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The One Joyful Week When Weddings Are Still Not Permitted

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The One Joyful Week When Weddings Are Still Not Permitted

Despite Bright Week's unbroken festal character and the total suspension of fasting rules throughout it, Orthodox canonical practice generally continues to prohibit the celebration of weddings during the week, a restriction that can seem paradoxical given how thoroughly every other normal restraint, fasting, subdued liturgical tone, ordinary greetings, is set aside for the same seven days, and clergy explaining the rule to couples typically point to the specifically Paschal focus the week is meant to hold without competing celebrations, rather than to any sense that a wedding itself would be inappropriate or unfestive.

The practical effect is that couples planning an Orthodox wedding must schedule around Bright Week much as they would around any of the fasting periods that do restrict weddings, even though Bright Week itself involves no fasting at all, a reminder that the liturgical calendar's restrictions on weddings track the specific character and focus the church wants a given period to have rather than simply following a single rule that austerity permits weddings and festivity does not.

Bright Week also has its own particular bread: the artos, a large loaf marked with the image of the resurrection or the cross, is blessed at the Paschal liturgy and kept before the icon of the risen Christ throughout the week, carried in procession each day, before being broken and distributed to the faithful on Bright Saturday, the loaf standing through the week as a further visible sign, alongside the open royal doors, that the risen Christ remains present among the gathered church.

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