As I'm sure you all know the Roman Catholic Church teaches that it is a matter of mortal sin to not fulfill your "Sunday Obligation" to attend Mass, unless not attending is a matter of serious necessity. Much discussion has ensued on many Catholic message boards about just how sick you have to be, or how dire your circumstances must be to justify missing Mass - with the concluding comment usually being, "Confess it anyway." Opinions of course range from "if you think you might be contagious better to stay home" to "unless you're in the hospital there's no justifiable reason for missing Mass."
So I'm wondering what is the Orthodox position on this?
For instance this past week. On Wednesday, my husband, after working a full day at work in Alabama, had to drive 7.5 hours to Virginia for a 2-day training class that began on Thursday morning at 9:00 AM. The class ran from 9:00 AM to midnight on Thursday and then resumed Friday morning at 9:00, running until 8:00 PM. On Saturday after a few hours sleep he drove the 7.5 hours to get home. Rather than sleeping he spent the remainder of the day running errands with dd and me. He even mowed the yard since it was desperately overdue. On Saturday night my daughter complained of neck pain so I gave her ibuprofen and sent her to bed with a neck massage and a heating pad. But I know she did not sleep well at all since she was up to nearly 1:00 AM.
We all slept through our alarms on Sunday morning. Which means that we missed the Divine Liturgy. Now we're not Orthodox yet, and technically as we are still under the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Church we are sinning greatly by missing Mass of our own fault to attend the Divine Liturgy. But I still feel very badly about missing the DL (much worse in fact than I feel about skipping Mass).
Now in the Roman Catholic setting missing one Mass doesn't mean that you cannot fulfill your Sunday obligation because if you miss one Mass there's usually another one an hour later. Some parishes have as many as 6 Masses on Sunday.
Obviously when there is one Divine Liturgy on Sunday and you miss it ... you've missed it.
In Holy Orthodoxy is missing Divine Liturgy a sin? I realize that we need to attend Divine Liturgy/Mass for the benefit of our own souls and I would never take lightly the overwhelming need we have in this regard. But I wonder if the Orthodox see this as a matter of sin as does the Catholic Church.