent with the aforementioned historical context and the historical contextualization that I feel compelled to outline below.
I do not perceive this directive by Metropolitan Saba as an order to undermine or eliminate the Prayer of St. Ephraim. Rather, it is the AOA returning to its root practice of not including it in the Presanctified Liturgy, as prescribed by the ancient Byzantine Cathedral Rite, whose beginnings date from the middle to the late fourth century A.D.4 The Antiochian leadership is not dictating that the Prayer of St. Ephraim be removed from all Lenten services. If that were the case, there would be a legitimate cause for alarm and disapproval, since it would strike at the very core of proper liturgical tradition in Orthodox Lenten services.
And now for the historical explanation.
As one of the three Byzantine eucharistic rites, the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts originated as a Cathedral Rite service, with several elements common to another prominent service of the Cathedral Rite: Vespers, which included psalmody, antiphony, litanies, processions, etc., especially in its medieval form.5 In monastic settings in remote locations, when the practice of ordaining monks to the priesthood to serve the liturgical needs of the skete or monastery began, monastic elements, considered all too important to be relegated to secondary importance or omitted entirely, filtered into the monastic celebration of the Presanctified Liturgy. One of these crucial elements, naturally, was the prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian, complete with prostrations. Without belaboring the conversation, monastic communities like Mt. Athos combined the Cathedral iteration of Presanctified Liturgies with their own devotional practices. Since
many of the monks on the Holy Mountain were from Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia, and other Slavic nations, the monastic rendering of the Presanctified Liturgy, complete with the Lenten Prayer of St. Ephraim, became prominent in Slavic parochial practice. However, the parish churches under the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the non-Slavic autocephalous churches celebrated the Presanctified Liturgy in the original Cathedral
Rite, i.e., without the prayer. And this has come down to us today; hence, the difference.
So, the bottom line is that the AOA is simply returning to its original historical roots and assimilating to the Cathedral Rite, as do the Greeks and other non-Slavic churches. Nothing more, nothing less.
- Robert F. Taft, The Byzantine Rite: A Short History (The Liturgical Press, 1992), 22, 23-24. ↩︎
- Practically speaking, the faithful stand during the acclamation and the second Old Testament lection,
thus allowing them to engage in full prostrations from the standing position when the incensation insidethe sanctuary and the chanting of Psalm 140 (LXX), “Let my prayer arise as incense before You”, begin. ↩︎ - As the first Orthodox bishop consecrated in North America in 1904, St. Raphael of Brooklyn’s
consecrating bishops in New York City included Archbishop Tikhon (Bellavin) and Bishop Innocent
(Pustynsky). St. Raphael served as Bishop of Brooklyn and as an auxiliary of the Russian Orthodox
Church in America, and he established the present-day St. Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Cathedral in Brooklyn, as well as built 30 churches, and he was instrumental in founding St. Tikhon’s Orthodox
Monastery. ↩︎ - For an exhaustive treatment of the Eastern Cathedral Office, the Egyptian Monastic Office, and the
Urban Monastic Office, all of which appear in manuscripts dating from the middle to the last quarter of the fourth century A.D., see Robert F. Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West (The Liturgical Press, 1993), 31-91. ↩︎ - For the schema of Medieval Vespers and Matins according to the Byzantine Rite, see Gregory
Woolfenden, Daily Liturgical Prayer: Origins and Theology (Ashgate, 2004), 93-120. ↩︎