Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 10: The Paschal Cycle

On Great Saturday the use of the Lenten Triodion liturgical book transitions the next important book called the Pentecostarion. It includes not only Pentecost or the Feast of the Holy Trinity in Russian, but also the other festal times in the cycle after Pascha such as: Bright Week, Antipascha/St. Thomas Sunday/New Sunday, the Sunday of The Myrrh-Bearing Women, the Sunday of the Paralytic, the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman, the Sunday of the Blind Man, the Ascension of Our Lord, and Pentecost. In some Germanic languages in Europe, they use a root word that derives from directional term for “the east” instead of Pascha. The Venerable Bede thought the Germanic peoples borrowed a term from a spring goddess with the same root word for “east” or “sunrise.” There isn’t much evidence besides that. A possible better interpretation is that they adopted that specific word because it fits well with the orientation that Christians maintain toward the East – our ancient homeland. English uses the word Easter and German Ostern while Danish, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages use a variant of “pascha.” Slavic languages use various forms that basically mean “the great night” and Latin languages nearly all use a form of “pascha” as well as Greek. But the Sundays listed above after Pascha outline important realities in the life after the Resurrection. We are becoming healed, we are emptying ourselves of the emptiness in this world in anticipation of the resurrection, we are uncovering our spiritual blindness with the divine light, we are adorning our preparation for our own death with myrrh and we are beginning to sing of our own passing over into the eternal springtime of the new creation. 

The feast of Pascha lasts a week. In a similar way that Genesis recounts the creation and the rest of God, we rejoice in the new creation. Forty days after the paschal celebrations, the Ascension of Our Lord marks the leave-taking of Pascha, but we’re still in its cycle. The Ascension lasts eight days and it dates to around the 4th c. AD. The glory of God the Father is made manifest through the Son. We should live as if we are now never really separated from the Father just as Christ showed us in his earthly existence. Great Vespers speaks of this renewal of Adam’s nature in Christ and in relation to God the Father, “… and thou didst raise it [Adam’s nature] up above every principality and authority” (Pentecostarion, Stichera at Litiya). The Feasts of the Ascension and Pentecost together explains the Orthodox Church and how it works. Many Christians confuse how it’s possible to have a corporeal, visible Church and also invisible authority with Christ Himself as its spiritual Head. Christ was emptied and suffered, so does the Church. Christ lifted human nature above authorities, so is the Church. Christ was never really isolated from God the Father, so is the Church. Christ was filled with the Holy Spirit, and the Church too receives the guiding and authoritative truth and power of the Holy Spirit. The Church follows Christ who follows the Father in the Holy Spirit. The substance that keeps the body alive is explained. “Christ doesn’t part with mankind,” Metropolitan Hilarion teaches. The Ascension then is an image of the Second Coming; to judge people on earth is the last to be fulfilled. The end is like the beginning. 

Pentecost is about new life, the promise, the hope, the beginning of Christian life, and enlightenment. The Comforter is the Holy Spirit who brings these good gifts to the Church, which was promised at the Mystical Supper that we read in holy scriptures (John 16:13). Christ “relocates our zeal” to become members of His Body. The Holy Spirit too is inseparable from the Church, and it is manifest through fruit-bearing Christians, prophecies, leaders in the hierarchy, teachers, comforters, and peacemakers. The Holy Spirit is promised to bring unity, strength, leadership, and illumination. Any other structure or foundation will fall. The Tower of Babel is the anti-Pentocost because people with seemingly good intentions, who had a desire to reach the heavens in a unified transcendent spiritual experience, built a kind of church of humanity on purely earthly ideas of the spirituality and life. The babblers believed they could acquire heavenly things only through the worldly ways, which ultimately show division. There are, then, clear signs of where the Church is. The cornerstone of the Church must be literally Christ Himself who is not ever nor will ever be separated from the Father and the Holy Spirit, and by extension His Bride – the Church Herself. There is another promise often quoted by other Christians groups in relation to ecclesiological arguments, “And the gates of Hell shall not prevail against the Church.” Many interpretations abound from this scripture quote. Most probably don’t understand this as Christ the Conqueror who broke the gates of Hell already. Almost no one seems to interpret this passage as the destruction of Hell itself that was achieved, as we learned from the Lenten Triodion, Holy Week, and Pascha. Most would understand this scriptural passage in the context of how successful Christian empires or countries have fared publicly, and which Church will not suffer greatly from apostasy or heresies, or how well the bishops in the world look, act, or speak. Metropolitan Hilarion ties up this chapter by teaching that the Orthodox Church exists for all. Not only the chosen people of Israel or the chosen nations of Christians, but that all of Adam’s race will be gathered into Christ’s Risen Body. So, the prayers of the Pentecostarion require prayers “for the confined in hades” and the breaking down of “the bolts of Hell.” These prayers of the dead are necessary because we will see life clearer after death, and we still have a noetic existence. With that change, many people would probably feel regret and shame, and even though they would desire to approach God, they would feel unworthy. But our prayers on earth help those who are trapped in Hell and Hades. Metropolitan Hilarion quotes, “For the dead praise Thee not, neither do those in Hell dare to offer Thee confession” (Pentecostarion, Vespers, Kneeling Prayer 3). We can fast and pray for the human race. That’s the purpose of the Church. The next chapter discusses the apostolic foundation of this ecclesial mission and the spiritual disciplines we can take up in our fight at the gates of Hell, and how the feasts explain the connection to those realities and the Orthodox liturgical life and worship. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 9: Divine Services from the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee until Great Saturday

 The divine services that lead up to Great Lent include four preparatory Sundays and these days use the liturgical book called the Lenten Triodion. Usually throughout the year there are nine biblical odes that are chanted, but during this fasting season there will be three odes instead of nine in the canon. Liturgical “cycles” on whatever calendar, season, or sequence are “unified” in spirit. The major theme of the Lenten Triodion and Great Lent is repentance more so than baptism that used to characterize it as well. Christian groups define repentance or conversion differently. They have different expectations in how that works out in individuals. Metropolitan Hilarion outlines the meaning of repentance in an Orthodox manner by examining the scriptures, hymnography, and liturgical texts of the Church which encompasses a large history from the Old Testament up to today. Roman Catholics have a highly developed Catechism where doctrines, dogmas, practices, and questions are easily referenced and answered. The Orthodox do not always have this exact kind of resource not because it’s difficult to translate into many languages or to agree on matters of faith, but because the “catechism” is in the liturgical life and worship of the Orthodox Church. This ritual experience spans many generations of saints, monks, nuns, holy fathers and mothers, persecutions, empires and kingdoms, and missionary work. One could argue that this Orthodox compendium is more comprehensive and richer than any catechism or Protestant resource book today in the world. Metropolitan Hilarion gives us a taste of this beauty and order that defines how Orthodox Christians approach repentance during these divine services. 

The first Sunday of the Lenten Triodion is the Publican and the Pharisee. Some Christians have interpreted this passage as a rejection of tradition, ritual, and liturgical worship – that all the mysteries or sacraments of the Church along with clergy and hierarchy are not accepted by the apostles. This isn’t true at all. Both men are justified, but the Publican is more justified because of his humility. While the Pharisee does have good deeds, he is missing a humble attitude that would make his works acceptable sacrifices to God. The emphasis is on the whole change that happens from the inside out; the actions still matter. When the Publican nurtures his humility, he will give birth to many virtues that would include and go beyond what the Pharisee offered. But the pride of the Pharisee will give birth to many vices. So, the fact that both were in a worship service and following prescribed ritual actions isn’t rejected, but the hidden, interior, and noetic happenings of the heart are highlighted. 

The second Sunday also reminds us of holy scripture. It is the Parable of the Prodigal Son. This story is about “unspeakable mercy,” and it might challenge our ways of conceptualizing justice. We are called to think about the possible and “unique blessing” of “a spiritual inheritance” that we can attain through the Father’s mercy and Christ’s love, and that we can pass down to the next generation. A son or Christian will share in the same nature as the Father through grace; that’s the unity that will be celebrated at the Wedding Feast at the end of the age, that the Holy Trinity has united humanity back to the Divinity through the image of Christ Jesus, the Son of God. The image of repentance is captured with the phrase, “And he came to himself.” Again, there seems to be a dichotomy or rejection of one son and the acceptance of the other that would make the sinning son good and the obedient son bad. The careful reading of this parable shows us that God lets his light and blessings shine on the good and the bad; the obedient, older son isn’t doing anything wrong outwardly, but the heart is different from the younger son who has sought forgiveness from the father. It’s good to be the obedient son if your heart is right, and it’s also good to be the repentant son who seeks forgiveness and unity with the household of his father. It begins in the nous. One must first arise in one’s heart with a firm belief before making a journey that includes bodily efforts, it seems to be the case because the younger “came to himself” before he left the foreign land of passions. Other lands of passion are allegorically referred to as Egypt or Babylon in liturgical texts and holy scripture. 

It has been argued by some Christian authors that the Christian battle for the soul and body begins with a “Roman” style approach of subduing the body first, and by starting with passions of gluttony and the bodily sins. But it seems from these Lenten Sundays that repentance is a noetic activity that allows us to arise and employ our bodies in the great struggle we’re called to do. The Shepherd of Hermas likewise encourages the faithful to repent by first believing that change can happen. He explains that if we don’t believe it’s possible, we won’t try, and it won’t happen. If we do believe it’s possible, we can overcome our passions gradually through the grace of God. The main emphasis of fasting in Holy Orthodoxy is to fast from the passions, the inward illness of the heart, since even the demons don’t eat, but they still lust, envy, and desire to do evil. The word metania means both to make a prostration with the sign of the cross and repentance – metanoia – in the koine Greek of the New Testament. The word is related to the nous or heart, mind, and noetic. As many Orthodox saints have taught, dead bodies cannot sin or do any action. So, the real starting point of repentance is our heart’s desires. 

The Sunday of the Last Judgment is the third Sunday called Meatfare (Apokreo). We take leave of eating meat and we commemorate all of the departed. All types of death are mentioned, and for whatever reason. God might allow, command, or even will the departure of some people. Death is a great mystery and part of each person’s way of salvation. Death isn’t something outside of God’s divine will and providence. Besides, the Saturday of the Dead at Matins teaches, “Thou shalt make trial of all things in the fire.” Whether that is people who need cleansing or things that unfairly happened to humanity, all things will be tested and refined in this divine “fire.” The Church teaches, “Be of good courage, all ye dead, for death is slain and hell despoiled.” We remember our mortality and that can make us very humble and help us to change our minds. If we don’t change our minds, we do miss out on some “inheritance” since the Church also teaches, “And woe to all whose lives are sinful” (Lenten Triodion, Matins, Canon, Ode 4). 

We make trial of ourselves in Great Lent so that we don’t experience “woes.” An important part of Orthodox fasting and Lent is that repentance normally comes in stages. That can be a great blessing. Many Orthodox saints spent years and years praying, doing menial jobs, and following routine tasks before ever experiencing the divine light and freedom from the passions. Protestants historically have rejected fasting programs that have a ritual character. Roman Catholics fast from flesh meats specifically on Ash Wednesday and Holy Friday as a rule now. Orthodox Christians can repent gradually over time and seek forgiveness through God’s grace. This time period allows us to purify our hearts before we enter the eternal kingdom where we enter the presence of others and all the angels. We take leave of these foods because we recognize that love is our spiritual food that we seek. But the Prodigal Son, the Publican, St. Mary of Egypt, St. Ephraim the Syrian have found the inexhaustible table that they desired deeply to devour joyfully. 

The fourth Sunday of the Lenten Triodion is Cheesefare or Forgiveness Sunday. We repent with Adam, all of humanity that we have “cast off the robe woven by God, disobeying Thy divine command, O Lord, at the counsel of the enemy” (Forgiveness Sunday, Vespers, Stichera at ‘Lord I call’). We fast from pride, resentment, meat, cheese, and now holding grudges and hatred against others. We are slowly dying a spiritual kind of death to the passionate person. Some people, religious or not, might say that it’s silly to think that giving up some cheese will help my salvation. But careful study of God’s holy scriptures shows us that it wasn’t necessarily wine or wealth in itself that caused the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah, but “stomachs full on bread.” It was an excess of eating that caused so much sin and destruction along with the superfluous living that would follow that lifestyle. We are also reminded that the Lord took “the flesh of a Virgin” in order to “call me back into paradise.” Adam disrobed divinity given by grace. Christ robed himself in our flesh by the Spirit. To become humble could mean to recognize one’s nothingness, earthliness, a lower and more vulnerable mortal state of created order. But it’s a part of human nature to be this way. In the epic of the Iliad, Homer shows us that in his worldview of the Hellenic pantheon only humans like the enemies Achilles and Priam, Hector and Patroclus could understand eleos or mercy, which is the concluding theme of the entire poem. Likewise, we are creatures who can access forgiveness by participating in the rite of forgiveness on Cheesefare Sunday, and by always praying, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” Mercifulness reconnects us to love and our homeland in paradise. 

The way that Lenten Triodion leads us into the theme of Great Lent is by fasting, noetic prayer, repentance, forgiveness, all of which must start with ourselves. Abba Dorotheos teaches, “There is nothing worse than condemnation [of our neighbor.]” St. Ephraim the Syrian’s prayer articulates that teaching and it’s recited throughout fasting periods. The spiritual disciplines that the Church gives us as blessing help us to see our blind spots. The major one is our tendency to focus on the faults of others, and to forget our own. St. Andrew of Crete composed a Canon of Repentance. Like St. Roman the Melodist, St. Andrew wrote hymnography that addressed one’s soul as the interlocutor because repentance must begin in the deep abyss of the nous for metanoia to change our minds. In this season of fasting, the troparia abound. St. Andrew teaches, “Awake my soul, consider the actions which thou hast done; set them before thine eyes, and le the drops of thy tears fall.” In Holy Orthodoxy, a lot of attention is given comparatively to the gifts of tears, especially in ascetic literature and liturgical texts. It’s a way of purifying our heart. He also teaches, “O miserable soul, thou hast not struck and killed the Egyptian mind, as did Moses the great.” The real enemy is our thoughts that betray us and the demonic council that first tricked Adam. They can attack us at the gate of our brain and our heart. Where our thoughts desire to go, the body will be dragged to do its bidding. Metropolitan Hilarion brings up a question, “can modern people find contemplation?” Moses found it in the desert along with St. John the Forerunner, and many Christian ascetics in the world and in the monastery after them. 

There are many more Sundays included in Great Lent that lead up to Holy Saturday. Holy Week is a special time where we begin to focus our attention on Christ’s suffering leading to his resurrection. An important theme that builds up in the liturgical texts is the teaching that hell’s dominion has been “swallowed up” and that “the power of death has no more strength.” It is a great topic that Metropolitan Hilarion gives some deserved attention. On Great and Holy Saturday, the Church teaches, “Hell is king over mortal men, but not forever. Laid in the sepulcher, mighty Lord, with Thy life-giving hand Thou hast burst asunder the bars of death” (Matins, Canon, Ode 6). St. Gregory of Nyssa theologized that hell couldn’t be eternal just as God is eternal, since that would make the idea of distributive justice, punishment, or time itself deified in some way similar to the gods like Kronos who swallowed up his children, the bright Apollo, or Pallas Athena — brandisher of the spear. If death is “slain” by Christ who exalts and brandishes the Cross, then likewise is hell destroyed is the argument. There seems to be a necessary link between death and hell, or punishment. There is burning fire and judgment at the end. But interestingly, not mentioned by Metropolitan Hilarion in the chapter, is that a never-ending, non-corrective torture or torment of hell was a unique teaching of the Pharisees who used specific Greek words that differed from Christ and the Apostles to describe this terrible kind of ending. The next chapter discusses the Paschal Cycle. There is the pascha of the crucifixion and the pascha of the resurrection. All of Adam’s race is resurrected. If we choose, we can follow the path of the cross that contains many blessings and freedoms that we have been hindered from choosing.  

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 8: The Navitiy Cycle

In chapter 8, Metropolitan Hilarion outlines the major feasts in the Nativity Cycle. The Nativity Fast is mentioned in the East and the West between the 6th and 9th c. Many of the Old Testament prophets and righteous are mentioned in the commemorations and readings. On the Sunday of the Holy Fathers the genealogy of Christ is enumerated as well as the righteous patriarchs. Just as Adam generates our race through birth and death, so Christ regenerates our race through spiritual rebirth and our resurrection after death. This Sunday commemorates the Prophet Daniel and the Three Holy Youth in the Furnace, who foreshadow the birth of Christ. The Virgin’s womb is the fiery furnace that doesn’t burn the body or soul but is like gentle dew. Like much of the Old Testament foreshadowing, where there is Christ there is the Theotokos too. She is both “chosen” before the generations and the “fruit of all the previous generations.” 

Our spiritual regeneration happens in the quiet night of our heart. What renews the spirit renews the body. The incarnation is transfiguring body through the spirit, and it’s a preparation for the universal resurrection. An important note highlighted in the chapter is that Christ “voluntarily” through the perfect will of the Father came into this world as a human and took on the form of our bodies. And all the circumstances surrounding his birth and death are completely in God’s will. No one forces him to die this way or to be born this way. After so much sin, negligence and violence, God the Father sends the most innocent and precious person to Him, His Son Jesus Christ. God the Father sends an infant in the middle of a lost cause and bloody conflict on earth among this human race. That the Holy Trinity willed it to be this way to correct humanity is the most counterintuitive action to us. Many cultures like the Greeks and Romans considered the past civilizations as purer than current ones like the dilution of metals or the worship of a heroic age of peoples. Metropolitan Hilarion doesn’t answer whether or not “the fullness of time” was a subtle praise of Rome’s political power and or Hellensim’s intellectual height. But a reading of the Gospels should give us a picture of what that could mean. Christ’s volition is perfectly united with his body and divinity with His Father. Christ willingly took the census under emperor Augustus Caesar. There is no necessity driving Christ’s will to be born, baptized, enrolled, circumcised, and crucified. It’s all out of love for humanity who really doesn’t have much of a choice like the Israelites in Egypt or the Jews in Babylon. Just as there is no necessity coercing the Holy Trinity to express His love for us or give us grace through the incarnation and crucifixion, so too there is no coercion or necessity that controls how God will deal with punishment and judgment. That much is taught at least in the Holy Scriptures.  

Christ was born a king, but not according to the standards of Herod or Caesar. Christ did not ever cause, as it seems, or ever seek to cause the fall of the Roman Empire during his lifetime. He was worshipped by strangers and outsiders. The shepherds of Judea and the star-gazing Persians followed the Light and came to worship the true emperor of universe. In the Menaion, the vespers on the Eve of the Nativity teaches us that the transfiguration has already worked in the world, “Whom do you seek? … You have the appearance, but not the thoughts, of Persians.” The poetess Cassia the Nun teaches that Christians are “enrolled in the Name of the Godhead” instead of putting our hope in imperial Rome’s destiny. A bad character in the Nativity Feast is the Jewish King, Herod. The source of his murderous actions is his “faithlessness.” Metropolitan Hilarion points this idea of faith out. Earthly thinking and living does not produce “fruit.” Roman Augustus, Herod, some of the Pharisees may have leaves and trunk, but nothing to show for it. But why are the Persians and Jewish shepherds ready to receive the Light of the world in true worship? Maybe they had the faith that drew them closer to the heavenly star. They might have devoted themselves to better pursuits, or they might have had a better perspective of their mortality so that they didn’t forget their real position in the universe. A faithless world is cause of hostilities and destruction. The saints and martyrs are witnesses with Christ that our innocence and kindness will be returned for hatred and a cross, and they give evidence that a faithless life is destructive. Trust and faith in God is grown in the body and soul while we live here. It’s a time for planting and sowing and tilling the soil.

The compline of the Forefeast of the Nativity teaches, “Adam the prisoner has been set loose and freedom has been given to all the faithful ….” Christ is the New Adam and the Theotokos is the New Eve. Origen and many other church fathers taught that the end is like the beginning, and this is called a “fathomless mystery.” How can the Orthodox liturgical texts speak of a God who saves all our race, that is Adam, and punishment for the wicked, when there still exists incorrigible sinners and obedient saints? In the Menaion, the stichera at the praises for the Nativity matins teaches, “O Lord past all interpretation, glory to Thee.” And the great vespers of Nativity teaches, “O pre-eternal God, have mercy on us.”

Many Protestant Christians will object to blessing objects, especially by ordained clergy members. Of course, it’s true God doesn’t have to use water, circumcision, oil, and incense to do anything. But because we too are material and bodily, we must use our bodies to be saved like Christ showed us. Orthodoxy is unique among Christian groups in that we do not tend to look down on the body as an obstacle to our sanctification and healing. Orthodoxy locates the point of salvation in our bodies. Our thoughts and spiritual states do affect our bodies, but when our wills have been so damaged over the years by habits that sometimes we have to get down to the basics of behavior and practicing the disciplines of the Church through our bodies. This practical way is the remedy for becoming free of the captivity of the passions – many Orthodox monastics and saints have taught this to be true by experience and sound teaching. God planned before eternity to come into a body like ours to heal and correct our wandering ways.

God’s “pre-eternal” plan is the Holy Trinity’s will before all kinds of time, even beyond eternity itself. One of the goals for us is “to restore the image of God in man.” Our body is an image. Our body can either take a beating from our soul’s destruction or be lifted by it through Christ. The body is extremely important in Holy Orthodoxy for combating passions, saving our souls, and preparing for a good departure. St. Demetry of Rostov taught in his homily, “the saving name of Jesus was reserved by the pre-eternal counsel of the Holy Trinity.” Images like icons always have a name or an inscription, and it becomes an identity of the form. The Feast of the Circumcision, then, commemorates another willing and loving action of Christ for our salvation. Because Christ was voluntarily circumcised according to the very Laws that he created for us to follow, now the Gentiles can enter into Church without that physical sign. Our whole body should be “circumcised” or rather circumscribed by Christ in our noetic heart. The sign of the covenant through circumcision was fulfilled in Christ’s body, and we are the body of Christ. The Feast of the Theophany also speaks of sanctifying the waters and earth through his voluntary baptism in the Jordan River. An emphasis that is found in this chapter and the Nativity Cycle is the voluntary aspect of Christ’s life and death. There isn’t much analysis or detail on man’s will except to show that it is held captive one way or the other. There are many Old Testament types of baptism in Genesis, Joshua, Judges, 1-2 Kings, Exodus, and Isaiah. These types are incorporated into the liturgical texts in the form of monologues or dialogues. St. John the Forerunner, for example, exclaims to the Jordan River, “Though Thou are the child of Mary, yet do I know Thee to be the pre-eternal God.” The children slain at Bethlehem by Herod are given through baptism. In the Menaion, the matins service in canon 1, ode 3 teaches, “For through water and the Spirit sons have been borne to Thee …” Instead of Herod professing his mortality and helplessness, instead of crying out in self-condemnation and humility and remembrance of his own death, the children and their parents cry out for mercy. They too have a kind of baptism. Yet we are told in this chapter that baptism brings enlightenment. Theophany is called “The Day of Lights,” in St. Gregory the Theologian’s homily, and it’s a feast where the Holy Trinity is made manifest for the first time. Athanasius wrote a creed that stated, “There are not three eternals, but one eternal.” The “pre-eternal plan” of the Godhead, the Holy Trinity, endures, never fails, and saves all. The waters were sanctified through Christ’s presence and obedience to God’s will. That light and fire too are sanctified would be a logical extension.  

The Meeting of the Lord is celebrated on February 2 on a fixed feast date in the calendar. In the Menaion, the stichera of the great vespers service teach that, “He is brought as an offering to Himself, setting us free from the curse of the Law and granting light to our souls.” Part of the Gospel and “good tidings” preached in Hades is to have the freedom to see the fiery glory of Christ’s Light and His loving energies. Metropolitan Hilarion explains that this feast is simultaneously of the Lord and of the Theotokos. The feasts of the Church follow an inner logic that isn’t always strictly linear. The Theotokos is glorified as the “throne of the cherubim” and the “cloud of the Light.” It makes one wonder if She too will be on the same cloud of light that Christ ascended as when he returns at his Second Coming, since She is glorified also as “the portal of heaven.” The next chapter discusses the divine services from the Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee until Great Saturday, and how great sinners can become saints by opening up the gateway to Paradise.

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 7: Divine Services from the Beginning of the Church Year

In Chapter 7, Metropolitan Hilarion outlines the divine services from the beginning of the church year. It begins on September 1, and it is followed by The Nativity of the Theotokos on September 8. The Protoevangelium of James, also known as the Infancy Gospel of James, and our knowledge of the Scriptures give us an understanding of Joachim and Anna who are the parents of The Most Holy Mother of God, Mary. Their example teach us that God is always our helper, not riches or fortune. From Anna’s barrenness and prayers the Theotokos was born, and Mary was born for Christ and Christ was born for Mary. The Church glorifies the Theotokos. She is foreshadowed many times along with Christ in the Old Testament: the vessel of light, book of life, the bridal-chamber and many more images. She is so important and glorious that Orthodox theologians recognize her as “the book of the Word.” Mary is one unique source of the holy scriptures and salvation through her God-bearing life. Scriptural typology is replete with images of her ever-virginity and her high place in our salvation. In the Festal Menaion of the Church, Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpakos quotes troparia in his book Life After Death, “Today the ancient bond of the condemnation of Adam is loosed, Paradise is opened to us: the serpent is laid low. Of old he deceived the woman in Paradise, but now he sees a woman become Mother of the Creator.” The Theotokos is described as “the living temple” sitting enthroned. God also sits on thrones of angelic ranks in the heavens. Her glory and His glory are “beyond the universe;” this glory is beyond eternity, and it is a great mystery. 

The link between Christ and Mary is inextricably established. St. Andrew of Crete teaches this deep knowledge in one of his Homilies on the Most Holy Mother, “For after the first formation of humankind had been fashioned from pure and undefiled earth, nature concealed [our] intrinsic honor, having been robbed of grace by the lapse of disobedience.” Mary is the pure earth, the candlestick, the altar, the ark of the covenant, and more. To bear the One above Being and beings she must have a birth beyond the natural laws of barrenness and fallenness to the One who created this earth. St. Andrew teaches again that, “We exchanged the joy in paradise for perishable life … from it came death and hence the corruption of our race … [No one knew] how to correct human nature and by what means it might be restored quickly and easily to its former noble state.” Christians belong to Christ’s Race through the Theotokos, and no one before or after can rightly correct our mortal humanity; death is both the consequence and the cause of further sin and sorrow. So, the restoration -- called apokatastasis in the New Testament – and the Theotokos are understood to work together for the good of all humans. Her will is the will of the Father. Her volition aligns with God’s volition even at the “pre-eternal council” – a term that as often mentioned in this chapter. Also, chastity, chasten, and chastisement are interrelated, and both etymologically come from the Latin verb castigare – to make pure. Mary’s will is united with the Holy Trinity’s will, and she never stops shedding tears and interceding on our behalf, whether in this life or the next; that’s evident in many stories of the saints. St. Andrew of Crete continues his teaching, “And so [he has been pleased] to point out the way towards a free and truly passionless new life for those who have, as it were, been reborn by the baptism of divine regeneration.” The true freedom of the Christian is always to do what is right just like the Theotokos. Even the most well-known of the Greek philosophers taught that no creature can truly wish for their own destruction – except maybe for the demonic creatures. We only will what we think is good for us, Aristotle and Plato taught. But even the best of philosophy couldn’t ultimately correct our backward and dysfunctional way of living as humanity has been doing for ages. The incarnation, which many educated Athenians mocked, is impossible without the Theotokos; likewise, our “correction” or kolasis in both modern and koine Greek would be impossible. She hid Christ in her womb who is “above being.” 

Another great mystery is the typology of Mary as the New Eve and the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross of the Lord that is celebrated on September 14 after the Church of the Resurrection of Christ was built in 335 AD. After many miracles occurred during the founding of the true Cross by Empress Helen and Emperor Constantine at Golgotha, the theology of the New Eve and the Theotokos grew quickly in the churches. Like Eve is the Mother of all the generations of humans, Mary is the Mother of the whole human race, and the Theotokos prays that “all should be saved” since mothers never give up on her children; if she wept for Christ, she would also weep for the restoration of all people. Orthodox Christians keep the feasts because we want to rejoice with the Trinity, the Theotokos, and all the angelic ranks together now. Creation isn’t meant to use reproduction and generation to fight off death to perpetuate our species. In this sense, evolution cannot be true because “death isn’t natural,’ which is taught in the book A Christian Ending by Dcn. Barna. The world was supposed to create without death like the Most Holy Mother of God and Christ. True evolution is Christ’s Resurrection, and His Cross is the only kind of death that brings life, with our participation, and brings us into the whole family tree of beings under One Mother. Death isn’t the survival of the fittest but just the assurance of more death. Metropolitan Hilarion teaches us that holy scripture and the liturgical hymnography and texts are deeply interwoven and educative. Many of the foreshadowing and theological insights of the fathers are taken from the Menaion, and the stichera and songs of matins and vespers. Emperor Leo the Wise teaches us through the stichera verses, “Hail, O Cross, complete redemption of fallen Adam.” The redemptive value of Christ’s Cross and Mary’s voluntary vouch for our race is the best news possible. The stichera of the Menaion teach, “…that in His compassion He may save the world from error.” Tears and prayers and the cross give us hope that these actions of our Master and Mother of God will unfreeze our passionate will and nature. In Holy Orthodoxy, tears can be a gift from God.

There is another great mystery and feast called the Protection of the Most-Holy Theotokos that is celebrated on October 1. It happened to St. Andrew Fool for Christ on that same day that Mary appeared to him in Jerusalem. She was surrounded “in light blue light” and she was praying with tears and with her head uncovered for the worshippers in the church. She was praying at the altar table in the church and spread out her omophorion over them to protect them. She protects Christians from evil doers, demons, and natural disasters. The kontakia at matins in the Menaion teach that, “… the prophets rejoice together, since for our sake she prays to the pre-eternal God.” The Holy Trinity is before eternity. Many Christians seem to make the concept of time above God. But God created time itself. God isn’t bound by eternity, since His will and council and plan for Mary was before that. The word eternity comes from the Latin aeternum which is a translation of “ages” or eons (aion in the New Testament). God is timeless. No concept of infinity or finitude can encompass the Holy Trinity, and the Most-Holy Theotokos requests protection and salvation with tears despite such ideas of time. 

Finally, the feast of the Entry of the Most-Holy Theotokos into the Temple is celebrated on November 21. Again, this feast fulfills the “pre-eternal” plan of the Holy Trinity that foretells of Christ our Savior. Hades could not hold Christ, but the Theotokos held “the one of whom the prophets preached.” The Theotokos is the image of the Temple and the Tabernacle of heaven; She is the Tower like the Church being built until the end of the age. All ages have an end like this earth.  If the prophets and scriptural images are all pointing to Christ and the incarnation, likewise we cannot understand scripture unless we see the Panagia (the Most Holy Mother) as the key to the scriptures, view her as the book of the Word, and keep the feasts of the Theotokos. Since Mary’s life is connected to Christ’s life, the next chapter discusses the Nativity Cycle of Christ. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 6: The Formation of the Yearly Cycle of Worship

Remembrance is an important teaching and practice in the holy scriptures and in the divine liturgy. Orthodox Christians keep a daily and yearly note of commemorating saints and memorable victories over heresies and schisms and disasters, and we note them especially in our calendar by making fast and feast days out of them. Christ commands us to “do this in remembrance of me,” in participating in the Eucharist, not just as a symbol, but as a reality. Christ fulfilled the Jewish prophecies and scriptures so that we can inherit the “feast of feasts,” Pascha (Easter) and Pentecost – the major movable feasts of the Church. These are one of the most ancient feasts observed by Christians in the 2nd c. AD. The first Apostolic Council and the early controversies over the date of Pascha both dealt with the problem of Jewish adherents and Christians converts from Gentile or partially Jewish heritage. The Church in Ephesus and the local churches of Asia Minor celebrated Easter on a date that coincided with the Jewish celebration of Passover, which probably wouldn’t cause immediate suspicion in today’s Christian world. The Church in Rome, Alexandria, Corinth, and Palestine celebrated Pascha on the same fixed day. Bishops Victor of Rome and Polycrates of Ephesus came to the forefront to debate the dating of Easter for the whole Church. Metropolitan Hilarion doesn’t mention any motives behind the controversy that involved issues of authority or uniformity, but both sides seemed to have good arguments for their observance. The Ephesians were practicing a local tradition they attributed to the Holy Apostle John the Theologian. The Romans were following the shared tradition of remembering the day of the resurrection of Christ that begins on Saturday evening that continues into Sunday morning. Both churches wanted to give honor to God. St. Irenaeus of Lyons helped resolve the dating of Pascha. Eusebius Pamphilius remarked wisely, “the disagreement in regard to the fast confirms the agreement in the faith.” 

Although it’s known by tradition that forty days of fasting for Pascha was widespread in the Church, there wasn’t always a completely uniform way of fasting in terms of length. Even abstinence from certain kinds of food varied by local tradition, according to St. Hippolytus of Rome in the writing called Apostolic Tradition. Sometimes only three days of fasting was enough to prepare for Pascha, and some churches didn’t allow certain fruits. By fasting during Great Lent for Pascha, we remember Christ’s sufferings and tribulations. It would be difficult to recall in our heart Christ or anyone we love if we were distracted by enjoyments and entertainments and the commotion of daily life. Through the Typikon and the holy fathers of the Church prescribes fasting to remember not only intellectually but physically we become involved in the remembrance of holy things. After fasting during “the pascha of the cross,” we celebrate with inner feasting and joy “the pascha of resurrection” along with some foods that we have denied ourselves – most importantly we’ve abstained from the passions that we have denied ourselves to do. There are two paschas in Holy Orthodoxy. These two paschas seem to help to resolve the issue of the dating of Pascha and its estrangement spiritually from Judaism and its association with the 14 of Nissan. To celebrate the resurrection of Christ on a Jewish day of Passover might cause offense to Christians who wish to remember the true type of the Resurrection – Christ Himself. The cross and the resurrection are combined mystically in the Eucharist at the Last Supper, although they happened chronologically in a different order. We fast first, then we feast like Lazurus did when he entered his heavenly home in Paradise, where he lived in his heart during his earthly suffering and daily struggles before the Rich man.

But the Old Testament prototypes help us to understand the Orthodox celebration of Pascha. The service began on Saturday evening and ended on Sunday morning – a Jewish and Byzantine way of keeping time. The beginning of the paschal lighting of candles symbolizes the reality of how Christ’s gentle light penetrates the gloomy chaos just as the resurrection comes through the cross. The Old Testament prophets are read out loud because they foretold of Christ as the Light of the world and the Lover of mankind. The connection between the two paschas is powerful. Oddly to our logic, love increases with trials and temptations just as the Theotokos and Christ experienced life. In the West, the Catalan, medieval mystic, Ramon Llull, wrote a religious book called the Lover and the Beloved that is a dialogue between the Christ and the Christian. A poem is written for each day of the year. Poem 9 reads, “Tell me, my lover, said the beloved, will you have patience if I double your misery? Yes, if you just double my love.” Poem 10 reads, “The beloved said to the Lover: Do you know yet what love is? Replied the lover. If I did not know what love is, would I know what hardship, sadness, and pain are?” And poem 13 reads, “Tell me, crazy for love, who is the most visible, the beloved in the lover or the lover in the beloved? And he said, the beloved is in love, and the lover is seen in sorrow, in weeping, in hardship and pain.”  In the dizzying array of repetitious forms of the Latin root word am- meaning to love, to be a friend, we arrive at our mind’s heart, and we begin to remember by faithful hardships and fellowships. What we feel or grasp as “love” are often manifestations of fear, control, or trauma induced fawning. But through Christ’s resurrection, we conquer joyfully and with ease our fears, sins, and the last enemy – our death.  The Orthodox Church incorporated the poems of Melito of Sardis into the paschal celebration. In his work On Pascha, he teaches poetically, “But he arose from the dead and mounted up to the heights of heaven. When the Lord had clothed himself with humanity, and had suffered for the sake of the sufferer, and had been bound for the sake of the imprisoned and had been judged for the sake of the condemned and buried for the sake of the one who was buried, he rose up from the dead, and cried aloud with this voice: Who is he who contends with me!” 

In this chapter, no mention is made of a direct corresponding festival between Pentecost and Judaism except through the images and prototypes of the Old Testament, and no mention of any controversies over the celebration of Pentecost between churches. One of the purposes of this feast is to remember the descent of the Holy Spirit. What we begin to discern is that God crazily empties himself by descending and going down to us over and over in history. Christ descends to earth in the form of our flesh and becomes a real man; then, Christ descends to Hades and conquers it. The Holy Spirit descends on Christ at his voluntary baptism out of love for us, not because he needed to be cleansed. The Holy Spirit descends as fire on the Apostles and the Theotokos in the book of Acts. God the Father’s kingdom of heaven in the age to come will appear descending from the sky. In a sense, the kenosis of the Holy Trinity -- the self-emptying and descending – could be described as a kind of suffering for our good. At the end of this chapter, Metropolitan Hilarion has a section on the views of the holy fathers of the Church in the 4th c. St. Basil the Great has written many homilies, and he teaches, “Each person receives a share of sufferings, but Christ’s life consisted of sufferings and sorrows.” The book called My Elder Joseph the Hesychast has a similar teaching to the parable of Lazurus and the Rich man as well as the view of the 4th c. holy fathers. Elder Joseph imparted his wisdom to his disciples at his deathbed and Elder Ephraim recounts that, “Elder Joseph taught us the following ‘equation’ he had deduced from his own experience: the amount of grace we are entitled to receive is proportional to the severity of a temptation we can bear with gratitude towards God” (p.606). Both the Rich man and Lazurus receive God’s loving light; they receive whatever is “due to them,” and that experience of His glory always shining is felt differently by each person. We are taught humility no matter what course we take in this life; we will have to face our conscience when all is uncovered. St. Gregory the Great teaches that the word mystery comes from the Greek word meaning to cover, hide, and conceal. A covering can be a protection, but it also means “to remove the veil” from our birth that associates pleasures, success, and riches with goodness and beauty and truth while we associate suffering with misfortune, rejection, and evil. A mystery is a hidden triumph. Real circumcision is a heart that can enter Christ’s life and the protection of the Most Holy Theotokos. We not only participate in Pascha through mental efforts that help us to identify with the Gospel characters we hear in the liturgical readings, but also, we offer our own sufferings and trials that will come either in this life or the next life. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 5: Sunday Services and Daily Services

Marshall McLuhan is often quoted in The New Media Epidemic written by Orthodox writer Jean-Claude Larchet, which we read a few years ago here at St. John the Forerunner. McLuhan said, “I live right inside radio when I listen.” All forms of technological media have the power to change our orientation. Now the loss of perspective and the distortion of our sense of time and wakefulness are happening rapidly. The culture of print seems closer to the day when books will seem like scrolls to future generations. In the preface of Metropolitan Hilarion’s five volume series, he states that the Orthodox divine liturgy teaches theology. When we enter the liturgical texts and poetry with our heart and ears, and we look with our eyes at the icons during the chanting and praying, we live right inside of Christ and His life, which is commemorated in the Sunday and daily services. Prayer could be the most “subversive action” a Christian can take in this electric and economic age. 

Many of the liturgical prayers are put into liturgical verses called stichera – a chanted poetic medium that is both oral and textual. Some of them originated in Constantinople and others in “the mother Church” of Jerusalem. Not only the stichera, but also the canons, sedalens/kathisma, troparia, and kontakia “reveal” the substance of the texts and prayers of the daily services in the Octoechos cycle that runs from the Sunday of All the Saints in Pentecost time to the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee in Triodion time. The first service of the week is Saturday vespers (evening), which is the eighth day of the resurrection – so, the verses often sing of the resurrection of Christ and its meaning for Christians and all humanity. Christ is sung as the “heavenly King.” Earthly kings that we’ve read about or have heard about tried to unite people based on politics, ethnicity, economics, nationality, or whatever else is convenient. Many rulers and emperors have used religion to unite countries and diverse groups. We intuitively understand that a ruler ought to have a divine character and to be able to transcend social structures to judge and protect. Often saints transcend society’s expectations and pressures like Perpetua and Felicity of Rome did under the imperial pagan state. We rally around leaders and inspirational individuals and rulers; we adorn kingly places and queens because we are trying to approach Beauty. All these cyclical patterns of history and human behavior can be answered adequately in the resurrectional stichera and “songs of ascent” during resurrectional orthros that were drawn from St. Theodore the Studite. The bishop and priest, the choir, and the people work in common toward this goal of the next life during this life. Universities and hospitals are wonderful ways of bringing the kingdom of God to those who are in need; to fulfill the commandment to love others. We also fulfill the commandment to love God when we pray and worship in the divine services, and it’s where “we are doing the work that no else in the world is doing.” Christ Himself is the Resurrection – the summit of divine and human beauty.

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 4: The Formation of the Weekly Liturgical Cycle

Chapter 4 briefly discusses the cycle of weekly services and prayers of the Orthodox Church with its roots in the Old Testament and New Testament traditions. Whenever the Jews would gather for worship, they read the scriptures and prayed together. The Mosaic command “to remember the Sabbath” was kept by the Jews and continues to be fulfilled in the keeping of the Sunday service of the Lord’s Day – called kyriake in Greek. The Jewish religious authorities had conflicts with Jesus’ observance of the Sabbath is obvious in reading the New Testament. In Holy Orthodoxy, Christ is the Lord of the Sabbath. He never broke any commandments because the true Sabbath isn’t for idleness, indulgence, or indifference toward our neighbors, John Chrysostom teaches. 

The Sabbath or Saturday is the day of resurrection for Christians. The Messiah didn’t come first as an earthly ruler like a Caesar or Herod. Christ was renowned for his rabbinical learnedness, healings, divine authority, and many other miraculous events recounted in the Gospels. Most of all, he was regarded as the “king of the Jews” who is known with the plaque over his head “the King of Glory” in Orthodox temples. Christ accomplished much more than what most Jews and scribes expected the Messiah to be and to do for them. Christ taught us to carry our own crosses in self-denial. He also taught us to love both our brothers and sisters in faith as well as our enemies who haven’t held any faith in God. 

The Eucharist came to the forefront in Christianity since it was the reality of so many Old Testament prophecies and typologies in the holy scriptures. For example, just as the story of Joseph can be used to teach us God’s providence and control over events in history and our personal lives, to teach us to love those who hate us and persecute us, to teach us to have steadfastness in God’s plans, so Christ also became our servant, he was sold into being captured by the religious scribes, and he suffered as a righteous and innocent man who came to teach us to do the same today. Christ is the Master and Teacher of the Holy Scriptures through his teachings and example of his life. Sabbath means “he rested,” and it refers to Christ who rested after his works were done – his resurrection and ascension into heaven. Christ created the world for all people before the Jewish nation existed. The worship in the synagogue at times conflicted with the openness of Christians to allowing Gentiles into worship without requiring them to adopt certain customs like circumcision or abstinence of foods. The first Apostolic Council met over their growing issue of these Jewish practices and customs and what Gentiles needed to do to gain entrance into worshipping the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The exchange between the Sabbath observation on Saturday for the Sunday observation of the Eucharist and the remembrance of our Lord and Master Jesus Christ fills up the meaning of all the commandments. But also, Ignatius of Antioch writes in his letter to the Magnesians, “It’s outlandish to speak of Jesus Christ and to Judaize. For Christianity did not put its faith in Judaism but Judaism in Christianity.” The Messiah wasn’t about the preservation of a cultural legacy of the Jewish nation – not to make it great with wealth and earthly power, which are in fact enslavements to passions, as John Chrysostom teaches. True rest is a clean conscience and loving everyone without inquiring into their situation. It is joy in poverty of some kind and faith in God’s complete control over all turn of events. It is being able to see with our noetic eyes the so-called punishments and hardships of life as gifts waiting to be opened or a doctor’s medicine, like Lazarus thought to himself in his own sufferings. Christ had to be from the Jewish nation is prophetic and necessary. But the mission of Christ wasn’t an ethnic parade for a single group of people just at isn’t for any of today’s cultural categories. Today to judaize could mean putting anything as an obstacle to faith in Jesus Christ. It might be something seen as necessary for daily life or even needed to be a good Christian. Judaizing could be any cultural practice that would block us from discerning how “the Holy Trinity never stops communicating with us.” Timothy was half-Jewish, and Paul allowed him to be circumcised, but others like Titus, who weren’t Jewish at all, Paul forbade them to be circumcised, depending on how it would help or hinder someone’s faith and growing up in it. In the canons of the Church, “judaizing” meant circumcising Christians and resting on Saturday instead of Sunday to remember Christ and put our faith in Him, and not trusting the old customs to heal us, which Christ has fulfilled in his works on earth. The Eucharist heals us. In some places of the Near East, Saturday and Sunday continued side by side as distinct liturgical services and days of remembrance without replacing each other in meaning or observance. The Church in Constantinople observed Sunday as a day of remembering the departed as well as the remembrance of Christ in the tomb.  Ignatius also says that the Sabbath existed at the beginning of creation. In a similar way, at the end of time, we will no longer need the heavenly stars, the sun, the moon to mark our daily existence because Christ will be our Light – Christ is the Cosmos. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 3: The Divine Liturgy pp.196-214

This last section of chapter three in part three covers The Conclusion of the Liturgy and the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. The chalice is taken to the altar table, after communion is received, where previously the offering of the proskomedia was made for the living and departed at the beginning of Sunday liturgical services. A prayer of the priest reads, “Wash away, O Lord, the sins of those commemorated here, by the precious blood, through the prayers of thy saints.” On the level of people’s being and, in our nature, we enter friendships, clubs, groups, monasteries, and marriage to be in community with others. To be in community is to remember and to be remembered by others, especially through our relationship with the Most Holy Trinity and the Most Holy Theotokos. We commemorate all without leaving out the living or the departed, and remembrance runs as deep as eternity – our thoughts and prayers should live in the recesses of our heart. Our mental life tends to focus on the sensate world of analyzing the painful past or the fatalistic future; both concepts in fact tend to push us into living in a fantasy not the presence of Christ. And God is called “I am” and we proclaim “Christ is risen” to emphasize that it is right now that salvation is given, and love is possible.  Christ’s blood at the Cross and simultaneously in the anaphora where we offer and give thanks for the Holy Eucharist cleanses us from sins, and not only Christ Himself but through the prayers of other holy and healed people we call saints. Prayers make present all people in the Church like an electrical conduit connecting everyone in an instant. Rather than asking why God cannot just forgive and do everything Himself directly without saints, which He can, it’s better to ask what it means that we are called to become holy and help others through Christ’s power, and how our commemorations during liturgical worship can heal others through Christ’s Precious Body and Blood in the Eucharist. 

The source of all life is found in a relationship with the Holy Trinity and the Theotokos that isn’t dependent on chronological time – the past and future. The injustices of the past and the fears of the future are where the demons live, and they flee to the periphery in the presence of Christ and the Theotokos. But wherever we are and in whatever moment, Christ is with us here. His presence is neither what happened to us before or what will happen on earth in unforeseeable events. Remembrance pulls in everything to the presence of a person – it is an approach and attitude that isn’t affected by reactions or worries. Remembrance reaches out and takes all points of time into the face to face exchange of the person and people we love. To remember is to collapse all the boundaries of chronological order and allows us to enter loving relationships with everyone. So, the priest crosses his arms with the chalice toward the people and blesses saying, “Blessed is our God, always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.” These specific words aren’t accidental or coincidental. Remembrance is continuous without division or stopping points; we repeat ourselves to remember ourselves in Christ. We pray again and again the same prayers out loud so that what we say with our mouth goes into our ear and descends into the heart to complete the circuit of loving memory. 

In an electric age full of flickering lights, a secular vigil is visible from airplanes above and across cities. But in response, the choir sings, “We have seen the true Light.” This Light we have beheld in the liturgy, and we have partaken of in the Holy Eucharist is the same Light that preceded the creation of the world written in the Book of Genesis before the existence of the sun or moon or stars. “Light came before the creation of the world.” The Light is pure vision. It is healing sound. It is the true spoken word of intimacy and identity. The prayer of St. Basil the Great sums up the meaning of the liturgy, and the priest reads it in the sanctuary, “The mystery of Thy dispensation, O Christ our God, has been accomplished and perfected as far as it was in our power … we have had the memorial of Thy death … we have enjoyed Thine inexhaustible food, which in the world to come be well-pleased to grant to us all …” The prayer doesn’t necessarily have to be understood as “food” that we haven’t yet eaten or not yet granted to us now like many Protestant Christians understand heaven to be – a place where they are waiting to eat and drink but have not any access to it now. In Holy Orthodoxy, we have already been granted it. We go into the “world to come” when we go to the liturgy to worship God. Some Christians have emphasized a “not yet” aspect, but it is maybe more accurate to emphasize it as not fully revealed to us what we have received already; we will see clearer after our departure. It is not like other Christian groups who understand it as a “not yet” at all but a “not yet” more to be enjoyed. Like Christ lived in the next world while in an earthly body, so we live in the next age with the same kind of an earthly body. The kingdom of heaven is the Heavenly King. We have already seen, we have already been filled, we have already enjoyed the food of heaven, and there is more heightened enjoyment after death. We learn to eat the food of heaven rightly here to receive more food in the heavenly kingdom. The true Light and the true Faith are connected to the Heavenly and Holy Spirit, in the anamnesis (remembrance) and in the epiclesis of the divine liturgy. 

“Going to Church” isn’t only a private experience like reading alone in silence. Liturgical prayer is fully visible, and it happens bodily before other people’s presence, whether they are alive or have passed away. “Everyone exists because God never stops thinking about us; He always remembers us.” If that is true about God and about everyone’s existence, even after death, then “the damned” continue to exist only because God hasn’t stopped remembering them. God has one mind. If that kind of remembering is connected to feeding us and sustaining every person who has ever existed, then there is a great and bold hope in the ages to come. All other services such as vespers, matins or orthros, the hours – they all prepare and help us remember those who need our prayers in the liturgy. The next chapter discusses the Sunday Services and Daily Services in part four. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 3: The Divine Liturgy pp.174-195

This next section of chapter three covers The Prayer of Intercession, Preparation for Communion, and Communion. In the diptychs of local Orthodox Churches, bishops pray for other bishops as a way of remembering each other in communion and expressing universality. They pray, “Again we offer unto Thee this rational worship for the whole world; for the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church …” The martyrs are also remembered in the prayers of the Church. The prayers have no clear distinction between the living saints and the departed saints as a separate category of people needing prayers. Molebens are done for the saints and the panikhidas are done for the departed. Nicholas Cabasilas outlines several kinds of prayer in the liturgy: intercession, thanksgiving, and petition. Whether in English or any other modern language, there doesn’t seem to be an adequate and specialized vocabulary for translating and expressing these different kinds of prayer when we discuss Orthodox worship. We tend to reuse the same word, prayer, for different words. For example, we don’t offer petition to the Theotokos and the saints, but we do offer them thanksgiving prayers. The hierarchs commemorate other hierarchs, a country’s safety, all the armed forces everywhere, all the civil authorities, and generally for a “quiet a peaceable life,” whether under a monarchy or democracy or some other form of government. These prayers are as practical as the American documents that write of our life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Then, the bishop prays, “Again we entreat Thee: remember … [the Church], which is from end to end of the universe.” Remembrance is something Christ commanded us to do at the Last Supper, and it means “to have someone live within your heart” just as the Wise Thief prayed to the Lord on his cross and just as the Apostle John the Theologian and the Most Holy Theotokos understood when they leaned on the chest of Christ hearing his heartbeat. Remembrance helps us prepare for communion. Atonement means the same etymologically as communion (at-one, with-one). Atonement is the communion of God and man, not a means but the end that is finished. 

Then, the Our Father is prayed together. We ask God the Father for bread that is supersubstantial – the Greek word that is originally used in the New Testament prayer of Christ taught to us his disciples by word of mouth. Christ’s body is deified, transfigured, and this Eucharist, the bread and wine that becomes the Body and Blood of Christ, nourishes our nature of body and spirit. The Apostle John the Theologian teaches, “that which is born of the spirit is spirit.” This communion with Christ makes us holy. The bishop or priest says, “the holy things for the holy” before the faithful receive communion. The holy ones are the faithful, the brethren, the brothers and sisters, the martyrs of the Church. The catechumens are connected to the Church since all people have a kind of relationship with the Church whether they despise it or are outside of it. Whether they are in it and can participate in it or not. But they are not ready to receive communion, which is the major way of telling whether someone is or isn’t in communion with the Church. The Didache teaches speaking to the faithful members, “He who is holy, let him draw near, and he who is not, let him change himself.” Are Christians made holy by first not sinning at all? Are Christians made holy by the eucharist? St. Symeon the New Theologian – one of the handful of men and women who have that title and ability to teach as one in Orthodoxy – teaches, “So, how is this to be understood? He who is not holy is not worthy? Not at all. But he who does not confess daily the secrets of his heart, he who does not show necessary repentance for these secrets … he who does not weep constantly … is not worthy.” Belief is a verb, an action, a fully involved movement toward the desire of a person with faith. When we surround ourself with faith, we are only able to hear and follow; a person surrounded in reasonings, fears, and shrouded with dark, esoteric philosophies, sees many exit routes. St. Cyril of Jerusalem teaches his catechumens, “After this priest says, the holy things are for the holy. Holy are the gifts presented, since they have been visited by the Holy Spirit; holy are you also, … the holy things correspond to the holy persons [the Trinity] … For truly One is holy, by nature only; we too, are holy, but not by nature, only by participation, and discipline, and prayer.” Faith fully involves a person’s space and time, one’s body and mind are at one, not divided into separate sensory experiences, outlined by St. Cyril above as involvement, partaking, ascetical efforts, and praying. In general, a philosopher, a critic, a scholar, a journalist, a lawyer – these were jobs that tended to have difficulty becoming completely involved in their environment since they must take a step back from the situation to gain a perspective. Faith doesn’t attempt to count the stars or view the sky’s measure; it follows with some understanding, and it takes sure action with the correct image in mind. St. Symeon the New Theologian also teaches that a person who lives, “… life in groanings and tears is fully worthy not only on a feast day, but on every day, although it is bold to say, from the very beginning of his repentance and conversion to be in communion with these divine mysteries (185-186).” 

The way of receiving communion has changed a little over time depending on the circumstances. Infants couldn’t receive solid food yet, but they could receive it mixed in a cup. By mixing the bread and wine, it also protects the body of Christ from being taken away. St. John Chrysostom teaches that the faithful should say “Amen” after receiving communion, and that some people would touch one’s eyes with the eucharist. The custom of using a spoon for communion of the faithful – the clergy still partake of the Eucharist by hand and mouth separately – derives from the 7th c. most likely in Constantinople, according to John Meyendorff and Robert Taft. The Council of Trent, a dogma for Roman Catholics, taught that anyone who doubted that receiving only the body or only the blood was insufficient for salvation was anathematized, and up to present day, receiving communion is often talked about as “obligation” or “duty.” An unfortunate result not always existing in Western Christianity is the consequence of infants not being able to commune. Another consequence came of it when communion became obligatory for sins committed after baptism due to a “loss of baptismal grace” and incurring unworthiness, which must be preceded by confession first. In this way, Western Christians have adopted a very linear, logical, and visual point to point correspondence in liturgical life and eucharistic theology. Interestingly, Roman Catholics require that baptism be separated from communion until “the age of reason” when a child can grasp the mysteries and when they can read. That literacy or rationality become the requirements for communion is a strange consequence of this dogma – probably unintended. There is an order and prerequisite: faith and baptism. Infants can meet both of those requirements in their natural state, according to the eastern fathers of the Church. Holy Orthodoxy receive infants with all the mysteries simultaneously, and they pray noetically in their God-given innocence. Although infants do not have strong visual control and developed cognitive abilities, they are able to hear all from their surroundings; their ear catches everything and their heart prays ceaselessly. Whether the age, level of cognition, degree of sinfulness, communion is saving. Today, at least since ca. 600 AD, Orthodoxy always gives us both the bread and the wine at the same time in the divine liturgy. Dionysius the Areopagite teaches that infants communed with baptism and chrismation, and parents have the gift and upmost reverent and honorable position in the Church of raising children with holy communion. The effects of the Eucharist on children are profoundly life changing, especially when parents pray for them too. Dionysisus the Areopagite teaches, “Children raised up in accordance with holy precepts will acquire the habits of holiness.” A crucial and enormous divine role married Christians have in Orthodoxy, “to avoid all errors and all the temptations of an unholy life” for their children. The Most Theotokos was raised in the temple and kept “away from men” and she was dedicated from youth. Her upbringing might be a good model to follow for Orthodox families as much as it is possible in this quick moving electronic age. The next section discusses the conclusion of the liturgy and the liturgy of the pre-sanctified gifts to complete this chapter on the divine liturgy. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 3: The Divine Liturgy, pp.156-173

This next section of chapter three covers The Eucharistic Canon in the Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great and the Change of the Holy Gifts, and how this rich liturgy holds the whole theological understanding of the anaphora and the eucharist in the eastern Churches. To make offerings is what humans do naturally and collectively, as we can see in history, and it’s how we find our identity. In the anaphora, Christ is both the offerer and the offered. Some of the names attributed to Christ in the liturgy are “Great God and Savior, “the image of the Father’s goodness,” “seal of equal type,” and “Living Word.” At the same time as these positive terms the names of Christ are described apophatically, or, negatively. He is also God “without beginning [cause].” The names attributed to the Holy Spirit in the liturgy are also scriptural. His name is “the Spirit of Truth” and “the life-creating power.” The Holy Spirit guides rational creatures “to offer up to the Father ever-existing doxologies [hymns of glory].” Angels and humans are created to do this common work that the liturgy calls an offering – an anaphora in Greek. Rationality calls us to offer up what has been given to us back to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Eucharistic canon speaks of these realities. Anaphorical nature is eucharistic. 

Human reason lives within the realm of the senses in the world. It helps to understand spiritual things — maybe only in parables. It has its own goals on earth that is bound in its scope. The use of reasoning requires analysis of things that can be separated and understood parts separately in time and space. To the degree that is possible with certain aspects of the liturgical life of the church, it is very helpful. But we learn from the Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great that there are some major limits to our understanding of God in his essence. The anaphora is worked out in a community led by the Holy Spirit who bestows names on us while we cry out in prayer during the divine liturgy the names that help us and heal us. Our opposite natures then meet at that very point. The mystery of the ever-existing one gives us existence, the ever-living one dies on the cross and resurrects, the perfect meets the imperfect, humanity mingles with divinity, the beginningless one comes into flesh that began when God created us. God doesn’t change. Only our view of Him can change, since necessarily a viewpoint or worldview must look from one angle at a time while God sees all things at once. The anaphora is the point at which divinity and humanity meet. Rather than viewing apophatic (negative statements) and cataphatic (positive statements) about God as only opposites, they provide the means for different natures and energies to commune, as Dionysius the Areopagite teaches about the divine names of God in the Celestial Hierarchy. For example, the space of worship in heaven is filled up. The nine ranks of angels offer up to God praise with “unceasing voices” coming from all angles at once while they cover up “their faces and eyes” with their many-winged members. Anaphoras not only include the nature of all creatures but also it changes the whole environmental space and time of the universe. Offerings to the Holy Trinity fill the huge expanses of the cosmos with sounds of heaven. The doxologies surround God’s glory. So, the divine liturgy and eucharistic offering is a fully integrated and all-encompassing experience of eternal life that surrounds and fulfills every spiritual sensation like an amphitheater captures the sound of voices from every corner simultaneously. The Eucharist unites the deified flesh of Christ with our flesh so that we can save both our soul and body. 

The “change” (metabolon Gk.) of the Changeless One, when the bread and wine turn into the Body and Blood of Christ, the Holy Eucharist, is another theological aspect that differs somewhat from western Christianity.  How and when that happens has occupied the attention of theologians and it has been approached from many sides. The Orthodox Church has not defined when that change occurs visually or textually during the anaphora prayers from a human understanding. Although we cannot visibly see the change happen, we can hear the praises and prayers acoustically as a way of exercising our faith in God’s power. Western theologians, however, have attempted to pinpoint where and when, in fact, there is a change in terms of logic, visual rituals, and the pronouncement of specific words and phrases in liturgical texts as the true cause of this mystery. The eucharist becomes the Body and Blood of Christ, and He becomes our “food,” Metropolitan Hilarion teaches. We cannot just symbolize what is substantial – what is “our daily bread.” If Christ didn’t become our sustenance, our source of life for body and spirit, then the problem of sin remains and the way we abuse materiality and our own bodies through our passions. We would only return to the original starting point in the garden of the physical food as the material for temptation and the soul would still be tied to flesh that hasn’t been deified and uses it to continue sinning. 

The fruit would continue to be “merely fruit” instead of divinized food touched by the Holy Spirit just as in the first creation read in the Book of Genesis. It can be fruit and spirit; what was uncovered was recovered. Fruit and food are no longer just “bare elements” when they are offered rightly to the Holy Trinity. We take all our resources and nourishment on faith in general. We experience it, wait for it, and over time we are persuaded to follow a path to gaining life that is worth the risks and unknowns. All human action must be grounded on the assumption of faith to begin its orientation toward its goal. St. Cyril of Jerusalem teaches his catechumens. He says, are we not allowed to drink enough from the river to satisfy and nourish us? Are we to go away thirsty because we cannot drink up the whole river? Faithful people who go to the liturgy live within a body that has a nous, a gift of God. Humanns require the use of reasoning to understand animals, atoms and the atmosphere, and we proceed and probe these areas of creation from a kind of hope to gain and gather more from them to improve and grow in life. 

Contrary to the principal of philosophic doubt leading to new discoveries and truths in science, a kind of reasoning method applied to the world of natural laws, persuasion and faith are enough to find truth, not fully seen here. That road of faith is also a common work of humankind. For example, we created the use of bread from what God has made – the plants, trees, and seeds of the earth. Metropolitan Hilarion calls bread and wine “our custom.” God receives this customary food as an offering to make it holy and deified, which will deify our own bodies. Out of bare elements, Christ ties himself into our way of making food and drink. He puts his life into creation and into our bodies, who are also part of the particles that are “never lost.” Food, then, is never really eaten without some degree of faith, and it cannot be merely symbolic, otherwise the characteristic of substantial is lost. 

The Latin school of theology emphasizes the visual aspects of this “change.” When western Europe received Greek texts, many of them from non-Christian, classical antiquity, they developed an approach to explaining the relationship between God, creation, and mankind. Their view was built largely on the logical and literate world of the alphabet and law, much like Byzantium. Rather than taking a broad understanding of the effects of the eucharist on the whole of creation, Latin theologians used Platonic and Aristotelian principles to help defend and preserve the change of the Eucharist into the Body and Blood of Christ. They explained that change through “transubstantiation” and they linked that to the specific and obligatory “words of institution” spoken by Christ in the New Testament at the Last Supper. The words themselves, then, became of primary importance in western European culture around the late Middle Ages, and especially later in the Renaissance. Greek philosophy, which some Byzantine refugees brought to Italy, helped Latins and other far western Europeans formulate their theology of the eucharist. The classical Greco-Roman literature itself, not necessarily the Greek Byzantine characters, influenced Italians and French to coagulate into what would become the Enlightenment and the “Age of Reason” – a deification of the abstract mind and reasoning powers of humanity — in fact, a fragmentation and separation of the senses of sight and sound through private reading. What is common between Roman Catholics and Protestants, even though one holds to the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the other denies it, is that the words themselves take on a greater meaning than other aspects of theology. For Roman Catholicism, transubstantiation is framed carefully with Thomistic and Aristotelian terms and a keen focus on the wording of the anaphora – only specific words can be used to make the Eucharist change. Rome made transubstantiation a dogma in a few councils in the 13th c. and 14th c. In it, the meaning of that term outlines a distinction. The bread and wine are called accidents, outer characteristics, while the essence, is what it in fact is and becomes. They teach that the elements of bread and wine disappear while visibly they still look like normal food. 

The Orthodox Church understands this change of the Changeless God in a similar way to the Transfiguration at Mt. Tabor and Theophany of Christ in the Jordan River. The eucharistic change could be understood as a transfiguration. When the Holy Spirit came down on Christ as St. John the Forerunner baptized Him, Christ was still both God and man. When the Father spoke on Mt. Tabor, who was heard audibly and remained unseen, Christ shone in Light, but he was still both God and man in the flesh.  In the Orthodox canon of the eucharist, unlike the Latin Mass, there is no “loss” of substance, either spiritual or physical. Latin theology explains that the bread and wine no longer are bread and wine. The earthly elements disappear. But the Holy Eucharist is 

“supersubstantial.” Our food becomes more than in addition to what we are offering to God the Father. The meaning of anaphora is to take what God created and given to us, and to make something more, and then offer that back to God in a new form while retaining some of the original. God can receive it and sanctify and unite to Himself and to us. The strange effect – maybe illogical humanly speaking – of sacrificial offering and anaphora to the Holy Trinity is that nothing is lost in giving something up, but even more abounds because of faith. The Orthodox faith grasps both the accidents and the essence of in Platonic-Aristotelian terms simultaneously and mystically. In this way, Orthodox anaphora makes sense of Latin transubstantiation. The change – the metabolon – is an all-at-once happening, not segmented through history, not limited, or separated by points. The logical order of liturgical life and anaphora remains extremely important, but the change of the Changeless One is beyond what humans can do to make sense of our earthly experience of space and time and language. Despite that theology found in the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great, some Russian theologians still accepted Latin theology. For example, Peter Mogila wrote a Catechism in the style of today’s Roman Catholic Catechism and he used transubstantiation as well as many other Orthodox theologians to defend the Eucharist against Christians who doubted it. But many recent Russian theologians rejected this western conception of the eucharistic canon. For example, Ouspensky, Schmemann, and Meyendorff helped to revive a truly eastern understanding of the Holy Eucharist. When transubstantiation is pushed to an extreme, it becomes a kind of modalism that might come close to untying the two natures of Christ by association. If the elements do disappear, and we are not consuming deified food in our nature, then there is a risk of the bread and wine becoming symbols, not deified and unified food – the very conclusion that was meant to be avoided. Reasoning relies on mental perception through the senses. Faith rests in the heart, the nous in the body, through an integrated experience and understanding of the world. Socrates said, people cannot call themselves happy until they have ended their life. There is enough wonder in ourselves, nature, history, and the cultural traditions of wisdom to understand and be persuaded that we have a body and a soul, that eternity and death are realities, and those facts have the most persuasive connection in the Orthodox teaching of the Eucharist that link with the doctrines about Christ Jesus. The Holy Eucharist is two one; Christ Jesus has two natures united in one person. Humans find their identity in the body with the soul. Christ is perfect God and perfect man. St. John of Damascus teaches that Christ has two natures in one like “bread united with divinity.” Anaphora transfigures the “plain stuff” into something higher without loss but increase. Like “coal united with fire isn’t plain wood” so too bread and wine united to Christ’s Body and Blood is supersubstantial food that we eat for our deification in body and blood, healing our souls. If transubstantiation means that Creator and creatures have restored a link and bridge to go across to each other and abide with each other while we maintain our own substances, then eastern and western Christians could agree with each other’s use of that term. The Russian emigres theologians didn’t receive this Roman dogma as a teaching that would fit into the liturgical life of the Orthodox Church. 
Every particle participates in the total renewal of creation. Faith is a holy gift of preparation and an element of “change” toward the Changeless God in our prayers during the divine liturgy, not in ratiocination, that seeks to perceive the eternal “utterance” in the echoes of our flesh and noetic heart. The next section discusses the Prayer of Intercession, Preparation for Communion, and Communion.