In Israel Today...

[Michaels HiFi]

The Holy Fire

has descended at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem for Orthodox Pascha (Easter) in this photo from today.

Our Easter - as everything about Orthodoxy - is based on ancient traditions and direct Apostolic teachings. Nothing is watered down over the years or altered by church officials. In this regard (and many others) we are quite different from other churches.

There is no one-man who can change our entire church on a whim. We do not have a single human head of our church. The Head of our Church is Christ.

Our faith was set in stone during the 7 Ecumenical Councils hundreds of years before the Great Schism of 1054. In that year, we finally separated after a couple of hundred years of Rome drifting away from the original teachings and the Pope trying to arrest and imprison Orthodox priests who would not bow to him.

Along those lines the reason our Pascha is usually a different time than others is because we carry on the tradition from 2,000 years ago: It was a full moon at the Last Supper during Passover. On that Friday Christ was crucified and On The Third Day He Rose In Accordance To The Scriptures (part of our Nicene Creed). Therefore in that ancient tradition we celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon after Jewish Passover.

And earlier today at the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem, the flame or the Resurrection of Christ has emerged. We will be doing the same here at midnight tonight.

Every year we strive to make it home with the lit candle from church to bring us blessings in the coming year.

I do not view any other beliefs or religions as "not as good" as ours. Having said that I am very thankful for being Eastern Orthodox.

 

[Mr Peabody]

As I understand your church doesn't use instrumental music choosing to sing acapella as the original early Christians. Eph 5:19

 

[Michaels HiFi]

As I understand your church doesn't use instrumental music choosing to sing acapella as the original early Christians. Eph 5:19

Correct. It's all done by chanters. And both they and the priests actually follow (for lack of a better description) a set way of chanting everything and cannot deviate from it.

That ensure no priest or chanter can emphasize or de-emphasize any parts of it nor deviate.

Here is a picture of what it looks like for a chanter to follow:

 

[Michaels HiFi]

CHISTOS ANESTI!

Here is the video from my church service last night where I got home at 2 AM.

There is nothing — NOTHING — like midnight on Pascha (Greek Easter).

At midnight after an hour chanting hymns, the church goes completely dark and silent. Then one flame is lit by the Priest as he exists from the altar.

And that single flame begins to move through the congregation, candle to candle, person to person, until the entire church is blazing with light. And then the priest cries out — CHRISTOS ANESTI! Christ is Risen! — and 2,000 voices in our church explode back — ALITHOS ANESTI! Truly He is Risen! — and every hair on your body stands up.

Then we sing. Christos Anesti is the ancient hymn of the Resurrection, and I don't care how many times you've heard it — when it fills a church at midnight by candlelight, it absolutely breaks you open in the best possible way.

It is the sound of two thousand years of faith, unwavering with modern trends or fads of a passing Pope, of every generation before us who sang these same words in the same darkness waiting for the same Light.

For those of us who grew up Orthodox, this moment is written into our souls. It is the smell of incense and melted wax, the warmth of a candle cupped in your hands, the sting as the wax drips off your candle onto your hands, your Yiaya's voice beside you, tears you didn't see coming.

This is why we fast for forty days. This is why our sevrice leading up to this moment started EIGHT WEEKS AGO. This is what we wait for all year.

Christos Anesti, friends. He is Risen indeed.

"Christ is Risen from the dead. By death, he has trampled upon death and to those in the tombs he is bestowing life"