Church Observation Paper

On the other hand, the service I attended at St. Sophia Cathedral was a bilingual service. Even though attending a bilingual service was interesting, it made me a little confused; like I did not know what I was attending or listening to. This reminds me of one of the discussion in our class, when back then, the people did not understand the language yet they still came to the service. It made me feel foreign in some sort of way, also there were no other Asians in the church, mostly caucasians. It did not bother me because most of the people attending the church must have a Greek descent or knowledge of the Greek language. Many came in very late, some even came half an hour before the communion. The entire service took around 2 hours; at first

Behind the altar was a gigantic painting of Mary, one of the Church’s major symbols. The ornaments that surrounded the church were very beautiful and I was stunned at how breathtaking they were. I noticed that the mass consisted of readings from the Scriptures, hymns and prayers. The readings and hymns were performed in Greek, however, the prayers were some in English and Greek. The hymns in this service is not similar to the hymns in the Catholic church, they seemed formal yet more chanting. There seemed to be more than three priests that performed this service. One thing that caught my attention was the way Greek Orthodoxs’ perform the sign of the Cross, it was also different than Catholics. In the Catholic church, The Holy Spirit would be on the left, yet in the Greek Orthodox church, people would signed it on the right. Continuing with that, when the priest performed the Holy Communion, mostly everyone stood up and received the body, in the form of a literal bread. I was shocked because I thought that the bread would be in a same form, rounded and