Perfect Ending to a Downer Week

This Third Sunday of Lent is the Sunday of the Cross. I did not remember, until doing our Saturday evening "Vigil" here at home, that there is a beautiful glimpse forward to Pascha! When I picture this service, I picture prostrations; I picture almost a burial procession with the cross on a bed of flowers. There is one thing I had forgotten: in Matins, we sing the hymns from the Paschal canon...
This is the day of Resurrection. Let us be illumined, O people. Pascha, the Pascha of the Lord. For from death to life and from earth to heaven has Christ our God led us, as we sing a song of victory!
For "Vigil" tonight, here at home, we read Small Compline inserting the appropriate canon from the Triodion. Using Compline was a choice to stay simple, since it can be read from the prayer book with no extra resources (way easier than trying to put together Vespers). Inserting material from the Triodion is more "fancy", but I was only intending to read the canon, which is easy if you have it.

That is when I realized that the canon uses the Paschal hymns (the irmoi hymns at the beginning of each ode of the canon). So, I went back to the prayer book, and sang those hymns using the Paschal Canon listed there. As it turns out, those used the exact same wording as I was used to singing, so that worked out well for me, personally.

There is a Triodion online, and you could read through the canon from the 3rd Sunday in Lent if you want...just scroll down to Matins and find "Ode 1".

After such a strange week, self-quarantined, schedules changing, struggling with how to set up life in a totally different rhythm, I found it incredibly encouraging to see this ray of hope on the horizon. "For from death to life and from earth to heaven has Christ our God led us, as we sing a song of victory!"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Did Christ Dwell Among or In Us?

One day last year, during a dogmatics class, the verse in St. John’s Prologue where he says Christ came and dwelt among us came up conversation. I forget why it came up, but what caught my attention was the little preposition: εν (“en”). That is what is normally translated as ‘among’ in most English translations, but to my knowledge it had more of the meaning of the English word ‘in’. ‘Among’ and ‘in’ have two very different meanings in my mind. Orthodox theology is very clear about God taking on human nature and deifying it. ‘Among’ sounds more like God coming, living alongside us, maybe the same place and same time, but still as something other than us. But I only have a feel for these words in English; what I really wondered was what the feel of the Greek word εν is in Greek, that is, to a native Greek speaker. When we were discussing this, Bishop Alexis happened to be right down the hall, and he spent more than twenty years living and breathing the services, the Scriptures, and the...
Read more

How to Pray for Ukraine

Ukraine's top Church leader, Metropolitan Onufriy, not only called on his people to pray, but gave them a prayer rule. It is short and simple, and he asked them to pray it at least once a day. Pray Psalm 90 (91) with twelve prostrations or bows.  "He who dwells in the help of the most high shall abide in the shelter of heaven's God."... Bishop Daniel of Santa Rosa (California), who spoke to one of the Ukrainian bishops in the past few days, suggested we all join them in their prayer rule, as well as fasting for them. All these events are happening just on the verge of Great Lent, and with such a disruption of daily life, Ukrainians will not be able to fast as they normally would. So, this is an opportunity to take up our brother's burden and carry it for him. And if you want to pray more specifically for the situation in Ukraine, you could either add some of the psalms below or occasionally  use them instead of Psalm 90, above. Below, you will see the "Peace ...
Read more

The Making of a Thai Paschal Troparion

This is the making of a paschal troparion, the hymn “Christ is risen from the dead…”, in the Thai language and from the Thai culture. For obvious reasons—my wife is Thai and the whole family is highly affected by our ties to Thai culture—we have closely watched the progress of the Orthodox Church in Thailand. If there had been a paschal troparion in Thai, we would have been using it in our house years ago. But instead, every year, we bemoan the lack of a Thai troparion and talk about how wonderful it would be to have one. It is a small consolation that we have a Chinese paschal troparion that we love, one that feels Chinese, and thus a little bit closer to our Asian home. And then, a Thai troparion appeared. A few weeks ago, my wife showed me a Facebook post with a Thai paschal troparion, sung by Matushka Ksenia , wife of a Russian priest serving a parish in Thailand. (In that video, he is singing the isan, the drone note, but it is my understanding that she wrote the troparion.) Jus...
Read more