Monday, April 29, 2019

Pascha at the Patriarchate of Antioch

5 comments:

  1. Does the Patriarchate perform Paschal Liturgy beginning at sunrise instead of midnight?

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  2. It appears that way. My own parish does everything at 8:00 AM Sunday morning. I still maintain that is better than splitting up the service,Matins at Midnight, and then coming back for liturgy at 9 or 10 AM, like most Serbs do. I find it even worse that some ACROD and OCA parishes do Paschal Matins as early as 6:00 PM Saturday evening. I know starting from midnight and going through until the end of liturgy is ideal. It is what our parish used to do. Any aging church membership made the change necessary.

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  3. Doing this in the morning is now common in the Middle East, mainly for security reasons, as the streets are much safer in daylight.

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    Replies
    1. Is this a criminal-thug problem, or a religious militant problem? I ask because I may be going to the Middle East, and I'm being told by a number of Middle Easterners what a hospitable place it is. (But, as I'm polite enough not to say, you're here and not there.)

      Anyway, it seems sensible for a lot of reasons for Pascha to commence around sunrise. Our parish starts the Rush service at 11 p.m. and it is getting to be quite a slog.

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    2. I think this practice goes back to the Lebanese War, at least. Whatever security issues are involved are compounded by the lack of public transport in Lebanon. Don't doubt that it's a hospitable place and Uber works in Beirut, but the whole country is a mess logistically in the big picture and there's no sense in testing it by having everyone out in the wee hours if they don't have to be.

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