Hey, everyone. I'd like to apologize beforehand if this is a stupid question or one of those "ask your priest/bishop questions."
When I'm away at school, I attend a local OCA Church. I genuinely enjoy my home-away-from-home and the practices I've been introduced to, some of which I had never seen at my home church. One of those practices is standing during Divine Liturgy. I don't need to explain to everyone that one usually sees pews in parishes part of the the Greek Orthodox Church of N. & S. America. Such is the case at my home parish, and I had never known that it was not a practice to sit during church until my second visit to Greece when I was 16. I prefer to stand during the Liturgy; I like this part of our tradition. As such, I've taken to standing during Divine Liturgy when I'm back home. However, there's one problem: I never realized how long my parish sits and kneels for. During the consecration, everybody kneels. Last week, I decided that instead of being the only person to stand the entire liturgy and feeling awkward about it, I'd make prostrations as some sort of compromise. Only, I felt even more embarrassed because I'm in the aisle of church making prostrations, and it was such a long time to kneel that I think I made about 20-odd prostrations and I felt like more eyes were on me than had I just stood. In the end, I just sort of knelt and remained in the aisle and felt like an ass. I don't really know what to do. My purpose for doing this is not some sort of crusade against the practice or a rebellion against the parishioner powers that be; I'm doing this for myself just because I have a preference. I'd like to ask: should I follow my conscience and carry on tradition, stand, and not care if all eyes may or may not be on me, or should I respect the customs of my home parish and sit and kneel when everyone else does and be humble about it? I genuinely don't know what to do. I'd also like to add that although I've been doing this for about half a year now, no one has said anything to me about it, so it hasn't started any sort of conflict.