In a word, YES. We do not have the authority to choose willy-nilly what parts of the Christina Tradition we want to follow. Our fathers, and countless saints crossed themselves from right to left. Ancient icons show Christ or bishops beginning a blessing from right to left. Thanks for Fr Alexander Lebedev for providing the majority of the ideas in this answer.
We confidently recommend our web service provider, Orthodox Internet Services : excellent personal customer service, a fast and reliable server, excellent spam filtering, and an easy to use comprehensive control panel. Why do Orthodox Christians "cross themselves" different than Roman Catholics? Is this difference important? How did the difference between the Eastern and the Western practice emerge?
As far as I know, bishops and priests in the Roman Empire have always made the sign of the cross as a blessing over the people by writing the sign of the cross in the air. After moving from top to bottom they move from left to right. Because this is the natural way of writing. Greek and Latin words — these two languages have always been dominant in the Roman Empire — are written from left to right. What do the people do when they are blessed in that way? They do what is natural to them: They mirror the sign.
So they move from right to left sic! If you move from left to right, the kid will move from right to left. In this context, the movement from left to right is only done by those who write the sign into the air as a blessing over others.
In all other cases the movement goes from right to left — even in private prayer: I do not bless myself, I am being blessed. Around a Roman deacon — who later became Pope Innocence III — witnessed that some people in Rome have started to make the sign over their bodies in the opposite direction: from left to right.
Since then, moving from the left shoulder to the right shoulder has become the typical Western way. But why did these people start to change the direction? They started to reflect too much. Nowadays the movement during a Roman Catholic blessing is always in a way distorted.
This gets very obvious when a priest stands close to you and blesses you individually. While he writes the cross in the air, you criss-cross his movement with your own hand. In no way is this a natural gestural communication. Instead of intuitively mirroring the sign that is written over us, we got used to imitate the blessing gesture on our own bodies.
Someone in the 12 th century started to change the direction of the movement. I always make the sign of the cross from right to left. When a bishop or priest makes the blessing sign from left to right, it feels natural to mirror that sign by moving from right to left.
During this movement my arm goes from a cramped position right fingers on the right shoulder to an open and wide position right fingers on the left shoulder — maybe a nice symbol for spiritual development! Not me. I would strongly oppose messing with centuries of lay practice in that regard, as with attempts to get English-speaking Catholic laity to significantly change the Our Father, which mercifully have failed miserably my current pastor tries to overtalk the congregation in this regard, which is a rather unprogressive approach….
We cross ourselves when we enter any Christian church that is a follower of Jesus Christ and his teachings. I cross myself from right to left, as I consider myself a sheep separated from the goats on the left. No need to be rude.. I am not Orthodox but was glad to learn something new. We need to listen to others, not to be over sensitive, or politically correct about everything.
That is my opinion. I am an Episcopalian, and we genuflect going left to right. I thought the article was interesting. Crossing ourselves has a threefold expression: 1. We first draw the holy cross on our body, we confess that Jesus was in fact crucified, and we seek His protection through It. Besides that direct meaning, there are two other symbolic ones: 2. By joining our first three fingers, we confess the Holy Trinity and the equality in essence of the three Hypostases.
With the other two fingers joined, we confess the two natures of the Son of God God and human and by sticking them the little two fingers to the middle of our palm, we confess that Jesus was incarnated in the womb of saint Mary, the Mother of God. We start with the fore head because God the Father is the initiator, even within the Holy Trinity above and outside the frame of time!
Last but not least , we touch our left shoulder in the same level as in the right one, confessing the equality in essence of the Holy Spirit to the Son of God and, effectively to the Father too! What would Christ say? Is it important to Him how we make the sign of the or cross or is more important our intention, what is in our heart? Jesus wants the church to be one, different traditions should not divide us. In a secular age we Christians have work cut out for us, in light of the challenge we need to keep our eyes on Jesus and together bring people to Christ.
It is the truth untainted, the same Church as that of Christ among the Apostles. Existing for years, there has been quite a lot of tradition along the way.
And why not? The countless saints did it too. It is necessary for a faithful child of the one Church of Jesus Christ to be submissive to this inheritance of sacred tradition.
Yes we are in a secular age…. And a pick and choose Protestant ethos certainly helped us to get here. Almost all the heresies were born not in the West, but in the East and that fact has a lot of evidences from the Church history. While the Roman Orthodox Church in ancient times has always kept the orthodoxy and helped the Eastern brethren to fight the heresies. Maybe because of that the Orthodox people cross themselve from right to left in order to show that the right side, the East needs to be crossed and healed first and then the left side?
I think that both traditions of crossing are generated by Church and are equal.
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