The bells began to ring...

...in my children's room at about 4:15 am on Sunday morning. (We do things a little different than most Orthodox Parishes: we have our Paschal service at 5am). As Ferrenberg tradition dictates, I play a CD from a Russian Church in St. Petersburg which begins with loud clanging bells and thereby I both wake the kids up and announce the arrival of Pascha.

Sleepy eyed (some more than others) and most with bootied feet, they staggered out into the living room to begin the sped up and abbreviated process of getting dressed and ready for liturgy. I pointed out to the kids that the central icon of the icon corner had changed from that of Christ crucified to that of Christ trampling down death. And as my youngest daughter continued dressing she looked up at it and promptly said:

"Whew...things are back to normal."

Comments

Munkee said…
James, a wonderful tradition you have my brother.
3:43 PM
Karl said…
"We do things a little different than most Orthodox Parishes..."

It is not 5am Paschal Matins in 19th Century Russia!

:)
5:16 PM
Anonymous said…
One of the (few) things I miss about being an Anglican are Sunrise Services at Easter/Pascha.

I do love the middle of the night services in most Orthodox parishes , too, but I'm always totally wiped out by about 4:00 a.m. and then the rest of the day is a blur (mostly sleeping, trying to recover for work the next day) I can rarely get up again for noon day services on Pascha. I think I would like it to get a good night's sleep , arise at 4:00 , get to the Church by a quarter to 5:00 and start the Paschal services then. How'd your parish come to having your services at 5:00 rather than midnight ?

I suspect they established that practice when the parish first started up as a mission, right ? I would imagine it would be very hard to change the time of the Pascha services in a well-established parish .
8:15 AM
fdj said…
I'm not sure how the practice came about. I was surprised to hear Rade blog that in Serbia they did a morning service (7AM!).

To some extent it is a condescension to the little ones and their parents...but I'm not sure...we usually have so much prep work to do saturday night that we the parents end up with 4 hours of sleep or so.

But, I do think it would be harder to do the midnight thing and feast at 2am or so. Our schedule affords us the more normal meat ridden breakfast.

Mmmmm sausage, bacon, cheese....
9:13 AM
Anonymous said…
I have done a fair amount of research and investigation into the practice of celebrating the Paschal Service in the morning. I have first hand accounts from both a Greek and a Romanian priest that the 5am practice was the norm in their village and surrounding villages in the old country. Likewise, in the US and Canada I've identified and documented quite a few parishes from among the following jurisdictions that celebrate a morning Paschal Divine Liturgy. (Some have the matins service on Saturday night). That includes: Ukrainian, Serbian, Romanian, OCA, Antiochian, Carpatho-Russian, Bulgarian, and the Moscow Patriarchal parishes in the US. Internationally, there are parishes from various jurisdictions that celebrate a morning Paschal service in the UK, New Zealand, Czechoslavkia, Austria, Greece, and Romania. These are just the ones I'm aware of.
11:02 PM
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