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Dear Parish Faithful,
One of our parishioners has kindly summarized a talk by Fr. Herman of the monastery attached to St. Tikhon's Seminary in PA. These notes can be very helpful for better understanding both Bright Week and the entire Paschal Tide (period of the Pentecostarion). A wonderful fifty days in the Church often overlooked as we recover from the exhaustion of Great Lent and Holy Week. As Orthodox, we must struggle against a contemporary temptation of "moving on" from one event to another. Pascha is not "one-and-done!" I have included a link here to Fr. Herman's presentation on YouTube.
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| Agape Vespers, the Resurrection Gospel read in many languages. |
PASCHA & BRIGHT WEEK
As the “Feast of Feasts,” Pascha is above all feasts; the services all reflect this.
Bright Week exists outside of time, as a single, week-long day, celebrating and shining in the glow of Christ's Resurrection. Each day’s services are identical (except for the tone of each day, which changes).
As many already know, we do not pray ‘O Heavenly King’ from Pascha until the Vespers of Pentecost.
Even more radically, we do not include the Trisagion Prayers during Bright Week.
As a special help for choirs, the Bright Week dismissal is discussed beginning at about 16:45, and is contrasted with the dismissal during the remainder of the Paschal season.
The Paschal Hours - The structure of the Bright Week services is of a whole different order than the rest of the year, especially for the Morning and Evening Prayers, and the Hours (and Compline), which use the beloved and utterly ecstatic Paschal Hours to bear us along through this amazing period.
[The Paschal Hours are included in most Orthodox prayer books, and can be found on our website.]
Reading the Paschal Hours before the Paschal Liturgies of Bright Week would further emphasize this radical difference in the services of Bright Week.
The Paschal Hours even replace our Prayers of Thanksgiving after Holy Communion, and significantly, some of the hymns of the Paschal Hours are included in the troparia pronounced by the priest following Holy Communion at Sunday Liturgies throughout the year.
Hardly any Psalms are chanted or read during Bright Week (except for “Lord I Call”, various prokeimena, and the Praises at Matins). Vespers and Matins are radically transformed by this with no Psalm 103 or Six Psalms during Bright Week.
THOMAS SUNDAY & PASCHALTIDE
The Pentecostarion Period
Thomas Sunday has the structure of a Great Feast, with its own unique hymns, and serves, as it were, as a “step down” from the other-worldly pinnacle of Pascha and Bright Week. This is in keeping with its prototypical role as Anti-Pascha (meaning "in place of Pascha"), as it sets the form for Sundays throughout the Church year.
With Pascha as the pinnacle, we see Palm Sunday and Thomas Sunday mirroring one another on either side, Holy Week and Bright Week mirroring each other, and Great Lent being mirrored by the Pentecostarion. I tried to create a visual depiction of this.
PASCHA
HOLY WEEK BRIGHT WEEK
Palm Sunday Thomas Sunday
Great Lent Pentecostarion
Normal Time Normal Time
Significantly, the period following Thomas Sunday is not a “return to normal,” but continues to be richly imbued with the Light of Pascha. The beginnings and dismissals of services include the Paschal Troparion, “Christ is Risen…” as do the hymns and “Lord I Call” stikhera, etc. The Aposticha are not discussed in the video, but this is different also, with “Let God Arise” being sung by the choir, preceded by one verse of the Aposticha. “The Angel Cried” is sung in place of “It Is Truly Meet” during the Paschal season after the consecration of the Eucharistic Gifts during the Divine Liturgy.
Each Sunday during Paschaltide is a “mini-feast”, with its own unique theme, and even has an “after-feast” extending the entire following week, such that the stikhera and hymns for even the weekdays continue the lessons of the preceding Paschal Sunday. All the Sunday hymns during the Paschal season come from the Pentecostarion (unless a major commemoration such as St George, Ss Constantine & Helen, etc.), and the hymns for the week combine the Paschal hymns with the Eight Tones (Octoechos) for a consistently Resurrectional emphasis, albeit with a different focus for each day of the week, corresponding to the normal commemoration for the day of the week (Monday - the Angelic Powers, Tuesday - St John the Forerunner, Wednesday & Friday, the Cross, Thursday, the Apostles & St Nicholas).
The Paschal period is further punctuated by the feasts of Mid-Pentecost and Ascension, which have their own after-feasts. Though not mentioned in the video, the Leavetaking of Pascha occurs with the Ninth Hour (before Vespers) of the eve of Ascension, and we no longer include the Paschal Troparion (“Christ is Risen”) after that. We do add the Troparion for Ascension at the beginning.
CONCLUSION: THE PURPOSE & GOAL OF THE LITURGICAL WORSHIP OF THE CHURCH
Starting at 23:15 in the video, Fr Herman discusses the importance of keeping the Paschaltide season so as not to “lose the grace” gained during Lent.
He gives an inspiring call for recognizing the cycle of church services existing to prepare us for the Eternal Pascha with the Lord, even though in this life we are living in “lenten lands,” to use C.S. Lewis’ phrase. The goal is “How to live on earth, while remembering Paradise."
He urges us to keep "one foot in Lent, and one foot already in Pascha.”
Fr Herman closes by citing Fr Alexander Schmemann’s saying that, “the entire Typicon [order of services] can be summed up in the expression, ‘from seven to eight’, that is to say, from the seventh day of this creation, the time of preparation, the time of struggle, into the Eighth and Eternal Day of the New Creation, the Resurrection, the Life of the Age to Come.”
See also our Pascha to Pentecost Section on our website.
