“Peregrinus Sum Apud Te.”
Last week, on the second anniversary of my Mom's passing, I went to my sister's Byzantine Catholic Church for Vespers of St. Andrew of Crete. My brother-in-law sang the litanies as you can hear in the audio example below. Vespers was three hours long, as it went through all of Salvation History. In the litanies that night, every person compared himself to each sinner of the Old Testament and New Testament. I sang in Byzantine tones that I myself was worse than each one of those Biblical sinners. So did everyone else in that little Eastern Catholic Church. We made nearly 300 nose-to-ground prostrations, begging for God's mercy. But it [...]