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Today, we celebrate the exaltation of the precious and life-creating(giving) Cross day in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church

The feast is extraordinary holy and beautiful, the priest brings the life-giving cross from the Altar and brings the Crucifixion cross on a table in the center of the Church.

While the priest’s crossing the temple with the precious life-giving cross in a small metal dish raising the cross over his heads, he sing the so called Troparion of the cross as you can read below:

Save, O Lord, Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance, granting unto the faithful victory over adversaries, and by the power of Thy Cross, do Thou preserve Thy commonwealth

Further on is the song,

"Before Thy Cross, we bow down in worship, O Master, and Thy holy Resurrection we glorify" is sang three times.

The priest blesses all the present clergy and layman in the the Church and leaves the life-giving cross for veneration.
Then we all the layman do line-up kiss and bow infront of the cross which brought salvation to us Christians and opened us the doors Christ.

As far as my understanding goes (though I’m not a competent person), today’s exaltation of the cross is minor feast and is different from the day of the so called Universal Exaltation of the Precious and Life-creating cross

The feast by God’s grace is one of the very blessed ones in the orthodox church and thus is an enormous joy for all us the orthodox christians.
Next to kissing the layman in the church are also offered to take a small branch of basil (a symbol of royalty) and better said as another blessing.

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Tags: The Exaltation of the Precious and Life-creating Cross day in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 27th, 2011 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Christianity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.