Zalestsy village, north-western Ukraine, March 31, 2016
Pupils of the Sunday school of the St. George’s parish of the Zalestsy village of the Rozhyshche district in Ukraine’s Volhynia region (also known as Volyn) gather daily at a local church to pray together. The new tradition has been introduced for the period of Great Lent at the initiative of the church rector, Priest Nikolai Zhuchen, reports the Pravlife.org website with reference to Rozhische.church.ua.
The road to the country school runs past the church and thus it occurred to Fr. Nikolai to gather the children before their lessons for morning prayer.
All begins with the joint singing of the prayer "The Heavenly King," and then the schoolchildren take turns reading prayers from the morning rule. Then all the pupils attentively listen to a piece from the Holy Scripture of the day and prostrate with the Prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian. This is followed by a short talk and at the end children take the priest’s blessing, venerate the icons and run to school.
In the evening the children gather together again: they play football, volleyball, ping pong, do gymnastics on the horizontal bar and parallel bars. After that they return to the church to recite evening prayers.
The Sunday school pupils sing the Creed by candlelight and again carefully read the prayers in turns.
