Bright Week is the seven days immediately following Pascha. Every single day of it is treated as Pascha itself.
Think of it this way: we don’t celebrate the Resurrection for one day and then move on. We’re so overwhelmed by what’s happened that we need a full week to even begin taking it in. Christ has trampled down death by death. The tomb is empty. Everything has changed. One Sunday can’t contain that.
A Week That’s Really One Day
Here’s what makes Bright Week different from the rest of the fifty days between Pascha and Pentecost. During those other weeks, we’re still in the Paschal season, we still sing “Christ is risen,” we still don’t kneel, we’re still celebrating. But Bright Week is more intense. Each day repeats the full Paschal services with the same hymns, the same joy, the same sense that this is the Feast of Feasts. We serve Vespers, Matins, and Liturgy daily, and they sound like Pascha because they are Pascha.
The Paschal troparion gets sung over and over: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.” If you come to services during Bright Week, you’ll hear it so many times it’ll be in your head when you’re driving down I-10 or standing in line at Brookshire Brothers. That’s the point.
What We Do (and Don’t Do)
No fasting. None. The fast is over, and during Bright Week we feast without restriction. Meat, dairy, wine, oil, all of it’s back on the table. This isn’t about indulgence for its own sake. It’s about living in the reality of the Resurrection, which has restored all of creation. We eat and drink with joy because death no longer has the final word.
We don’t make prostrations either. From Pascha through Pentecost, we stand upright. We’re a resurrected people now, raised with Christ. Bowing to the ground belongs to a penitential season, and this isn’t one.
And you’ll keep hearing the Paschal greeting everywhere. “Christ is risen!” “Truly He is risen!” People say it at coffee hour, in the parking lot, when they answer the phone. It’s not just a nice custom. We’re proclaiming the central fact of our faith to each other, over and over, until it sinks all the way down into our bones.
Why “Bright”?
The week gets called Bright Week because of the light. Christ is “the light of the world,” and His Resurrection floods everything with that light. The darkness of Hades couldn’t hold Him. Death itself has been illuminated from within and destroyed.
You’ll also hear it called Renewal Week, which is the English translation of the Greek word Diakainisimos. We’re being renewed, made new, brought from death into life. What was broken is being put back together. St. John Chrysostom’s Paschal homily, which we read at the Paschal Liturgy, captures this: “Let no one fear death, for the Savior’s death has set us free.”
Living It Out
If you’ve just come through your first Holy Week and Pascha, Bright Week can feel like coming up for air after being underwater. The services are shorter than Holy Week’s marathon. The mood is completely different, pure joy instead of solemn mourning. But don’t let the week just slip by.
Come to services if you can. Even one Vespers or Liturgy during the week will help you hold onto what Pascha means. If you can’t make it to church, keep the Paschal troparion going at home. Light a candle. Read the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection out loud with your family. The Church gives us this whole week because we need it, we need time to let the Resurrection soak into our lives, not just our heads.
Bright Week ends on Saturday evening at Vespers, when we begin moving into the rest of the Paschal season. But what we’ve celebrated during these seven days continues. We’re still Paschal people. We still greet each other with “Christ is risen” for another forty-three days. We still stand upright in prayer. The light that flooded the world on Pascha morning doesn’t go out. It just becomes the new normal, the reality we’re learning to live inside. That’s what the Resurrection does, it doesn’t give us a moment, it gives us a whole new world.
