Standing in Worship

Walk into a church in Greece, Romania, or Russia and one of the first things you may notice is what is missing: rows of seats. The nave is open floor, and the people stand — men and women, children, the very old leaning on a rail along the wall. This is not austerity for its own sake. From the earliest centuries Christians prayed standing, and the Fathers read the posture as a small confession of faith: a servant stands in the presence of the master, a watchman stands at his post, and above all, one who has been raised from the dead stands upright. The Greek word for resurrection, anastasis, literally means "standing up."

St. Basil the Great, writing in the fourth century, counted standing at Sunday prayer among the unwritten customs handed down in the Church: we stand, he explains, because we rose with Christ and are bound to seek the things that are above, and because Sunday is an image of the age to come. The services themselves keep nudging the body awake — again and again the deacon calls the people to stand aright and attend. Orthodox worship assumes that prayer is something the whole person does, body included, and standing is its baseline.

The open nave is the older arrangement, and across much of the Orthodox world it remains the norm, with benches or stalls along the walls for those who need them. But practice varies. In North America and Western Europe many parishes have pews — some inherited with buildings purchased from other Christian communities, some installed because local custom expected them. Where pews exist, the congregation typically sits for the homily and certain readings and stands at the great moments: the entrances, the Gospel, the Anaphora, and Holy Communion.

None of this is policed, and no one is judged for sitting. The elderly, the pregnant, parents holding sleeping children, anyone unwell — all sit freely, and a piece of pastoral advice long repeated among Russian believers holds that it is better to sit thinking of God than to stand thinking of your feet. A newcomer's rule of thumb is simple: stand when the people around you stand, sit when they sit, and do not worry about the rest.

Kneeling belongs to Orthodox worship too — but it belongs to its penitential register: weekday services, and above all Great Lent, when prostrations fill the services. Sunday is different. So highly did the early Church prize the standing posture on the day of the resurrection that the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea (325) devoted its twentieth canon to it: "Forasmuch as there are certain persons who kneel on the Lord's Day and in the days of Pentecost, therefore, to the intent that all things may be uniformly observed everywhere (in every parish), it seems good to the holy Synod that prayer be made to God standing." The Council in Trullo (692) reaffirmed the rule, and the same joy governs the fifty days from Pascha to Pentecost, when kneeling and prostrations are set aside altogether. The season ends memorably: at Vespers of Pentecost the Church appoints the famous "kneeling prayers," and the faithful bend their knees for the first time since Pascha night.

In practice, use varies today. In some parishes, especially in North America, the faithful kneel at the consecration even on Sundays; in others the ancient canon is kept strictly; monasteries have their own rhythm. Neither side should judge the other — follow your parish's custom and your priest's guidance. The canon was never about gymnastics but about theology: every Sunday is a little Pascha, and risen people stand.