Jesus Christ taught us to love and serve all people, regardless of their ethnicity or nationality. To understand that, we need to look no further than to the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). Every time we celebrate the Divine Liturgy, it is offered "on behalf of all, and for all." As Orthodox Christians we stand against racism and bigotry. All human beings share one common identity as children of God. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatian 3:28)

Members of our Parish Council are:
Joseph Barbera - Council Member at Large
Susan Davis- Council Member at Large
Carolyn Neiss - President
Marlene Melesko - Vice President
Susan Egan - Treasurer
Dn Timothy Skuby - Secretary

Parish Shared Folder - http://bit.ly/St-Alexis
Parish Members' Directory - https://stalexischurch.sharepoint.com (See Fr Steven for login information)

Pastoral Care - General Information

Emergency Sick Calls can be made at any time. Please call Fr Steven at (860) 866-5802, when a family member is admitted to the hospital.
Anointing in Sickness: The Sacrament of Unction is available in Church, the hospital, or your home, for anyone who is sick and suffering, however severe. 
Marriages and Baptisms require early planning, scheduling and selections of sponsors (crown bearers or godparents). See Father before booking dates and reception halls!
Funerals are celebrated for practicing Orthodox Christians. Please see Father for details. The Church opposes cremation; we cannot celebrate funerals for cremations.

The service schedule for the next two weeks (including Holy Week) is posted in this bulletin. Please familiarize yourself with the schedule of services as all will be held "in person" as well as on line.

Also included in this bulletin is the agenda for the next Parish Council meeting (April 14th via Zoom). Everyone in the parish is invited to attend. 

Upcoming

Blessing of Palms and Pussy Willows will take place on Saturday, the 16th during Vespers. If you have access to Pussy Willows, please bring some in (but they are going by rapidly!)

Blessing of Paschal baskets will take place on Holy Saturday, after Liturgy, and just before the Agape Meal on the morning of Pascha.

If anyone would like the graves of family members blessed, I will begin this on Sunday, May 1st. Please reach out to me directly. This is Sunday of St Thomas. Also on this Sunday, Daniel Cummings will be Christmated and received into the Orthodox Church.

Understanding the Icons of Holy Week
BY JONATHAN PAGEAU ON APRIL 18, 2019

Crucifixion in linden. 12 x 16″ by Jonathan Pageau
During Holy Week, the Orthodox faithful will see several icons in the center of the church being commemorated. Although we are used to interpreting icons as stand alone objects, I have found that it is sometimes best to see the language of icons as an inter-connected web of elements which speak to each other across different icon types. Brought together with other liturgical events, the iconological elements dance together in a powerful symphony of meaning. For example, how can we fully understand the meaning of the strange detail added to the icon of the Entry into Jerusalem, where we see a child helping another with a thorn in his foot, unless we consider that the image of The Bridegroom is to be commemorated the following day? This same Jesus who is being hailed as Messiah on Palm Sunday will soon be crowned by the very thorns God gave Adam and Eve as a curse.

What we see in the series of icons for Holy Week, starting on Palm Sunday, is a playing out of the extreme duality of the Passion, which culminates into the Lamentation Service for Holy Saturday Matins in statements such as this one:

He who holds the earth in the hollow of His hand is held fast by the earth; put to death according to the flesh, He delivers the dead from the grasping hand of hell.
The pushing to the extremes, showing us the Divinity of Christ, contrasted with his bodily descent into death, is there to ultimately flip the script of death and unite all things to Him who hung on the cross. And so we see a king entering the city. But this image of the king is revealed to be the beaten humiliated man. We see a king acclaimed with vestments placed at his feet who then proceeds to use his own vestment to wash his Apostles’ feet. We see Christ on the cross with wonder and disbelief, and we know that as he is dying, Hades is destroyed. Adam and Eve are being pulled out of the grave.

In the following video, I therefore go through the main icons of Holy Week and show how they are connected to each other, how they reveal the pattern of unity in extremes that we all experience leading up to Pascha.

Here is the video: https://youtu.be/vgmt5JGVv3I

Archpriest Dennis, Archpriest Michael, Deacon Timothy, Evelyn, Katheryn, Anne, Aaron, Veronica, Richard, Nancy, Susanne, Gail, Kelley, Nina, Ellen, Maureen, Elizabeth, Christopher, Joshua, Jennifer, Petra, Olivia, Jessica, Sean, Sarah, Justin, Edward, Dayna and Maria.

Please pray for our catecumens: Daniel and David.

Many Years! to Nina Naumenko, Lisa Egan, Christine Jankura on the occasion of their birthdays.

Memory Eternal! for Alex Martins and Alla Hamisevich

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• Pray for: All those confined to hospitals, nursing homes, and their own homes due to illness; for all those who serve in the armed forces; widows, orphans, prisoners, victims of violence, and refugees;
• All those suffering chronic illness, financial hardship, loneliness, addictions, abuse, abandonment and despair; those who are homeless, those who are institutionalize, those who have no one to pray for them;
• All Orthodox seminarians & families; all Orthodox monks and nuns, and all those considering monastic life; all Orthodox missionaries and their families.
• All those who have perished due to hatred, intolerance and pestilence; all those departed this life in the hope of the Resurrection.

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St Mary of Egypt. Martyrs Terence, Pompeius, Africanus, Maximus, Zeno, Alexander, Theodore, Macarius, and 33 others, beheaded at Carthage (3rd c.). Martyrs James (Jacob) the Presbyter, and Azadanes and Abdicius—Deacons, of Persia (ca. 380). Hieromartyr Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople. 

Prayer for family and friends in the Ukraine and Russia

Hope, Myron, Daniel, Stepan, Galina, Maria, Vladislav, Juliana, Oksana, Novel

If you have specific names of anyone you would like to have included here, please send them to Fr Steven.

Tone 1 Troparion (Resurrection)

When the stone had been sealed by the Jews,
while the soldiers were guarding Your most pure body,
You rose on the third day, O Savior,
granting life to the world.
The powers of heaven therefore cried to You, O Giver of Life:
“Glory to Your Resurrection, O Christ!
Glory to Your Kingdom!//
Glory to Your dispensation, O Lover of mankind!”

Tone 8 Troparion (St. Mary of Egypt)

The image of God was truly preserved in you, O Mother,
for you took up the Cross and followed Christ.
By so doing, you taught us to disregard the flesh for it passes away;
but to care instead for the soul, for it is immortal.//
Therefore your spirit, O holy Mother Mary, rejoices with the angels.

Tone 1 Kontakion (Resurrection)

As God, You rose from the tomb in glory,
raising the world with Yourself.
Human nature praises You as God, for death has vanished.
Adam exults, O Master!
Eve rejoices, for she is freed from bondage and cries to You://
“You are the Giver of Resurrection to all, O Christ!”

Tone 3 Kontakion (St. Mary of Egypt)

Having been a sinful woman,
you became through repentance a bride of Christ.
Having attained angelic life,
you defeated demons with the weapon of the Cross.//
Therefore, O most glorious Mary, you are a bride of the Kingdom.

(Instead of “It is truly meet…,” we sing the following)

Hymn to the Theotokos

All of creation rejoices in you, O Full of Grace:
the assembly of angels and the race of men.
O sanctified temple and spiritual paradise,
the glory of virgins,
from whom God was incarnate and became a Child –
our God before the ages.
He made your body into a throne,
and your womb He made more spacious than the heavens.
All of creation rejoices in you, O Full of Grace.
Glory to you!

Communion Hymn

Praise the Lord from the heavens, praise Him in the highest! (Ps. 148:1)
The righteous shall be in everlasting remembrance! He shall not fear evil
tidings! (Ps. 111:6)
Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
SUNDAY OF SAINT MARY OF EGYPT
1 April 1990

In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
On the fifth Sunday in Lent we remember Saint Mary of Egypt, and she can teach us a great deal of what we need to know. She was a sinner, publicly known, a temptation and a scandal to men. How she became a sinner - we do not know; whether there was evil in her, whether she was seduced or raped, how she became a harlot, we shall never know. What we know for sure is that one day she came to a church of the Mother of God - the image of perfect wholeness - and she suddenly felt that she could not enter it. We need not imagine a miraculous force preventing her from crossing the threshold; the force was probably - certainly - within herself. She felt that the realm was too sacred, and the person of the Mother of God too holy for her to dare walk into Her presence and stand in the precincts of the church.
This was enough for her to realise that all the past was darkness, and that there was but one way out of it: to shake off all evil and to start a new life. She did not go for advice, she did not go for confession; she walked out of the city into the desert, into the scorching desert where there was nothing but sand and heat and hunger, and desperate loneliness.
She can teach us something very great. As Saint Seraphim of Sarov repeated more than once to those who came to see him, the difference between a sinner who is lost and a sinner who finds his way to salvation lies in nothing but determination. The grace of God is always there; but our response is not. But Mary responded; through the horror of her new perception of herself she responded to the holiness, the grace, the wholeness and sanctity of the Mother of God, and nothing, nothing was too much for her to change her life.
Year after year, in fasting and prayer, in the scorching heat, in the desperate aloneness of the desert she fought all the evil that had accumulated in her soul; because it is not enough, to become aware of the evil, it is not enough even to reject it in an act of will, it is there, in our memories, in our desires, in our frailty, in the rottenness which evil brings. She had to fight for her whole life, but at the end of that life she had conquered; indeed, she had fought the good fight, she had become pure of stain, she could enter the realm of God: not a temple, not a place but eternity.
She can teach us a great deal. She can teach us that only if one day we become aware that in the realm into which we walk so freely: the church, or simply the world created by God and which has remained pure of evil although subjected, enslaved to evil, because of us - is so holy that we alone have no place there, we might in response to this sense repent, that is turn away from ourselves in horror, and turn against ourselves with stern determination. Then we could follow her example.
This example of hers is presented to us as a crowning moment of this spring of life, which is Lent. A week before we heard the teaching and call of Saint John of the Ladder, the one who has established a whole ladder of perfection for us to overcome evil and come to right. And today we see one who from the very depth of evil was brought to the heights of saintliness, and as the Canon of Saint Andrew of Crete says: 'Be sure that God Who could heal the leprous could heal the leprosy which is yours'.
Let us therefore see in her a new encouragement, a new hope, indeed, a new joy, but also a challenge, a call, because it is in vain that we sing the praise of saints if we do not learn from them and emulate them. Amen.