Yikes. God be with you in your recovery, Nine_Two.
It’s not a physical injury, but boy did I put my body to the test with the giant feast that we had as the post-Resurrection liturgy Agape meal. Copts: You really need to calm down. Meat did not begin to vanish just because you couldn’t have any for 55 days. You don’t need to stockpile it and bring it out in a giant, comical, Fellini-esque display. I don’t even eat meat and they still roped me into eating literally everything else (“Well, you’re not eating meat, so you can take another plate!”). Abouna even put extra desserts onto my plate when I wasn’t looking and when I said “No, Abouna, I can’t…”, he said “No English. Food. You eat it.” (It’s true, he didn’t speak English, but come on!)
Nothing like stuffing yourself at one in the morning with enough food to last for the entire Holy Fifties and then trying to go to sleep. One of the deacons commented that I would make a perfect monk after he saw me abstaining from meat. I laughed, but if that’s what I have to do to get away from these shenanigans, maybe it’s worth looking in to!
Ahhh, Baaaaskha,
How do your churches celebrate it, non-Coptic Orthodox folks? Probably the most distinctive thing that separates it from an average liturgy for us is the dramatization of the resurrection (
this, though I don’t know what’s going on with having the big annoying projectors on during the reenactment…ours were/are definitely off, or else what would be the point of having the lights shut off?) that occurs a few hours in (the whole liturgy is from 6 pm to midnight, though in practice it goes a bit longer because the hymns are sung in the joyful or “efrahi” modes, which makes them last longer, and there are various hymns and long replies that are only used for that liturgy that wouldn’t be in a regular liturgy in any form). Do any other churches do this, or something like it? I’d never seen it anything like it before my first Resurrection liturgy last year, and it really stuck with me. I’m afraid no YT video does it justice…
