Great and Holy Friday / Friday of the Crucifix
(Remembrance of the holy saving sufferings of the Lord Jesus
Christ
Today is the great and sad day for us Christians in which the Lord
has been crucified.
It's a day of a great spiritual sorrow for all the Orthodox
Christian.
It's also the day in which we do venerate the holy shroud
(plashtenica) in which the Lord's body has been wrapped, after it
was removed from the life giving cross.
The priest takes the plashtenica and walks through the temple and
afterwards we do venerate the holy plashtenica (The dead body of
the saviour).
There is a local Orthodox Church tradition which I believe is very
specific to the bulgarian orthodox Church.
The plashtenica is placed on a table, the holy gospel and the holy
cross are placed by the priest over the plashtenica (the shroud),
after which grouped in a line (first the children, then the man,
followed by the woman) we the layman do kiss the holy gospel, the
cross and the plashtenica showing evidently our love for Christ and
his gospel and their respect for the Lord's Great Cross sufferings.
Further on the layman does crawl (under the table with the
plashtenica).
The crawling under the plashtenica in Bulgarian Orthodox Church is
a very known tradition by bulgarian people.
The crawling under the table symbolically shows that we take
participation in the Lord's death.
As it's written that we all who are in Christ are being death for
the world after the Holy Baptism.
There are probably other reasons for which the Church has
established the passing under of the holy plashtenica which I'm not
aware of.
What is sad is that most people does not really understand the real
symbolism behind the crossing below the plashtenica (crossing below
the table).
Thus many people who know the feast of Great Friday do come to the
church to cross below the plashtenica as an act of superstition, as
they don't really understand why they do it.
They simply interpret that crossing below the plashtenica would
grant them "good health", "a life success" or good fortune.
Many of those people who come to crawl under the table, are not a
regular on other Church services (Holy Liturgies) and therefore
completely miss even the basics of our Christian beliefs.
Many of those people who are not adept in faith, do come to the
Church with the only goal "to crawl below the table" and leave the
Church immediately after that ...
It's truly sad to see that especially when I know that we
Bulgarians are Orthodox Christian nation.
An Orthodox Christian nation who is starting to forget Christianity
...
Just to give you an idea on how people have left astray from
Orthodox Christian faith I can tell you for sure that the regular
Church goers who attend Holy Liturgies and have intermediate
knowledge of Orthodox Christianity and Church order in Bulgaria are
not more than 4% of all the Bulgarian population.
This means that probably no more than approximately 300 000 of
Bulgarians are in a communion with our Bulgarian Orthodox Church
and do regularly confess and take the sacraments.
Here is an Orthodox Singing of the core troparion for the day (in
Greek):