Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Vasara! Summer!

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.
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:
All of these kinds are very nice. The juniper branch we used in the Methodist Church is in Helen's left hand.


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