Looking East During Prayer & Worship

We all look towards the East when we pray, but few of us know that we are seeking our own old country, Paradise, which God planted in Eden in the East.

We pray standing, on the first day of the week, but we do not all know the reason. On the day of the resurrection (or “standing again,” Greek: “anastasis“), we remind ourselves of the Grace given to us by standing at prayer, not only because we rose with Christ, and are bound to seek those things which are above, but because the day seems to us to be, in some sense, an icon of the age which we anticipate.

– St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit