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we must recover the meaning of this great joy. We must if possible partake of it, before we discuss anything else—programs and missions, projects and techniques.
One enters into joy.
The Eucharist is a liturgy.
Thus the leitourgia of ancient Israel was the corporate work of a chosen few to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah.
the Church itself is a leitourgia, a ministry, a calling to act in this world after the fashion of Christ,
The Eucharist is a sacrament.
At this stage we shall say only this: the Eucharist is the entrance of the Church into the joy of its Lord.
its essential leitourgia, the sacrament by which it “becomes what it is.”
The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession. It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom.
It is not an escape from the world, rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world.
For they are now on their way to constitute the Church, or to be more exact, to be transformed into the Church of God.
The purpose is to fulfill the Church, and that means to make present the One in whom all things are at their end, and all things are at their beginning.
We always want to make Christianity “understandable” and “acceptable” to this mythical “modern” man on the street. And we forget that the Christ of whom we speak is “not of this world,” and that after His resurrection He was not recognized even by His own disciples.
His glorification is known only through the mysterious death in the baptismal font, through the anointing of the Holy Spirit.
In church today, we so often find we meet only the same old world, not Christ and His Kingdom.
To leave, to come.… This is the beginning, the starting point of the sacrament, the condition of its transforming power and reality.
From the beginning the destination is announced: the journey is to the Kingdom.
To bless is to accept in love, and to move toward what is loved and accepted.
Upon this Amen the fate of the human race is decided. It reveals that the movement toward God has begun.
we begin with “common prayers and supplications,” with a common and joyful act of praise.
The liturgy is, before everything else, the joyous gathering of those who are to meet the risen Lord and to enter with him into the bridal chamber.
Beauty is never “necessary,” “functional” or “useful.”
As long as Christians will love the Kingdom of God, and not only discuss it, they will “represent” it and signify it, in art and beauty. And the celebrant of the sacrament of joy will appear in a beautiful chasuble, because he is vested in the glory of the Kingdom, because even in the form of man God appears in glory.
Man, with the aid of grace, is given the opportunity of relaying his fundamental essence, of really becoming that which according to his divine destiny he should be and longs to be, a child of God.
it unites act and reality in a supernatural childhood before God.
The next act of the liturgy is the entrance: the coming of the celebrant to the altar.
It is the very movement of the Church as passage from the old into the new,
It is the crucial and decisive act in which the true dimensions of the sacrament are revealed and established. It is not “grace” that comes down; it is the Church that enters into “grace,” and grace means the new being, the Kingdom, the world to come.
The knowledge about God results in definitions and distinctions. The knowledge of God leads to this one, incomprehensible, yet obvious and inescapable word: holy.
Now, for the first time since the eucharistic journey began, the celebrant turns back and faces the people.
As the new Adam, as the perfect man He leads us to God; as God incarnate He reveals the Father to us and reconciles us with God. He is our peace—the reconciliation with God, divine forgiveness, communion.
in the Orthodox perspective the liturgy of the Word is as sacramental as the sacrament is “evangelical.”
The proclamation of the Word is a sacramental act par excellence because it is a transforming act. It transforms the human words of the Gospel into the Word of God and the manifestation of the Kingdom.
the Word of God is the eternal coming to us of the Risen Lord, the very power and joy of the resurrection.
It is heard as the Word of God, and it is received in the Spirit—that is, in the Church,
Bread and wine: to understand their initial and eternal meaning in the Eucharist we must forget for a time the endless controversies
The Fathers called “eucharist” the bread and wine of the offering, and their offering and consecration, and finally, communion.
As we proceed further in the eucharistic liturgy, the time has come now to offer to God the totality of all our lives, of ourselves, of the world in which we live.
We know that we have lost this eucharistic life, and finally we know that in Christ, the new Adam, the perfect man, this eucharistic life was restored to man. For He Himself was the perfect Eucharist;
that in Christ has become the very life of man: a movement of adoration and praise in which all joy and suffering, all beauty and all frustration, all hunger and all satisfaction are referred to their ultimate End and become finally meaningful.
Man is a sacrificial being, because he finds his life in love, and love is sacrificial:
And we do it in remembrance of Him because, as we offer again and again our life and our world to God, we discover each time that there is nothing else to be offered but Christ Himself—the
we bring and “sacrifice”—that is, give to God—what He has given us; and each time we come to the End of all sacrifices,
God remembers us and His remembrance, His love is the foundation of the world. In Christ, we remember. We become again beings open to love, and we remember.
The bread and wine are now on the altar, covered, hidden as our “life is hid with Christ in God” (Col 3:3).
The Church, if it is to be the Church, must be the revelation of that divine Love which God “poured out into our hearts.”
Love alone creates and transforms: it is, therefore, the very “principle” of the sacrament.
“Let us lift up our hearts,” says the celebrant, and the people answer: “We have lifted them up to the Lord.”
It is the ascension of the Church to heaven.
It is because we have “constituted” the Church, and this means we have followed Christ in His ascension; because He has accepted us at His table in His Kingdom; because, in terms of theology, we have entered the Eschaton, and are now standing beyond time and space; it is because all this has first happened to us that something will happen to bread and wine.
