St. Tikhon’s Monastery, the oldest Orthodox monastery in America, has published an in-depth, twelve-part video series on the fascinating yet complicated topic of Liturgics for Readers and Choir Directors in the Orthodox Christian tradition.
The Sunday of Holy Pascha and all the succeeding days of Bright Week follow a unique order of services dramatically unlike the order used throughout the rest of the year. Many psalms and other regular fixtures of the services disappear; the tone of the Octoechos changes every day instead of every week—in effect, Bright Week is a week of Sundays, a week of Pascha.
But the remaining days of Paschaltide, beginning with Thomas Sunday and concluding with the Leavetaking of Pascha on the day before Ascension, have many special liturgical features as well. While the order returns to something much closer to normal (compared to Bright Week), it still retains, in a quieter way, the joy and light of Pascha.
In this lesson we describe several of the most prominent features of the Bright Week order and of the Paschal order (i.e., post-Bright Week), and we take pains to distinguish between the two, as there is often much confusion regarding which practices pertain only to the first week of Pascha and which pertain to the 40-day period concluding with the Leavetaking.
Used with permission
