Liturgical Calendar & Feasts
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EssentialLiturgical Calendar & FeastsPascha (Easter)The Resurrection of Christ, the feast of feasts, and the day every Sunday of the year repeats. At Nicaea the Fathers asked that the whole Church keep it on one Sunday, reckoned independently of the Jewish calendar; the Orthodox Church still finds that Sunday by the Julian calendar and the old Alexandrian tables, which is why it usually falls later than Easter in the West and sometimes on the same day. In the dark before midnight the light is brought out from the altar and passed from candle to candle, the people go out in procession, and outside the church the troparion is sung for the first time. For forty days the greeting is Christ is risen, and the answer Truly He is risen, and the troparion takes the place of O Heavenly King at the opening of every service. The week that follows is kept as a single day, with the royal doors left open, and St John Chrysostom’s homily, read that night, calls everyone to the feast, those who fasted and those who did not.EssentialLiturgical Calendar & FeastsGreat LentThe forty days of preparation for Pascha, which a hymn of the Triodion calls the springtime of the fast. It is approached over four Sundays, the Publican and the Pharisee, the Prodigal Son, the Last Judgement and Forgiveness Sunday, whose Vespers ends with everyone asking and giving forgiveness, one by one. Clean Monday follows, and in the first week the Great Canon of St Andrew is read in four parts at Great Compline. The Sundays keep the restoration of the icons, St Gregory Palamas, the Cross, St John Climacus and St Mary of Egypt. On weekdays there is no full Liturgy: on Wednesdays and Fridays the faithful receive the Presanctified Gifts in the evening, in the Greek use the Salutations of the Theotokos are sung on the Fridays, and the Prayer of St Ephraim is said at every service with prostrations. Its fast is the strictest of the year, kept with prayer and almsgiving. The forty days end on the Friday before Lazarus Saturday, and Holy Week begins.EssentialLiturgical Calendar & FeastsHoly WeekThe last week before Pascha, served day by day in the order of the Passion. On the first three evenings the Bridegroom service is sung, behold the Bridegroom comes at midnight, and on Holy Wednesday many parishes serve Holy Unction for all. Holy Thursday keeps the Mystical Supper with the Liturgy of St Basil, and that evening the Twelve Passion Gospels are read, and in the Greek use the Crucifix is carried out after the fifth. On Holy Friday, with no Liturgy at all, the Royal Hours are read, and at Vespers the body of Christ is taken down from the Cross and laid in the tomb in the Epitaphios; at Matins that night the Lamentations are sung around it and it is carried in procession. Holy Saturday morning brings the Liturgy of St Basil with fifteen readings from the Old Testament, until the vestments are changed from dark to white and the choir sings Arise, O God, judge the earth. The Descent into Hades is kept that day, in stillness, before the midnight of Pascha.EssentialLiturgical Calendar & FeastsPentecost (Feast of the Holy Trinity)The feast of the Descent of the Holy Spirit on the fiftieth day after Pascha, kept as the feast of the Holy Trinity, Troitsa in the Russian tradition, where Rublev’s Trinity is its icon. Churches and homes are filled with green branches, grass and flowers, because the Spirit is the Giver of life. At Vespers that follows the Liturgy the faithful kneel for the first time since Pascha, which the First Council forbade on the Lord’s days and throughout the fifty days, while the priest reads three long kneeling prayers, one of them for those who have fallen asleep. The prayer O Heavenly King, silent since Pascha, returns to the beginning of every service. The next day is the Monday of the Holy Spirit, which the Romanian Church keeps as the feast of the Holy Trinity; the Sunday after is All Saints, and the Apostles’ Fast begins the day after that. St Gregory the Theologian’s sermon for the day is still the one the Typikon of St Sabbas appoints for Matins.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsAnnunciation: March 25The Archangel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive the Son of God by the Holy Spirit. Mary's response: 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word' (Luke 1:38), is the supreme act of human free will cooperating with divine grace. Celebrated exactly 9 months before Nativity. Fasting is relaxed (fish permitted).ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsAscension of ChristForty days after Pascha, on a Thursday, Christ led His disciples out to the Mount of Olives, blessed them, and was taken up in the body until a cloud received Him out of their sight, and two men in white told them He would come again in the same way. The feast follows the Leavetaking of Pascha on the day before. The Church sees in it human nature, our own nature, taken into the life of God and seated at the right hand of the Father, and it does not read it as a departure: its kontakion has Him ascend not being parted from those who love Him, but remaining with them, and crying, I am with you, and no one will be against you. In the icon the Theotokos stands at the centre beneath Him, among the apostles and the angels, for she is the image of the Church He leaves on earth. Ten days later He sends the Spirit.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsDormition of the Theotokos: August 15The falling asleep of the Theotokos, kept on 15 August. The Church holds that she died as all die, was buried by the Apostles, and on the third day was raised and taken up in the body, her tomb found empty. Orthodoxy confesses this in its hymns rather than defining it as dogma, which is where it differs from Rome, and it holds no doctrine of an immaculate conception: she was mortal like us, and her glory is the fruit of her free obedience. Preceded by a strict fortnight of fasting.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsMeeting of the Lord (Hypapante): February 2Forty days after the Nativity the Theotokos brings the Child to the Temple, and the elder Symeon, to whom it had been promised that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ, takes God into his arms. The Greek name is Hypapante, the Meeting: the Law meets its Giver, the Temple receives the One it was built for, and the age that had been waiting is free to depart in peace. Symeon’s words at that moment are not kept for this day alone. They close Vespers every evening of the year, so the whole Church says them nightly. Anna the prophetess, a widow of eighty-four in the Temple, is the second witness. The Latin name for the day, the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, puts the weight on a purification the all-pure Theotokos had no need of; the Orthodox name keeps it on the Meeting itself, and the feast is reckoned among the feasts of the Lord. Kept on 2 February, with its leavetaking on 9 February, and the last of the Twelve Great Feasts of the Church year to be given a page here.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsNativity of Christ (Christmas)The birth of Christ, kept on 25 December, which on the Old Calendar falls on 7 January. The East kept it with the Theophany until the end of the fourth century; St John Chrysostom was preaching the separate feast at Antioch in 386 as recently arrived. It is prepared for by forty days of fasting from 15 November, and on the eve, strictly kept, the Royal Hours are read and the Liturgy of St Basil is served with Vespers. Its kontakion, St Romanos’, says what the feast is: today the Virgin gives birth to Him who is above all being, and the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable. The icon holds the whole mystery. The Child lies in a manger shaped like a tomb and wrapped like the dead; the ox and the ass of Isaiah know their Master’s crib; the Theotokos rests beside Him; and in a corner St Joseph sits troubled, while an old man tempts him to doubt.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsTheophany (Epiphany): January 6The baptism of Christ in the Jordan on 6 January, and the first open showing of the Trinity: the Father speaks from heaven, the Son stands in the water, and the Spirit comes down as a dove, as the troparion sings, When Thou, O Lord, wast baptised in the Jordan, the worship of the Trinity was made manifest. Christ needed no cleansing; He went down into the water to cleanse it, and the Church reads the feast as the sanctification of the whole creation. The Great Blessing of Waters is served on the eve and on the day, often out of doors at the sea or a river, where a cross is thrown into the water and, in the north, lowered through the ice. The faithful drink the water and take it home, and in the weeks that follow the priest blesses their houses with it. The eve is kept as a strict fast. St Gregory the Theologian called it the feast of lights.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsTransfiguration of Christ: August 6On Mount Tabor Christ took Peter, James and John apart, and was transfigured before them: His face shone like the sun and His garments became white as light, and Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets, the dead and the living, spoke with Him of His departure. The Church keeps it on 6 August, forty days before the Elevation of the Cross, and its kontakion explains why it was shown when it was: the disciples beheld Thy glory as far as they could bear it, so that when they saw Thee crucified they would understand that Thy suffering was voluntary. For the Orthodox Church the light of Tabor is the uncreated light of God, as St Gregory Palamas taught against Barlaam: not a created sign of glory, but the glory itself, which the saints see. In the icon the rays reach down to the three apostles, thrown to the ground. Grapes and the first fruits are blessed on the day, which falls in the Dormition Fast.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsElevation of the Holy Cross: Sept 14Commemorates the finding of the True Cross by Empress Helena (326 AD) and its later recovery from the Persians by Emperor Heraclius (628). A strict fast day (no meat, dairy, or fish). The Cross is brought out in procession and elevated before the faithful. One of the 12 Great Feasts.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsPalm Sunday (Entry into Jerusalem)Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem on a donkey, greeted by crowds waving palm branches and crying 'Hosanna!' Celebrated the Sunday before Pascha. The faithful carry palm or willow branches blessed at the service. One of the 12 Great Feasts. Marks the beginning of Holy Week.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsThe Dormition FastFourteen days, from 1 to 14 August, and the strictest of the four after Great Lent: no fish except on the Transfiguration, which falls in the middle of it. The Paraklesis to the Theotokos is sung on most evenings of the fast, alternating the small and great canons, so the fast is the most audibly Marian season of the year. It ends at the Dormition, and in many places the burial service of the Theotokos is sung with a bier and an epitaphios exactly as on Great Friday, which is the clearest statement the calendar makes about what her death is.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsThe Nativity FastForty days before the Nativity, from 15 November to the eve of 25 December, and the mirror of Great Lent as the Nativity is the mirror of Pascha. It is kept less strictly: in the Greek use fish is allowed on most days until the feast of St Spyridon, and the rule tightens through the last week. The Sundays before Christmas bring the genealogy forward, with the Forefathers and then the Fathers, so that the fast ends with the whole ancestry of Christ read out. In the Slavic churches it is called the Philip fast, because it begins the day after the apostle’s feast.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsThe Protection of the Theotokos: October 1During a siege of Constantinople, at the all-night vigil in the church at Blachernae where her robe was kept, St Andrew the Fool for Christ saw the Theotokos come in above the people, pray, and spread her veil over them. The feast keeps that vision. It is not one of the Twelve, and in the Slavic churches it is kept with more solemnity than several that are: the Pokrov is one of the great days of the Russian year, and the Ukrainian and Serbian churches keep it likewise. The Greek Church moved its observance to 28 October to join it with the anniversary of the refusal in 1940, which is a rare case of a modern deliverance being written into the calendar.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsThe Saturdays of the SoulsSaturdays given to the dead. The Saturday before Meatfare Sunday and the second, third and fourth Saturdays of Great Lent are the chief of them, with Radonitsa in the second week after Pascha in the Slavic practice and the Saturday before Pentecost everywhere. Saturday is the day because it is the day Christ lay in the tomb. The Church serves a general memorial, boiled wheat is brought, and lists of names are read for as long as the lists take. The pre-Pentecost one prays for everyone who has died from Adam onwards, including those nobody is left to remember and those who died in ways the Church cannot name, which is the widest prayer in the Orthodox year.ImportantLiturgical Calendar & FeastsThe Triumph of OrthodoxyThe first Sunday of Great Lent, keeping the restoration of the holy icons at Constantinople in 843 under the Empress Theodora, after the second iconoclast persecution. The icons are carried in procession by the faithful, and the Synodikon of Orthodoxy is proclaimed: a long text acclaiming the teachers of the faith with Eternal Memory and pronouncing anathema on the heresies the Church has condemned, added to over the centuries as new ones arose. It is called the Triumph of Orthodoxy and not the triumph over iconoclasm, because what was vindicated in 843 was the whole confession that God has truly become visible.Liturgical Calendar & FeastsEntry of the Theotokos into the Temple: Nov 21Commemorates the presentation of the three-year-old Virgin Mary in the Jerusalem Temple by her parents, Joachim and Anna. According to Tradition, she entered the Holy of Holies and was nourished by an angel. Celebrates Mary's dedication to God from earliest childhood. One of the 12 Great Feasts.Liturgical Calendar & FeastsNativity of the Theotokos: Sept 8The birth of the Virgin Mary to Joachim and Anna, who had been barren into old age, kept on 8 September, the first Great Feast of the Church’s year, which begins on the first of the month. Its story comes from the second-century Protevangelium of James, which the Church does not read as Scripture but whose account it sings. The feast is the first step of the Incarnation: the one through whom God would enter the world is herself born into it, and its troparion says so, Thy Nativity, O Theotokos, has proclaimed joy to the whole world, for from thee has shone forth the Sun of righteousness, Christ our God. St Andrew of Crete preached on it. Its first Great Feast answers the last of the year, the Dormition in August, so that the Church year begins with her birth and ends with her falling asleep.Liturgical Calendar & FeastsThe Apostles’ FastIt begins on the Monday after the Sunday of All Saints and ends on 28 June, the eve of Sts Peter and Paul. Because it starts on a movable day and ends on a fixed one, it has no fixed length: it can run to six weeks in a year when Pascha is early and shrink to eight days in a year when Pascha is very late, which is the kind of thing a calendar that computes rather than remembers gets wrong. On the New Calendar it is shorter still and in some years does not happen at all. It is the mildest of the four, with fish on most days.