Prayer 008: Do words matter?

For as long as I can remember, I have experienced a cognitive dissonance every Saturday evening, when a deacon or a priest urged us to “complete our morning prayer unto the Lord” at the end of the Vigil. (The Vigil consists of Great Vespers and Matins, followed by the First Hour.) Something similar, albeit in reverse, can be experienced when a Vesperal Liturgy is celebrated in the morning: “Let us complete our evening prayer unto the Lord.”

The usual explanation that is given for these discrepancies is that the All-Night Vigil, if properly done (by whom? when? where?) literally lasts much of the night, and the Matins portion falls somewhere in the early morning hours. Considering that it is immediately followed by the First Hour - somewhere between 4 am and 7 am, depending on the time of year - this makes some sense. I recall reading about an experiment at one of the theological academies in imperial Russia (St. Petersburg, if I am not mistaken) when the vigil was served without any omissions or contractions - albeit, they had to resolve some contradictions in the Typikon - and it lasted approximately eight hours - truly an all-night undertaking. To the best of my knowledge, this was done only once, and no one follows this practice anywhere - no parish, no monastery, not even the Old Believers (although, their vigils can indeed last for over four hours).

When it comes to Vesperal Liturgies, the usual explanation is that we are too weak to celebrate the services in the evening - thus, requiring us to observe the eucharistic fast all day - and therefore, we move it to the morning hours as a form of oikonomia (οἰκονομία - “house management”). I have written about this elsewhere, but methinks that the appeal to weakness is a bit disingenuous. First, barring most serious health conditions and metabolic disorders, no one will actually die from fasting until evening. Muslims do it every year for thirty days straight; they seem to have little trouble with it. To somehow insist that Christians are incapable of fasting once or twice a year or even once a week for seven weeks - this seems disingenuous. Second, one cannot know whether he can fast until the evening until he tries. Why are we so certain that we are so weak? What if we are not?