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This is my favorite church service of the year and I cry every time. It’s long as hell but worth it! If you’ve never been you enter the church in darkness, and everyone has a candle, so the first part of the mass is just by candle light.
This year I also taught the lovely adults who were becoming Catholic for the first time and it was just really gorgeous and lovely.
There are days being in organized religion is exhausting but at the Easter Vigil it always feels purely wonderful, beautiful, and radically hopeful
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It’s the darkest day of the liturgical calendar but Good Friday has always been one of my favorite services.
For the entirety of the matins, about 2.5 hours, every light in the church is turned off. At first, only the candles on the iconastasis provide a dim, warm glow. There is a shroud of Christ displayed in front of the altar, surrounded by fresh flowers and icons. This year, you could smell the sweetness of lilies from five feet away.
There’s no communion at this service, simply a veneration and a procession. When entering the church, everyone approaches the shroud on their knees, bowing their forehead to the ground three times and crossing themselves. Soon after, we are all given a candle and pass eachother’s flame around until you can see every face in the room.
Before the final veneration, the priest leads everyone outside, candles in hand, singing in unison. We process around the church three times, illumined only by the bright stars above and the light that we carry in our hands. I’ve always wondered what the Friday night traffic thinks about the 60 tiny fires moving along like ants on the hill as they speed through the dark mountains.
This year, my candle never went out.
1d ago
What’s going on in there? What kind of prayers come out?
Mar 23, 2025
Mar 5, 2024
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I was going through the Ignatian approach to education today (adapted from the Spiritual Exercises for those keeping track at home) and this tenet is just so good.
St. Ignatius says that a person, “ought to be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor’s statement than to condemn it.Further, if one cannot interpret it favorably, one should ask how the other means it. If the meaning is wrong, one should correct the person with love; if this is not enough, one should search out every appropriate means through which, by understanding the statement in a good way, it may be saved.”
This is very Hanlon’s razor (never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity/ignorance) and I just feel like having a curious posture like this is a major slay and makes us better people
Mar 7, 2024
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I gotta know what happens!!!
Feb 10, 2025
Like look at this shit. Just kinda sick tbh. The Eastern church invented maximalism which is just very slay for them (even if you aren't into God or whatever I feel like you can enjoy old buildings with tons of art everywhere)
Feb 2, 2024