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| Kite flying at the Eiguliai UMC family picnic. |
Summer has finally arrived in Lithuania after a cool
spring. Lenten Season, Easter, and
Annual Conference have come and gone and now we enter the summer season with
children’s camps and family worship services outside. During the coming days, I will share some highlights of our
ministry in Lithuania these last six months:
This Easter was our first Easter to celebrate in Lithuania
and celebrating Easter in a new country
is always exciting. What are the
Easter traditions are here and what happens
in the church in the Holy Week
are some of the questions we asked
ourselves during these days.
We lived 14 years in Ukraine and were familiar with the
Orthodox Easter celebrations
and here in Lithuania, it is the Catholic Easter celebration
that is strong. It's
interesting to see and experience how the different
traditions are part
of how our Methodist church celebrates
Easter.
We began Holy Week with a Palm
Sunday celebration in one of the Methodist Church’s here in Kaunas.
We started outside the church where we all had
at one branch of a juniper tree, in Lithuania called a “verba”, (the lithuanian word means palm, but is use here in a liturgical sense) and
then processed in after various liturgical readings. In Ukraine, a pussy willow branch is
used, and is also use here sometimes. When palm branches are not
available, local fauna is used.
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| Getting ready to process inside |
During the service
branches were blessed
and tradition says that the branches should be be
taken home and dried. The needles are then saved
and burned as incense when people meet tough and hard times and the branches are, when they are dry, hung behind a holy
picture – as a reminder of God’s
protection over us.
We were not the only ones with branches in our hands,
everyone we saw on the street had them.
Near the Catholic churches, you can purchase a more elaborate artistic
version of the “verba”, which , after being blessed in church, you take and put
in a corner of your home also as a sign of God’s protection. We decided to get one for our
home:
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| All of these kinds are very nice. The juniper branch we used in the Methodist Church is in Helen's left hand. |
