Brothers and Sisters,
Greetings in the Name of the Lord.
At this Saturday’s session of St Thomas School, we are starting our First Saturday of the Month Practical Orthodox Stuff Class (we worked really hard on that name). Our topic for March is Liturgical Etiquette, so if you have ever wondered how and when to ask a priest for a blessing, when exactly to make the sign of the cross, how and when to reverence the icons, how to receive the holy gifts, or just about any other aspect of our Life in the Liturgy, this is the session for you. We will meet in the Long Hall at 4pm; Father Aidan will lead the class, so join us on Saturday and get all your questions answered.
This Sunday is the Sunday of Orthodoxy when we celebrate the Triumph of the Icons. We do that with a procession around the property, and, during that procession, we all carry icons, so please remember to bring a small icon with you to the services on Sunday morning.
Our Calendar
Fasting
The traditional fasting discipline is that we go without meat (beef, pork, chicken, and fish with backbones), dairy products, oil, wine, and hard liquor through Pascha, Sunday, April 16 (there is a blessing for fish, wine, and oil on Saturdays and Sundays). If you need to modify that discipline in any way, please speak with your spiritual father as soon as possible.
Daily Services
Monday, February 27- Friday, March 3
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 Hart, 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.
Lenten Services
Monday, February 28 Great Compline 7pm
Tuesday, February 29 Great Compline 7pm
Wednesday, March 1 Pre-Sanctified Liturgy 7pm
Thursday, March 2 Great Compline 7pm
Friday, March 3 Akathist Hymn 7pm
Saturday, March 4
St. Thomas School at 4:00 p.m.
Great Vespers at 6:00 p.m.
Sunday, March 5 The Sunday of Orthodoxy
Orthros 8am
Church School 8:15
Liturgy 10am
Fellowship Hour Noon
Youth Church School following Fellowship Hour
Since this is the first Sunday of the month, it is Blessing Sunday, so if you’re going to be traveling during March or if you have icons, prayer ropes, and crosses to be blessed, just show up at the chanter’s stand after liturgy for those prayers. But the first Sunday of the month is also Claim Your Stuff Sunday; that means you need to check the Lost and Found Box in the kitchen because it will all go to Goodwill after Fellowship Hour is over.
St. Thomas School
On Saturday, March 4, Father Aidan Wilcoxson will lead the discussion on the subject of liturgical etiquette. Since this will be a very interactive and mobile presentation, there will not be an online option. Online access will return next week.
Membership update
This past weekend, we made Mary Anne B. a catechumen. Please introduce yourself to Mary Anne and let her know that you will be praying for her as she prepares to be fully received into the Church.
coming up
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.
On Sunday, March 12, we will have our next Safety and Security Rehearsal. This will work just like the rehearsal we had this past fall, and you will receive detailed instructions the week before the rehearsal. Basically, we will all be exiting the buildings and gathering at the Rally Point Signs on the parking lot, but please be prepared to participate so that we will all be prepared for whatever we may encounter in the providence of the Most Holy Trinity.
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.
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 Myrrbearers have now installed the St. John's Memorial Garden by the front entrance walkway to the Long Hall, 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.
OUR MOMENT OF GRACE AND COURTESY
In the Comforting Room, we have lots of wonderful books available for our children. If your children or godchildren take any of the books with them into the nave, after the service is over, please show them how to return the books to the Comforting Room. That way, our children and godchildren will not only be blessed with high quality books, they will also be blessed in knowing how to pick up after themselves.
Things That Make Priests Happy
Baptizing and chrismating Ignatius B. and Luke B.; making Mary Anne B. a catechumen; doing those Pre-Lenten prostrations; running across this quotation from G.K. Chesterton: “I doubt whether the best men ever devote themselves to politics. The best men devote themselves to pigs and babies and things like that”; explaining to disbelieving younger people, that, when I was in elementary school, the teachers all directing us to get cigar boxes to hold our supplies; singing the Paschal Canon; admiring the new Memorial Garden; sitting at a stop light and watching the sun come up.
On Discord, you will find a message from our new archbishop, Metropolitan Saba Esper.
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 Ben Manalowitz; our corporate headquarters features the world’s most extensive collection of Solo Cups, and our Spiritual Advisor is Elder Galaction of the Holy Mountain.