Brothers and Sisters,
Greetings in the Name of the Lord.
This coming Sunday, February 26, is Reception Sunday, so we will be performing baptisms and chrismations and also making some folks catechumens. But, following a brief Fellowship Hour, we will also offer one of the most beautiful and significant services of the year—Forgiveness Vespers. It’s just a normal vesperal service, but, at the conclusion of the service, we will line up and offer one another words of forgiveness: “Forgive me, a Sinner.” “God forgives, and so do I.” It’s how we always begin Great Lent, and it’s a service in which we should all participate.
For the past six years, Father Deacon Gerasimos Juliano has been our hard-working IT Guy. He has faithfully distributed the newsletter and our parish announcements each and every week. Since Father Deacon now serves our parish as a clergyman, he’s going to step away from that responsibility, but all of us here at Life At A Dead Run Media will miss him a great deal. Please let Father Deacon know how much you appreciate all of his efforts to keep us connected to one another.
Our Calendar
Fasting
The traditional fasting discipline is that we go without meat (beef, pork, chicken, and fish with backbones) through Pascha, Sunday, April 16. Dairy products are permitted each day this week. The full fast begins on Monday, February 27, so, if you need to modify that discipline in any way, please speak with your spiritual father as soon as possible.
Daily Services
Monday, February 20- Friday, February 24
Orthros 5am
Vespers 5pm
Seth Hart will be at the online chanter’s stand offering the First, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Hours this week on ZOOM. The schedule is below:
1st hour: 6:45 a.m.
3rd hour: 8:45 a.m.
6th hour: 11:45 a.m.
9th hour: 3:45 p.m.
The login information is available in the emailed version of the newsletter.
St. John Trapeza Readings
Fr. Andrew, Seth Heart, and Matthew Groh and many other folks continue to broadcast daily readings from spiritual books online. d many other folks continue to broadcast daily readings from spiritual books online. They are currently reading Beauty, Spirit, Matter: Icons in the Modern World by Aidan Hart.
The schedule is as follows: Monday to Friday at 12:00 p.m.
If you would like to listen in, use the link to join the Telegram group shared in the emailed version of the newsletter.
Tuesday, February 21
Orthodoxy 101 at 7:00 p.m.
Topic: Orthodoxy 101
Please see the emailed version of the newsletter for login information.
Thursday, February 23
Bible Study 7pm
Topic: St. John the Forerunner - Bible Study
Please see the emailed version of the newsletter for login information.
Saturday, February 25
St. Thomas School at 4:00 p.m.
Great Vespers at 6:00 p.m.
Sunday, February 26 Sunday of Forgiveness
Orthros 8am
Between Orthros and Divine Liturgy, Easton T. and Ignatius B. will be baptized, Luke B. will be chrismated, and several people will be made catechumens. Please arrive early to join us for these Holy Mysteries
Northern Typika with Holy Communion in Killeen 10am
Liturgy 10am
Fellowship Hour Noon
Forgiveness Vespers no later than 1pm
St. Thomas School
On Saturday, February 25, Father Aidan Wilcoxson will lead the discussion of Chapter Twenty four in Volume Three, “The Veneration of The Saints”. In order to participate online, send an email to remote.meetings@theforerunner.org by this coming Thursday, February 23; you will also need to keep your camera on during the session.
coming up
Great Lent
Great Lent begins on Monday, February 27. That week, there are Lenten services each night at 7pm: On Monday, February 27, Tuesday, February 28, and Thursday, March 2 Great Compline with the Canon of St Andrew will be served.
On Wednesday, March 1, we will offer the first Pre-Sanctified Liturgy, and on Friday, March 3, we will serve the first Akathist to the Mother of God. Please plan on joining us as often as you can.
There are three more Saturdays of Souls for this year: March 11, March 18, and June 3. These Saturdays are not only an important time to remember our departed loved ones and friends, they are also how we can teach our children and grandchildren and godchildren to pray for us once we have departed this life. Please use the Memorial Book in the narthex and print the first names of those that you would like to have remembered at the service you will be attending. And on each of those Saturdays, representatives from the St Joanna Burial Society will be on hand to help us with advanced directives, wills, funeral arrangements, and cemetery information. So please plan on participating on at least one of these three Saturdays and taking full advantage of all that is on offer.
The Archdiocese expects all of us to make our confession before Pascha. In our parish, confession is offered on Saturday evenings after Great Vespers or just about any other time by appointment, but we do not hear confessions during Holy Week. That means we have until Lazarus Saturday, April 8, so let’s not wait until the last minute to receive that blessing.
St Elias parish is hosting a Lenten Retreat at their north campus with Father Bogdan Bucur, Associate Professor of Patristics at St. Vladimir’s Seminary on Saturday, March 4, 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. Father Bogdan will be speaking on "Learning Theology from the Hymns of Holy Weeks and Christian Ethics from a Jewish Convert"; everyone is welcome to participate.
By now you’ve probably heard that we are setting up our official St John’s online presence on Discord. Discord is available as an app for your phone or computer or in your internet browser; to check it all out, click the link below. If you already have Discord set up, you will be added to the server without a role - in other words, as a guest. If you have not set up Discord, you will be prompted to create a username (please use your actual name, so we will all know with whom we are communicating) and a Discord account. Once you are in the server, you'll see a small number of channels, either on the left of the screen or (on mobile) in a three-line menu on the left. Go to the Verify channel for instructions on confirming that you are a St. John parishioner. Once you've been verified, you'll see that the Verify channel disappears and there are additional channels available to you.
At any point, if you run into issues, please feel free to email, text, call, or send a carrier pigeon, etc to Seth Hart, who has graciously agreed to guide us through this process.
The St. Joanna Myrrhearers are preparing to break ground on the St. John's Memorial Garden in the coming weeks. It will abut the front entrance walkway to the church, so that all of us in passing will be able to cross ourselves and say a prayer for the departed. This space will be dedicated to parishioners (and Orthodox immediate family members of parishioners) whose graves are more than 100 miles away and difficult to visit, or simply unavailable to us. In addition, parishioners who have suffered the loss of an unborn infant, by whatever cause, will now have a place to lay a stone in their remembrance. The Myrrhbearers are finalizing the vendor choices for the stones, but in the meantime, we ask that you contact Becky T. (or snag her at Fellowship Hour) if you are interested in getting more information and/or purchasing a stone.
Gwyneth B. has been serving with the nation-wide program YES North America for the past three years. The YES (Youth Equipped to Serve) Program aims to present youth and young adults with the one true Way of life- living for the sake of others. YES offers many different opportunities, including online series, in-person Day Trips, internship experiences, and more. Gwyneth is trying to raise $500 for YES that will go towards helping build this beautiful ministry and fund interns, trips, and leadership training. She can collect cash or checks (made out to YES North America), and she has a QR code that you can scan and donate withIf you have any questions or would like to talk about any of this further, email Gwyneth or you can find her at Fellowship Hour on a Sunday.
In years past, the women of our community have come together to do daily Psalter readings during Great Lent. Each day, the entire Psalter will be read by our community with each of us reading a Kathisma a day. We will each work through the Psalter reading a Kathisma a day with the next Kathisma being read on a subsequent day. In this way, each of us will work our way through the Psalter twice while it is read in its entirety by our community daily. If you would like to participate, please contact Mary (sarah) B.
OUR MOMENT OF GRACE AND COURTESY
If we wish to place candles in the boxes in front of the iconostasis, we should wait until the priest or the deacons are in the altar. If the priest or the deacon come out of the altar while we are putting candles in the boxes, we should step well back into the congregation and wait until they have gone back into the altar; we should not continue trying to light candles while the priest and deacon are out in front of the iconostasis; that is a distraction, and it is disrespectful.
Things That Make Priests Happy
“He is separated from all and united to all;
Above all, he is happy,
Divinely happy.”
Brothers and Sisters,
Greetings in the Name of the Lord.
This coming Sunday, February 26, is Reception Sunday, so we will be performing baptisms and chrismations and also making some folks catechumens. But, following a brief Fellowship Hour, we will also offer one of the most beautiful and significant services of the year—Forgiveness Vespers. It’s just a normal vesperal service, but, at the conclusion of the service, we will line up and offer one another words of forgiveness: “Forgive me, a Sinner.” “God forgives, and so do I.” It’s how we always begin Great Lent, and it’s a service in which we should all participate.
For the past six years, Father Deacon Gerasimos Juliano has been our hard-working IT Guy. He has faithfully distributed the newsletter and our parish announcements each and every week. Since Father Deacon now serves our parish as a clergyman, he’s going to step away from that responsibility, but all of us here at Life At A Dead Run Media will miss him a great deal. Please let Father Deacon know how much you appreciate all of his efforts to keep us connected to one another.
Our Calendar
Fasting Days
The traditional fasting discipline is that we go without meat (beef, pork, chicken, and fish with backbones) through Pascha, Sunday, April 16. Dairy products are permitted each day this week. The full fast begins on Monday, February 27, so, if you need to modify that discipline in any way, please speak with your spiritual father as soon as possible.
Daily Services
Monday, February 20-Friday, February 24:
Orthros - 5am
Vespers - 5pm
Hours - Seth Hart will be at the online chanter’s stand, offering the First, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Hours this week on ZOOM: 1st hour: 6:45 a.m.; 3rd hour: 8:45 a.m.; 6th hour: 11:45 a.m. 9th hour: 3:45 p.m. Here’s the log in information Meeting Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89047623739?pwd=ZDBCYnk4M3R1RjFRbUJwY3lobEpjQT09
Trapeza - Fr. Andrew, Seth Hart, and Matthew Groh and many other folks continue to broadcast daily readings from spiritual books online. They are currently reading Beauty, Spirit, Matter: Icons in the Modern World by Aidan Hart. The schedule is as follows: M-F at 12pm. If you would like to listen in, use the following link to join the Telegram group. https://t.me/+QSpiS0tULDw0YjNh
Tuesday, February 21
Orthodoxy 101 7pm
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84795491832?pwd=MnJoak1iZUh6VkZCUWxZWlJ3UWxiUT09
Thursday, February 23
The Bible Study 7pm
Topic: St. John the Forerunner - Bible Study
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81824134126?pwd=YmpkaGFNNDh1TWdCOWladEpwVXFHUT09
Saturday, February 25
St Thomas School 4pm
Great Vespers 6pm
Sunday, February 26
The Sunday of Forgiveness
Orthros 8am
Between Orthros and Divine Liturgy, Easton Tyson and Ignatius Brown will be baptized, Luke Baecklandt will be chrismated, and several people will be made catechumens. Please arrive early to join us for these Holy Mysteries
Northern Typika with Holy Communion in Killeen 10am
Liturgy 10am
Fellowship Hour Noon
Forgiveness Vespers no later than 1pm
St Thomas School
On Saturday, February 25, Father Aidan Wilcoxson will lead the discussion of Chapter Twenty four in Volume Three, “The Veneration of The Saints”. In order to participate online, send an email to remote.meetings@theforerunner.org by this coming Thursday, February 23; you will also need to keep your camera on during the session.
Finance Update
Thanks to your generosity and to the grace and mercy of the Most Holy Trinity, we finished January with a surplus of $36,000. January is a month when many parishes generate deficits since everyone is recovering from the holidays, so good job all around! Let’s pray that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will bless us throughout the coming year, and let’s continue to be faithful in our stewardship.
Coming Up
Great Lent begins on Monday, February 27. That week, there are Lenten services each night at 7pm: On Monday, February 27, Tuesday, February 28, and Thursday, March 2 Great Compline with the Canon of St Andrew will be served. On Wednesday, March 1, we will offer the first Pre-Sanctified Liturgy, and on Friday, March 3, we will serve the first Akathist to the Mother of God. Please plan on joining us as often as you can.
There are three more Saturdays of Souls for this year: March 11, March 18, and June 3. These Saturdays are not only an important time to remember our departed loved ones and friends, they are also how we can teach our children and grandchildren and godchildren to pray for us once we have departed this life. Please use the Memorial Book in the narthex and print the first names of those that you would like to have remembered at the service you will be attending. And on each of those Saturdays, representatives from the St Joanna Burial Society will be on hand to help us with advanced directives, wills, funeral arrangements, and cemetery information. So please plan on participating on at least one of these three Saturdays and taking full advantage of all that is on offer.
The Archdiocese expects all of us to make our confession before Pascha. In our parish, confession is offered on Saturday evenings after Great Vespers or just about any other time by appointment, but we do not hear confessions during Holy Week. That means we have until Lazarus Saturday, April 8, so let’s not wait until the last minute to receive that blessing.
St Elias parish is hosting a Lenten Retreat at their north campus with Father Bogdan Bucur, Associate Professor of Patristics at St. Vladimir’s Seminary on Saturday, March 4, 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. Father Bogdan will be speaking on "Learning Theology from the Hymns of Holy Weeks and Christian Ethics from a Jewish Convert"; everyone is welcome to participate.
By now you’ve probably heard that we are setting up our official St John’s online presence on Discord. Discord is available as an app for your phone or computer or in your internet browser; to check it all out, click the link below. If you already have Discord set up, you will be added to the server without a role - in other words, as a guest. If you have not set up Discord, you will be prompted to create a username (please use your actual name, so we will all know with whom we are communicating) and a Discord account. Once you are in the server, you'll see a small number of channels, either on the left of the screen or (on mobile) in a three-line menu on the left. Go to the Verify channel for instructions on confirming that you are a St. John parishioner. Once you've been verified, you'll see that the Verify channel disappears and there are additional channels available to you.
https://discord.gg/eVuUjDsv
At any point, if you run into issues, please feel free to email, text, call, or send a carrier pigeon, etc to Seth Hart, who has graciously agreed to guide us through this process.
The St. Joanna Myrrhearers are preparing to break ground on the St. John's Memorial Garden in the coming weeks. It will abut the front entrance walkway to the church, so that all of us in passing will be able to cross ourselves and say a prayer for the departed. This space will be dedicated to parishioners (and Orthodox immediate family members of parishioners) whose graves are more than 100 miles away and difficult to visit, or simply unavailable to us. In addition, parishioners who have suffered the loss of an unborn infant, by whatever cause, will now have a place to lay a stone in their remembrance. The Myrrhbearers are finalizing the vendor choices for the stones, but in the meantime, we ask that you contact Becky Thurner at beckyt1954@att.net (or snag her at Fellowship Hour) if you are interested in getting more information and/or purchasing a stone.
Gwyneth Brown has been serving with the nation-wide program YES North America for the past three years. The YES (Youth Equipped to Serve) Program aims to present youth and young adults with the one true Way of life- living for the sake of others. YES offers many different opportunities, including online series, in-person Day Trips, internship experiences, and more. Gwyneth is trying to raise $500 for YES that will go towards helping build this beautiful ministry and fund interns, trips, and leadership training. She can collect cash or checks (made out to YES North America), and she has a QR code that you can scan and donate withIf you have any questions or would like to talk about any of this further, Gwyneth’s email is bigbigsis12@gmail.com, or you can find her at Fellowship Hour on a Sunday.
In years past, the women of our community have come together to do daily Psalter readings during Great Lent. Each day, the entire Psalter will be read by our community with each of us reading a Kathisma a day. We will each work through the Psalter reading a Kathisma a day with the next Kathisma being read on a subsequent day. In this way, each of us will work our way through the Psalter twice while it is read in its entirety by our community daily. If you would like to participate, please contact Mary (sarah) Brown at Sarah.robot@gmail.com
Our Moment of Grace and Courtesy
If we wish to place candles in the boxes in front of the iconostasis, we should wait until the priest or the deacons are in the altar. If the priest or the deacon come out of the altar while we are putting candles in the boxes, we should step well back into the congregation and wait until they have gone back into the altar; we should not continue trying to light candles while the priest and deacon are out in front of the iconostasis; that is a distraction, and it is disrespectful.
Things That Make Priests Happy
Offering the services on the First Saturday of Souls; talking with Valerie Groh about the new Memorial Garden; reminiscing with Linda Brown about school buses with standard transmissions and with Will Hampton about bad Hunter Thompson movies; wondering, after talking with Stephanie Crown, what you’re supposed to do with the catfish if the hockey team loses; watching, on Valentine’s Day, Glenn Ford and Geraldine Page and The Tomato From Altoona, in “Dear Heart”; serving in the altar amidst the annual Lady Bug Pilgrimage.
an unworthy priest,
aidan
The Happy Priest is a publication of Life At A Dead Run Media, which is a subsidiary of One Take Productions. Our IT Guy is Christian Perez; our Webmasters are Lily Halsey and Seth Hart; our Keeper of Lists is Father Andrew Wilson; our Roving Reporter is Joseph Frady; we always bet on the Washington Generals, and our Spiritual Advisor is Elder Galaction of the Holy Mountain.