Great and Holy Friday ~ We have come to His Sacrifice and thus His Bridal Chamber

One must understand that the tomb of our Holy Bridegroom

is the place of His Resurrection.

We must understand that the Bridal Chamber is His Grave.

Great and Holy Friday:

I taught my Munchkin that Christ on the Cross

is killing death and every time he sees the Cross with Christ

he says, 

He is killing death.

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The awareness of the suffering of Christ will come as he 

grows and lives more in understood conscious suffering;

but with this I hope my munchkin always remembers

that Christ by dying has killed death

and that this Great and Holy Day is to be 

kept with great reverence

and with listening to and praying the

  Lamentations of Christ's Holy Mother.

This explanation is excellent: 

"On this day we commemorate the sufferings of Christ: 

the mockery, the crown of thorns, the scourging, 

the nails, the thirst, the vinegar and gall, the cry of desolation, 

and all the Savior endured on the Cross.

The day of Christ's death is the day of sin. The sin which polluted God's creation from the breaking dawn of time reached its frightful climax on the hill of Golgotha. There, sin and evil, destruction and death came into their own. Ungodly men had Him nailed to the Cross, in order to destroy Him. However, His death condemned irrevocably the fallen world by revealing its true and abnormal nature.

In Christ, who is the New Adam, there is no sin. And, therefore, there is no death. He accepted death because He assumed the whole tragedy of our life. He chose to pour His life into death, in order to destroy it; and in order to break the hold of evil. His death is the final and ultimate revelation of His perfect obedience and love. He suffered for us the excruciating pain of absolute solitude and alienation - "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me!" (Mark 15:34). Then, He accepted the ultimate horror of death with the agonizing cry, "It is finished" (John 19:30). His cry was at one and the same time an indication that He was in control of His death and that His work of redemption was accomplished, finished, fulfilled. How strange! While our death is radical unfulfillment, His is total fulfillment.

The day of Christ's death has become our true birthday. "Within the mystery of Christ dead and resurrected, death acquires positive value. Even if physical, biological death still appears to reign, it is no longer the final stage in a long destructive process. It has become the indispensable doorway, as well as the sure sign of our ultimate Pascha, our passage from death to life, rather than from life to death.

~ from Great and Holy Friday (emphasis mine)

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We will have these services this day:

9:00  AM Royal Hours

12:00 PM Great Vespers; Small Compline

6:00 PM Matins of the Lamentations

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We will process with the Shroud of Christ,

we will walk under and into Christ's tomb, lamenting

with His Mother His Holy Passion.