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How I Got Up The Butter Mountain

There are things in the Psalms that you don’t know about until you read the whole thing. Aloud. In a dark church on the night of Good Friday. Did you know about the butter mountain in Psalm 67? I kid you not. In the Orthodox Church, the tradition is to keep all-night vigil at the […]

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There are things in the Psalms that you don’t know about until you read the whole thing. Aloud. In a dark church on the night of Good Friday. Did you know about the butter mountain in Psalm 67? I kid you not.

In the Orthodox Church, the tradition is to keep all-night vigil at the symbolic Tomb of Christ, reciting the Psalter round the clock. We’ll be doing it pretty much unbroken until the Paschal liturgy tonight. I took the one a.m. to six a.m. shift last night, because I like being in the silent dark church all night, just me and the Psalms and the Holy Spirit. But after three, it got to be rough going. I thought about the penitents of Dante’s Purgatorio, hard at ascetic labor, but joyous, because they knew Who it was for, and they knew where they were going.

Courage, people. We’re almost there.

UPDATE: The “butter mountain” verse is from the Septuagint version of the Psalms, which the Orthodox Church uses. More information about that here.

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