About a month ago, March 16, Loretta and I participated in the enormous Palm Sunday processional in Jerusalem, from the Mount of Olives into the old city of Jerusalem. Today I walked the mile or so from the Orthodox Academy of Crete where we are staying to the village church in Kolymbari, in order to participate in the Palm Sunday services here in Greece. Holy Week begins today here, and next Sunday is Easter Sunday. I was determined to get there for the whole service today, so I arrived at 8:00 AM. The priest and choir were already chanting Psalms and prayers, but the Divine Liturgy itself did not begin until 9:00 AM. The church was fairly empty the first hour, but began to fill up as the service continued, as is customary in Greek Orthdox worship. There is a lot of coming and going through these services. By the end of the service the church was quite full, with lots of families and children.
The service had the same liturgy enacted every Sunday, which I could follow easily with my Greek/English parallel copy of the liturgy. There were some special hymns and prayers for the Palm Sunday observance, and the Gospel reading was from John 12:1-19. The priest gave a short homily in which he talked about how popular Jesus was because of the raising of Lazarus, but that the same people who were marveling at this miracle now would be calling out for Jesus' crucifixion later in the week. Everyone attending received a small palm leaf folded into the shape of a cross, with a carnation tucked into it. Later today, and throughout the week, there will be special services in all the churches following the events of Holy Week. I still have to find out where and when and how to get to these, but I hope to participate as much as possible.
With the amount of walking involved to the churches, I'm letting Loretta here in our apartment with Joanne and Kaitlyn for most of these services. Loretta continues to be OK, but her energy level isn't so good. Last evening was bitter sweet for us as I took Dora and Susanna to the airport and dropped off the Fiat Scudo van we had been driving for the past two weeks. It was hard to break up the family circle again, but I was so thankful the girls managed to get two weeks off work in order to join us for this time. We had a very good time together, and enjoyed the archaeological sites we visited, the nature hikes we took, and all our other activities.
Roy
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Finally, I was able to get to your blog site. Somehow I had written the address in error. Today, for some reason, I felt compelled to experiment until I got in. Once I started reading, I knew why. I needed to pray for Loretta. I did not know she had been so ill. I called Darlene and Roy and they were not aware that Loretta had been so ill. We are all praying for her restoration to good health and safe journey home. Thank you for the interesting reading.
Diane
Post a Comment