Christ is Risen! - المسيح قام - Христос Воскресе! - Χριστὸς ἀνέστη!

We pray you had a Blessed Pascha and were able to pray with us this past week. We know for sure the “pause” in New York City will continue until at least May 15 so it is doubtful we will be able to open the Cathedral before then, however, we will continue to bring you the services in the meantime via livestream. For the Pascha service last night, our Facebook statistics showed we reached over 10,000 people and had 4,500 “engagements” which means 4,500 people actually clicked on the livestream and watched for at least 3 seconds. At any given time last night we had around 250 people watching consistantly for most of the service. While this was the most of all the services, others had varying numbers, but Palm Sunday liturgy and Holy Thursday and Friday were also viewed by very high numbers of people. On our webpage last night/today we had over 47,000 hits with a similar amount last weekend.

Many of you have taken the time to thank me and my family along with Fadi and Mark for bringing you these services. On behalf of all of them, we would like to thank God and thank all of you in return for giving us the inspiration, strength and motivation to take a dark situation and bring the light of the empty tomb into it. Likewise, myself and the parish council thank you for your donations during this time. We can say “so far so good” but, as this drags out, we ask that all of you continue to send in your monthly pledges or make them online as we move from April to May and into the summer. Again, here is the link if you want to keep up with your pledges and other offerings on line:

https://st-nicholas-orthodox-cathedral.square.site

Tomorrow evening at 7:00pm NetTV, the local Roman Catholic station, will air a piece on our Paschal celebration. They interviewed me earlier in the week and then filmed a short part of last night’s service. They are on channel 48 for those with Fios and for those with Spectrum you can look it up. We should have a link at some point to view it online.

This week we will have services for sure on Wednesday evening at 7:00pm and Thursday morning at 9:30am (Orthros) and 10:30am (Divine Liturgy) for the Feast of St. George. There may be others that we will post as the week goes along.

As soon as we are able to return, we hope to have a big celebration, hopefully still during the Paschal season!

Click here for some photos from last night and the previous week. A couple of explanations, the "fence" was a virtual fence posted by Jiries (Jerry) Khoury for the usual Palm Sunday family photos that were missed this year. Me lighting the purple candles was one of the times I was lighting candles and saying prayers for those who offered candles online. Fadi and George have taken a Pascha photo every year together for several years. This year they put a tape measure between them to make sure they were six feet apart as a remembrance of this year. Enjoy! If any of you have other photos to add, please send them along!!!

Christ is Risen!

Fr. Thomas