The Liturgical Calendar and the Twelve Great Feasts

It’s a church that tends to love decoration and embellishment believing that worship should be really beautiful.


Transcript:

The Orthodox Church follows what is called a liturgical year. If you’ve been in a liturgical congregation before you’re familiar with that term, but if you aren’t it means that the course of the year is marked by various feasts and observances. There are in particular 12 great feasts. The greatest of the feasts is Easter, we call it Pascha, and it is the feast of feasts so it’s not included in the twelve. The 12 do include for example, Palm Sunday and Ascension and Pentecost and many of those other greatest hits that you probably would think of instinctively. The church year brings us through the entire story of Christ’s life, takes us from his conception, his teaching, his preaching, the death, the resurrection, and the Ascension into glory and in the course of that time also brings us to mind some of the events in church history, some of the events in the life of his mother, his disciples or the apostles who followed him. As the years go by as the centuries go by, of course more and more events, are added to our calendar so it just gets more and more enriched but those particular twelve feasts stand as road marks. Usually in an Orthodox church you’ll find a place where those twelve festal icons as they’re called, the icons of those feasts, are side by side on a wall. When you come into an Orthodox church for the first time you’re likely to see a lot of stuff. It’s a church that tends to love decoration and embellishment believing that worship should be really beautiful.