Categories: orthodox-life, parish-life, feast-days, interesting-sites
Date: 25 February 2007 04:14:00
Your pure image do we venerate, O Good One, asking forgiveness of our sins, O Christ our God; for by Your own will You did ascend the Cross in Your body, to save Your creatures from the bondage of the enemy. You have truly filled all with joy, since You did come, O our Saviour, to save the world.
Troparion for the Feast of the Sunday of Orthodoxy
Today was the first time I have been to church this year (yikes!): but I could not think of a better day on which to return. Today we celebrated the First Sunday of Great Lent, the The Sunday of Orthodoxy, where we commemorate the restoration of icons to the churches in 843AD. After the Divine Liturgy, we processed with icons around and outside the church, and the icons were then blessed with rose-water and prayers.
I received a welcome that would've rivaled the reception the Prodigal received from his father: I am truly blessed with a wonderful parish community. It was a joy and blessing to see them all again and to catch up with them all; and it was great to see how well the parish is doing under our new priest who is a great blessing to us. His sermon on our increased effort on prayer and fasting, and our view of heaven and our purpose in Christ, was challenging, thought-provoking, and, God willing, will lead to increased effort from me this Lenten season.
As we move through Lent, a time of increased effort in terms of our prayer life, spiritual reading, alms giving and fasting, among other things, a number of changes occur to the Church's prayer life. On Wednesday evenings we have a Liturgy of the Presanctified (where the bread and wine have been consecrated the previous Sunday) and on Fridays we have the Akathist to the Theotokos service.
Change is also present in the Divine Liturgy: the melodies for the chants are that little bit slower, more ponderous one might say, and we use the Liturgy of St Basil rather than the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom: the Liturgy of St Basil has a longer Anaphora, which details, in great and wondrous detail, the plan of salvation from creation to the Fall to the Old Testament prophets to the coming of Christ, and His Life, Death, Resurrection and Ascension: click here to read it.
As I may've mentioned last year, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America has a wonderful Great Lent section on their website: it is well worth a look.
God bless you all this Lenten season.