Dear parishioners:
A)-On the Gregorian Calendar, the Holy Week services that we will serve at the Shrine, and which will be livestreamed are as follows:
April 9, Holy Thursday: 6pm – Matins of the Passion (the reading of the 12 Gospels)
April 10, Good Friday: 3pm – Good Friday Vespers (the Shroud, or Plashchanytsia)
April 11, Holy Saturday: 10am – Jerusalem Matins
April 12, Easter Sunday: 7am – Resurrection Matins, followed by Easter Divine Liturgy
All these services will be sung totally in English.
There will be no public services at the Shrine, so there won’t be blessing of Easter baskets. What you can do is to assemble an Easter basket on your own, with foods that you already have (no need to make an extra trip to the grocery store for this purpose in view of the Covid 19 hazards), and pray a blessing of your own design over it. It would not be the same as a priest’s blessing, but in this case, God will look upon it with favor, because it is an exceptional time. I remember a brief ritual my family used to do when I was a child. My father would begin Easter brunch by saying a blessing over a hard-boiled egg from the Easter basket, dividing it up into as many sections as the number of people present, distribute the sections to each person, and then we would each eat our piece of the egg.
If you would like a confession, phone me at the church, and observing a whole bunch of precautions, we could arrange something on an individual basis.
B)-On the Julian Calendar, we will celebrate Palm Sunday divine liturgy in Ukrainian at 10:30am on Sunday, April 12.
Fr. Ireneus