Brothers and Sisters,
Greetings in the Name of the Lord.
It’s time to start looking ahead and planning for our participation in the services of Holy Week. All of those services (there are twenty of them) are on the website calendar, so please go ahead and start making arrangements to attend as many of them as you can. And remember: In Holy Orthodoxy, Holy Week is actually an entire week. It begins with Lazarus Saturday, and it runs through Agape Vespers on Easter Sunday afternoon.
Our Calendar
Fasting Days
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, March 27 - Friday, March 31
Orthros 5am
Vespers 5pm
Seth Hart will be at the online chanter’s stand offering the First, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Hours this week.:
1st hour: 6:45 a.m.
3rd hour: 8:45 a.m.
6th hour: 11:45 a.m.
9th hour: 3:45 p.m.
Join the Daily Hours on Discord.
St. John Trapeza Readings
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: Monday to Friday at 12:00 p.m. Please see the emailed version of the newsletter for the link to join the Trapeza Readings on Discord.
Lenten Services
Monday, March 27 Great Compline 7pm
Wednesday, March 29 Small Compline with Canon of St Andrew and The Life of St Mary of Egypt 7pm
Friday, March 31 The Akathist Hymn 7pm
Tuesday, March 28
Parish Council 7pm This group will meet in the parish house
Orthodoxy 101 7pm This group will meet in the narthex of The Long Hall
You can also access the group on Discord
Thursday, March 29
The Bible Study 7pm
You can access this group on Discord
Saturday, April 1
St Thomas School 4pm
Great Vespers 6pm
Sunday, April 2 The Fifth Sunday of Great Lent
Orthros 8am
Church School 8:15am
Liturgy 10am
Fellowship Hour Noon
Youth Church School 1pm
Since this is the first Sunday of the month, it is Blessing Sunday, so if you’re going to be traveling during April 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, April 1, we will have our Second First Saturday of the Month Practical Orthodox Stuff Class. Our topic for April is Prayer and Fasting, 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 Andrew will lead the class, so join us on Saturday and get all your questions answered.
Membership Update
This past Sunday, we made Michael T. a catechumen. Please introduce yourself to Michael and let him know that you will be praying for him as he prepares to be fully received into the Church.
coming up
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.
It may seem like a long ways off, but it will be here before we know it—The Pascha Book Study! The study will begin on Bright Wednesday, April 19, and it will meet each Wednesday night at 7pm through May 17. This year’s study will be structured just like the Fall Theological Seminar; we will have a series of presentations that will focus on our new temple, but we will also be talking about men’s issues and women’s issues and how, as women and men, we will interact with one another in our new temple. Please plan on joining us, either in person or on Discord, for what promises to be a very important time in the life of our community.
One of the really fun features of life at St John’s during the Paschal Season is our Annual Talent Show. This year, the show will be on Sunday, April 30th, so if you play a musical instrument or do magic tricks or sing or tell stories or jokes or dance—or, really, do anything that brings joy to others—please consider participating in the show. If you have questions or need some specific equipment, please check with Rigel Thurston, but go ahead and sign up for your slot with this link: https://forms.gle/dJ37Trzm5eiCfbLv7.
And to keep the fun going all throughout the Paschal Season, on the Sundays following the Talent Show, we’re going to have live music during Fellowship Hour. We want to feature all the musicians in our community, so if you are part of a group or play an instrument or want to put together a group just for this program, talk to Rigel Thurston or use this link to get on the schedule: https://forms.gle/EdcAtJidfBW9nAjT9.
OUR MOMENT OF GRACE AND COURTESY
Since our first practical session of St Thomas School proved so popular, we are going to be highlighting a few of the liturgical etiquette tips in the weeks ahead. Here is Tip #4: When you approach the chalice to receive the Holy Gifts, please make sure that your chin is well over the cloth that the servers are holding. If you stop just short of the cloth, that increases the chances of a spill, so please get as close to the chalice as you can.
Things That Make Priests Happy
Baptizing and chrismating William, Tatiana, Anastasia, Adelina, and Dominic R. , along with Nicholas P. and Easton R.; discovering that Bessie J. has all kinds of agricultural experience; explaining to the chanters, along with Father Andrew, how the hymnography for the Leave Taking of the Feast of the Annunciation can be combined with the commemoration of St John of the Ladder, and then recalling this quotation from G.K. Chesterton: “We all know how natural it is at certain moments to feel a profound thirst to kick clergymen simply because they are clergymen”; offering the services for St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne; learning that John W. used to manage The Righteous Brothers; blessing Mike R.’s new car; celebrating the Feast of the Annunciation; standing in the altar in the morning sunshine.
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 Herbsaint Sazerac, whenever our iquanas get too rambunctious, we hose them down with garlic spray, and our Spiritual Advisor is Elder Galaction of the Holy Mountain.