Eastern Orthodox Forty Days of the Pascha of Our Lord [View all]

'Christ is risen from the dead,
trampling down death by death,
and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!'


Day without evening:

To the Orthodox, the celebration of Pascha reveals the mystery of the eighth day. It is not merely an historical reenactment of the event of Christ's Resurrection. It is a way to experience the new creation of the world, a taste of the new and unending day of the Kingdom of God.

This new day is conveyed to the faithful in the length of the paschal services, in the repetition of the paschal order for all the services of Bright Week, and in the special paschal features retained in the services for the forty days until Ascension. Forty days are, as it were, treated as one day.

[Attribution: paraphrased from OrthodoxWiki.]