Robert F. Taft SJ - Liturgy: Model of Prayer, Icon of Life

LiturgyModel of Prayer, Icon of Life 1
Liturgy
Model of PrayerIcon of Life
An Orthodox-Catholic Liturgical Retreat
by
Archimandrite Robert F. Taft, S.J.
Eastern Christian Publications

Fairfax, VA
2008
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Bibliography
Reflection 1Lord, teach us to pray (Lk 11:1)
Reflection 2Liturgical Prayer, Icon of Our Life in Christ
Reflection 3Liturgical Prayer, Icon of Our Prayer Life
Reflection 4The Earthly Temple, Icon of Our Redeemed World
Reflection 5The Divine Liturgy, Icon of Our Prayer Life I
Reflection 6 The Divine Liturgy, Icon of Our Prayer Life II
Reflection 7 The Divine Liturgy, Icon of Our Prayer Life III
Reflection 8 The Divine Office, Icon of Our Prayer Life
Reflection 9Mary-Theotokos, Icon of Our Prayer Life
Reflection 10Great Lent, Icon of Our Prayer Life
Reflection 11You be the Icon, by Fidelity to the Icon of Our Liturgy
INTRODUCTION
This small book has its origins in the annual retreat given to the community
of the Ukrainian Catholic Seminary of St. Josaphat in Washington DC on January 7-
10, 2008, at the invitation of the seminary Rector, Very Rev. Fr. Robert J. Hitchens. I
entitle my remarks reflections rather than meditations, or prayer, since they
are not meant to be prayer but a stimulus to prayer. Prayer comes from the heart
of those praying, not from someone else talkingunless of course that someone
happens to be God, and my pretenses have not yet reached that level of
presumption.
In fact, my pretenses do not even extend to professing any special
competence in the spiritual life or expertise in spiritual direction, and though
already an old man, I do not imagine myself to be anyones starets but just a
starik. But I do have competence aplenty in matters liturgical, and know perfectly
well and have often written on what liturgy is and what it is meant to do. That is
why I have chosen as the theme of these reflections Liturgy: Model of Prayer, Icon
of Life. If you want to know what that means, read these reflections. They express
my vision of what liturgy is and of what, from an Orthodox-Catholic point of view,
God meant it to be in our lives.
Nothing I say here is new: old men cannot be expected to have new ideas,
but at the most just to give a new spin to their already tried and mature vision of
things. So I readily admit that much of the material in these reflections is resumed,
usually in abbreviated and simplified form, without the scholarly apparatus, from
among my numerous other writings on liturgy, 1 especially those cited in the
Bibliography that follows:
1
For a more extensive bibliography, already superceded by numerous more recent
publications, see Bibliography of Robert F. Taft, S.J., in Mark M. Morozowich (ed.), Saints
SanctityLiturgy. For Robert Francis Taft, S.J. at Seventy, January 9, 2002. Symposium
Papers and Memorabilia (Fairfax, VA: Eastern Christian Publications 2006) 71-108.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbreviations used in the text and footnotes:
CCC = Catechism of the Catholic Church (Washington DC: US Catholic Conference 1994)
references refer to paragraph numbers in the margin.
CSS = Cistercian Studies Series.
Mansi = J.D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, 53 tomes in 58 vols.
(Paris/Leipzig 1901-1927).
NPNF = A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian
Church, ed. P. Schaft (Grand Rapids MI) series 1: 1974-; series 2: 1952-.
OCA = Orientalia Christiana Analecta (PIO, Rome).
OCP = Orientalia Christiana Periodica (PIO, Rome).
PG = Migne, Patrologia Graeca.
PIO = Pontificio Istituto OrientalePontifical Oriental Institute, Rome.
PL = Migne, Patrologia Latina.
SpEx = St. Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises references refer to paragraph
numbers in the official editions.
SC = Sources chrtiennes.
PRINCIPAL WORKS OF THE AUTHOR

USED IN THE PREPARATION OF THESE REFLECTIONS
AND CITED IN ABBREVIATED FORM IN THE NOTES
A partire dalla liturgia. Perch la liturgia che fa la Chiesa (Pubblicazioni del Centro Aletti,
Rome: Lipa 2004).
Beyond East and West. Problems in Liturgical Understanding. Second revised and enlarged
edition (Rome: Edizione Orientalia Christiana 1997) = Oltre loriente e
loccidente. Per una tradizione liturgica viva, trans. Sara Staffuzza (Pubblicazione
del Centro Aletti 21, Rome: Lipa 1999).
Cielo in terra. Spazio e orientamento nelle liturgie dellOriente e dellOccidente:
convergenze e divergenze, in G. Boselli (ed.), Spazio liturgico e orientamento. Atti
del IV Convegno Liturgico Internazionale, Bose 1-3 giugno 2006 (Comunit di Bose:
Edizioni Qiqajon 2007) 217-239.
Communion in the Holy Spirit in the Byzantine Liturgy, in Orientale Lumen IV Conference
Proceedings 2000, June 19-23, 2000, at the Catholic University of America,
Washington, DC (Fairfax, VA: Eastern Christian Publications 2001) 17-46.
The Fruits of Communion in the Anaphora of St. John Chrysostom, in I. Scicolone (ed.),
Psallendum. Miscellanea di studi in onore del Prof. Jordi Pinell i Pons, O.S.B.
(Analecta Liturgica 15 = Studia Anselmiana 105, Rome: SantAnselmo 1992) 275-
302.
A History of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, vol. II: The Great Entrance. A History of the
Transfer of Gifts and Other Preanaphoral Rites (OCA 200, 4th ed. Rome: PIO 2004).
A History of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, vol. V: The Precommunion Rites (OCA 261,
Rome: PIO 2000).
A History of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, vol. VI: The Communion, Thanksgiving, and
Concluding Rites (OCA, Rome: PIO 2008) in press.
Liturgy and Eucharist. I. East, in Jill Raitt (ed.), Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and
Reformation = vol. 17 of World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious
Quest (New York 1987) 415-426.
Liturgy as a Locus of Identity Formation in Consecrated Life, in Transfiguration in the Lord.
Materials from the Sobor for Religious of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, held
in Lviv, Ukraine, 8-11 September 2004 (Lviv 2004) 37-53.
Liturgy as Expression of Church Identity, Folia Athanasiana 1 (Nyregyhza, Hungary
1999) 29-45.
Liturgia come espressione di identit ecclesiale, in Congregazione per le Chiese Orientali,
Lidentit delle Chiese Orientali Cattoliche. Atti dellincontro di studi dei Vescovi e
dei Superiori Maggiori delle Chiese Orientali Cattoliche dEuropa, Nyregyhza
(Ungheria) 30 giugno - 6 luglio 1997 (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana 1999) 119-
136.
The Liturgy in the Life of the Church, Logos 40 (1999) 187-229.
The Liturgy of the Great Church: An Initial Synthesis of Structure and Interpretation on the
Eve of Iconoclasm, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 34-35 (1980-1981) 45-75.
The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West. The Origins of the Divine Office and its Meaning
for Today. Second Revised Edition (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press 1993) = La
Liturgie des Heures en Orient et en Occident. Origine et sens de lOffice divin
(Mysteria 2, Turnhout: Brepols 1991) = La Liturgia delle Ore in Oriente e in
Occidente. Le origini dellUfficio divino e il suo significato oggi, 2a edizione

revisionata con nuova traduzione di Sara Staffuzza (Pubblicazioni del Centro Aletti,
Rome: Lipa 2001).
The Living Icon: Touching the Transcendent in Palaiologan Iconography and Liturgy, in
Sarah T. Brooks (ed.), Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557). Perspective on Late
Byzantine Art and Culture (The Metropolitan Museum of Art Symposia, New York:
the Metropolitan Museum of ArtNew Haven and London: Yale University Press
2007) 54-61.
Marian Liturgical Veneration: Origins, Meaning, and Contemporary Catholic Renewal, in
Proceedings, Orientale Lumen III Conference June 15-18, 1999, at The Catholic
University of America, Washington, DC (Fairfax, VA: Eastern Christian Publications
1999) 91-112.
Maria SS. Madre di Dio, in G. Marani (ed.), Omelie di Natale (Betelbrevi saggi spirituali 4,
Rome: Lipa 1997) 43-57.
Praying to or for the Saints? A Note on the Sanctoral IntercessionsCommemorations in
the Anaphora: History and Theology, in M. Schneider, W. Berschin (eds.s), Ab
Oriente et Occidente (Mt 8,11). Kirche aus Ost und West. Gedenkschrift fr Wilhelm
Nyssen (St. Ottilien: EOS-Verlag 1996) 439-455.
The Theology of the Liturgy of the Hours, in: Handbook for Liturgical Studies, vol. V:
Liturgical Time and Space, ed. A.J. Chupungco (A Pueblo Book, Collegeville: The
Liturgical Press 2000) 119-132.
Through Their Own Eyes. Liturgy as the Byzantines Saw It (Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox
InstituteThe Paul G. Manolis Distinguished Lectures 2005, Berkeley: InterOrthodox
Press 2006).
To drink of the one Spirit (1 Cor 12:12): The Theology of Ecclesial Communion in the
Byzantine Divine Liturgy, Proceedings, Orientale Lumen EuroEast I2004
Conference, May 10-13, 2004, Constantinople, Turkey (Fairfax VA: Eastern Christian
Publications 2004) 87-105.
The Veneration of the Saints in the Byzantine Liturgical Tradition, in J. Getcha and A.
Lossky (eds.), Thysia ainevseos. Mlanges liturgiques offerts la mmoire de
lArchevque Georges Wagner (1930-1993) (Paris: Presses S. Serge 2005) 353-368.
War and Peace in the Byzantine Divine Liturgy, in T.S. Miller & J. Nesbitt (eds.) Peace and
War in Byzantium. Festschrift for George Dennis, S.J. (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press 1995) 17-32.
What shall we call you? Marian Liturgical Veneration in the Byzantine Tradition, lecture
at the International Conference on Reverence for the Most Holy Mother of God in
the Christian East, at the Centrum Spirituality Vychod-Zapad Michala Lacka, Koice,
Slovakia, 25-26 November 2005, published in the Conference Acta (Koice 2005)
121-140.
1: Lord, teach us to pray 6
Reflection 1: Lord, teach us to pray (Lk 11:1)

In Lk 11:1 we read that the disciples, seeing Jesus praying, asked him: Lord,
teach us to pray. Let us make the same prayer as we begin our retreat. For a retreat
is nothing if not prayer, and to pray we need to know what prayer is. The kinds of
prayer are many. In this first reflection, I am talking about what is usually called
private prayerthough of course no prayer is private in the sense of being done
alone, since it wells up from the Spirit of God who dwells within us. St. Paul tells us,
No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 12:3). Furthermore, our
prayer is always done in company with the communion of saints to which we belong
by baptism.
I. Jesus Teaches Us How to Pray
As with everything in the spiritual life, Jesus is the model of our prayer. 2 How
did Jesus pray? He prayed liturgically, for the New Testament presents him
participating in the Jewish festivals, in the cult of the Jerusalem Temple, and in the
synagoguei.e., in the Jewish liturgy of his day. More important for this opening
reflection of our retreat, we also see Jesus praying privately, and therefore implicitly
teaching us how to pray indirectly, by example. Jesus prays in solitude (Lk 6:12),
especially when conflicted and distressed, as in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mt 26:36-
46; Mk 14: 32-42; Lk 22:40-46), praying for comfort and relief in his sorrow. He prays
to the Father in blessing, adoration, praise, glorification, thanksgiving, petition and
intercession (Mt 11:25-27; Lk 10:21-22; Jn 12:41-42). He prays the wonderful prayer
of farewell to his disciples in Jn 17. He prays in anguish at the hour of his death on the
cross (Mt 27:46; Mk 16:34; Lk 32:34, 43, 46; Jn 19:30).
When asked directly how to pray, Jesus teaches his disciples the Our Father as
the ideal model (Mk 6:9-15; Lk 11:2-4). He also instructs them to pray without making
a show of it, but quietly, humbly, and in the spirit; not with long prayers in public
like the Pharisees (Mk 12:40; Lk 20:47), but in solitude, using few words (Mt 6:1, 5-8),
humbly asking forgiveness like the publican (Lk 18:9-14). Jesus tells us to pray
persistently, even obstinately, pestering God until he gives us what we want just to
get rid of us (Mt 7:7-12; Lk 11:5-13, 18:1-8). And we see Jesus own example, praying
in the morning (Mk 1:35), in the evening (Mt 14:34; Mk 6:46; Jn 6:15), keeping night
vigils (Lk 6:12) and exhorting his disciples to do the same, telling them to Watch and
pray, for we know not the day nor the hour (cf. Mt 9:14-15, 25:1-13; Mk 2:18-20,
13:33-37; Lk 5:33-35, 13:35-40; cf. 1Thess 5:2; Rev 3:3, 16:15, 19:9). Jesus also
teaches us to pray always and not to lose heart (Lk 18:1), to pray with faith and
confidence (Mk 11:24), because he assures us our prayers will be answered (Mt 7:7-
11; Lk 11:9-13; Jn 15:7, 17, 16:26; Jas 1:5-8)though of course not necessarily in the
way we want. For as we pray in the Prayer of the Third Antiphon: fulfill now the
requests of your servants in all things good for us.
So Jesus shows us that there is nothing for which we cannot pray except sin;
he teaches us prayer of petition and thanks and sorrow and pardon and importunity
and even complaint. And this prayer is both Christian and Trinitarian. For one can pray
to the Father in Jesus name (Jn 14:13, 16:24; Phil 3:17, Eph 5:20); one can pray to
Jesus directly (Mt 1:40-41, 2:5, 5:28, 36, 7:29, 9:27; Mk 10:46-52; Lk 23:39-43); and
one can pray in (1 Cor 12:13) and to the Holy Spirit, as in the Byzantine Heavenly
King, Consoler, Spirit of Truth, or the Latin prayer Come Holy Spirit. Christian
prayer is also Marian prayer, for we imitate the Fiat (Lk 1:38) and Magnificat (Lk
1:46-55) of the Theotokos, and constantly invoke her intercession (CCC 2617-2619).
As to when we should pray, Jesus commands us to pray always, an injunction
repeated several times in the NT (Lk 18:1, 21:36; Eph 5:20, 6:18; Col 4:2; 1 Thess
5:17-18). And from the start, beginning with the NT itself, we see the first Christians
2
See the excellent, succinct treatment in J.L. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible (Milwaukee
1965) 688: Prayer 2. NT.
following Jesus example of prayer.3 From then on the Fathers and Mothers of the
Apostolic Churches of East and West4 right up to the spiritual fathers and mothers of
today maintain this teaching and follow this example.
II. What is Prayer?
How do these spiritual guides define or describe prayer? What, in their view,
does it mean to pray? St. John Damascene (ca. 650-749), last of the Greek Fathers,
wrote in his classic treatise On the Orthodox Faith 3:24, that Prayer is the raising of
ones mind and heart to God, or the requesting of good things from God. 5 More
recently, St. Theresa of Lisieux, the Little Flower, surely one of the most beloved
saints of the 20th century, dear to Christians of both East and West, said more simply,
in more direct feminine terms: For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple
look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial
and joy.6
So prayer is always a turning toward God in any one or all of the multiple ways
it is given us to do that: in words or without, in thought, in love, in anguish or sorrow,
in joy or depression, in thanks or complaint. There are no limits to it, and there is no
definition that can exhaust its fullness, for its ways are myriad: Prayer is talkingbut
also listening; prayer is askingbut also receiving; for prayer is not our gift to God,
but his to us, in the Spirit, the Paraclete or Comforter he has sent to be with us always
(Jn 14:25).
For a more full and technical modern definition of prayer we find the following
in the excellent Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2564-2565):
2564. Christian prayer is a covenant relationship between God and man in
Christ. It is the action of God and of man, springing forth from both the Holy Spirit and
ourselves, wholly directed to the Father, in union with the human will of the Son of God
made man.
2565. In the New Covenant, prayer is the living relationship of the children of
God with their Father who is good beyond measure with his Son Jesus Christ and with the
Holy Spirit. The grace of the Kingdom is the union of the entire holy and royal Trinity
With the whole human spirit.7 Thus, the life of prayer is the habit of being in the
presence of the thrice-holy God and in communion with him. This communion of life
is always possible because through Baptism, we have already been united with
Christ (cf. Rom 6:5). Prayer is Christian insofar as it is communion with Christ and
extends throughout the Church, which is his Body. Its dimensions are those of Christs
love (cf. Eph 3:18-21).
III. Ways of Prayer
Spiritual writers describe many ways of prayer, some of them overlapping
and more or less synonymous. There is liturgical prayer, vocal prayer, mental
prayer, meditation, contemplation, lectio divina, hesychia or the prayer of quiet,
as it was called in the West. Some of these terms are open to misunderstanding.
Mental prayer or meditation, for instance, might be mistaken for just thinking
or reflecting, which in itself is not prayer at all. And some spiritual writers devalue
vocal prayer as if it were second-rate, considered just words recited by rote, with
no necessary interiority. Indeed, there have been times in the history of the Church
when even liturgical prayer was looked on much in the same way, and considered
secondary to contemplation or interior prayer.
The truth of the matter, however, is that most methods of prayer include all
or at least several of the many ways of prayer: one contemplates an icon,
meditates on a psalm or other scriptural text or spiritual topic; reflection on this
holy icon or Divine Word moves ones heart and inspires one to speak to God about
what is on ones mind and in ones heart, and then to listen attentively for the
3
Examples and texts in Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours chapter 1.
4
On the instruction of the early Fathers on prayer, see ibid. chapter 2 and Part I passim.
5
Cited CCC 2259.
6
Cited CCC 2258
7
St. Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 16, 9, PG 35:945.
response of his grace. The same with vocal prayer or the prayer called lectio divina
in the ancient tradition of western monasticism. It is not just spiritual reading of
some pious text, but a slow, prayerful, meditative reading during which one pauses
as the heart is moved to ponder and speak to God of what has moved ones spirit.
This is the same as the classic second method of prayer of St. Ignatius of Loyolas
Spiritual Exercises (SpEx 249-257). St. Jean Baptiste Marie Vianney, better known
as the Cur dArs, recounts how one of his French peasant parishioners called
contemplation a gaze of faith, a communion of love. When asked to describe his
prayer before the tabernacle, he said I look at Jesus, and He looks at me (CCC
2715).
All these ways of prayer are found, if under different names, in the classical
eastern and western spiritual writers. One of my favorites is 19 th c. Russian
Orthodox Bishop Feofan Zatvornik or Theophan the Recluse, a spiritual master who
lived from 1815-1894. Ordained a bishop in 1860, after six years he resigned and
retired to a small monastery to live a life of prayer and seclusion. 8 Feofan, who calls
prayer standing before God with the mind in the heart, distinguishes three
degrees of prayer: bodily or vocal prayer, prayer of the mind, and prayer of the
heart or prayer of the mind in the heart. Oral or vocal prayers, Feofan teaches, in
an insight of genius, originated as purely spiritual prayers that only later became
oral by being written down. When we pray them now, we must reverse the process,
he writes, and
enter into the spirit of the prayers which you hear and read, reproducing them in
your heart; and in this way offer them up from your heart to God, as if they had been
born in your own heart under the action of the grace of the Holy Spirit. Then, and
then alone, is the prayer pleasing to God. How can we attain to such prayer? Ponder
carefully on the prayers which you have to read in your prayer book; feel them
deeply, even learn them by heart. And so when you pray you will express that which
is already deeply felt in your heart.
The same is true of the liturgical chants. Citing the teaching of St. John Chrysostom,
Feofan says: The songs must primarily be spiritual, and sung not only by the
tongue but also by the heart.
By the continual practice of this prayer with the mind in the heart ones
prayer becomes spiritualized and takes on a life of its own, becoming self-
moving, as Feofan calls it, when prayer exists and acts on its own, i.e., is moved
by the grace of the Spirit, and not by ones own human will. Slowly, words
disappear from the prayer, which becomes the hearts wordless unceasing prayer
of love. There is nothing whatever in this description of progress in interior prayer
that is foreign to western spirituality, despite the frantic attempts of the clich
mongers to seek everywhere irreconcilable differences between East and West.
The early hesychasts also evolved a physical method, a system of bodily
posture and breathing techniques to foster this state of prayer, and there is
something akin to it in the Third Method of Prayer in St. Ignatius Spiritual
Exercises (SpEx 258). But Feofan and other authoritative 19 th c. Russian masters
like Bishop Ignatij Brjanchaninov (1807-1867) were somewhat reticent with regard
to this physical method. 9
Basically what these authors, East and West, are talking about is what I call
the interiorizing of vocal and liturgical prayer, taking the written text and making
it ones own by praying it in ones heart, so that when one returns to it again and
8
The material on Feofan is taken from The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology, compiled by
Igumen Chariton of Valamo, translated by E. Kadloubovsky and E.M. Palmer, edited with an
Introduction by Timothy Ware (London 1966). See also, most recently, the excellent
presentation, at once scholarly and spiritual, of M. van Parys, Saint Thopane le Reclus et la
prire du cur, in Le feu sur la terre. Mlanges Boris Bobrinskoy (Paris 2005) 113-126. I am
grateful to Fr. Abbot Michel, OSB, retired abbot of Chevetogne, for providing me a copy of his
study.
9
The Art of Prayer 34-36.
again it is no longer someone elses prayer, but has become the movement of
ones own heart.
IV. The Prayer of the Busy Person
So this is the type of prayer I would like you to learn during this retreat. I call
it the prayer of the busy person, a way of prayer suitable for non-monastic priests
and others busily engaged in the pastoral ministry and distracted by the cares of
administering a parish while at the same time, perhaps, bringing up and supporting
a family. This sort of life is very much like the one I live as a Jesuit, and this is the
sort of prayer I have learned to do amidst the hectic cares of my work. Though
vowed to the monastic ideal in the eastern sense of the educated monks of
Orthodoxy engaged in the work of the Church, Jesuits lead a busy active life in the
world. The underlying Ignatian or Jesuit vision of this world, inherited from our
Founder St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), is that only God can save it, but that he
has chosen to use us as instruments in so doing. One of my favorite prayers, that of
St. Teresa of Avila (1518-1582), a contemporary of St. Ignatius, expresses this
vision perfectly:
Christ has no body now but yours,
no hands but yours, no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which Christs compassion must look out
on the world,
Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good.
Yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now.
This same vision is expressed in the Byzantine liturgical tradition by the
feasts, known as the synaxis in Greek or sobor in Slavonic, which fall in the
liturgical calendar on the day following a major feast of Salvation History. They
celebrate the role of those human figures intimately associated with the Saving
Mystery of the preceding dayMarys parents Saints Joachim and Anna on
September 9, the day after the Nativity of the Theotokos; Mary the Mother of God
on December 26, the day after the Nativity of her Divine Son; St. John the Baptist
on January 7, the day after the Theophany and Baptism of Jesus. All indicate the
same doctrine of our faith: that by entering our human history through the
Incarnation of his Divine Son, God willed to associate us in his work of salvation.
This vision, equally Ignatian and Byzantine, is fundamentally different from
the modern humanistic and secular social ideal, which pretends that humans can of
themselves create the society they choose, free of human despotism, historical
determinism, and supernatural authority. But is it equally different from the ideal of
early and eastern monasticism, with its radical eschatological orientation and
rejection of this world. On the contrary, Ignatian service and prayer, in the words of
Jesuit Karl Rahner (1904-1984), whom many consider the greatest Catholic
theologian of the 20 th c., is rooted in a positive, amicable, and joyous relationship
with the world. As the former Jesuit Father General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach (1928-)
noted, Ignatian spirituality, does not insist on seeking God outside of created
things, but rather finding Him in them and recognizing fully their autonomous
existence in a state of dependence as created objects.
The condition of this cooperation in Gods design for the human race,
however, is that we, the human instruments, be united with God. And that is where
prayer comes in. Without prayer there is no such thing as a spiritual life, no
possibility of being united with God, no chance of being his instrument in the
salvation of the worldand, I might add, no chance of living a happy and fulfilled
priestly or religious life; without prayer we are not living in and with God. As the
Catechism of the Catholic Church states peremptorily: Prayer is a vital necessity.
Prayer and Christian life are inseparable (CCC 2744-2745).
Immersed in this world, we need the Bless this Mess spirituality so aptly
expressed by Michael Hollings, the harried, overworked urban parish priest of St.
Mary of the Angels, Bayswater, London, in an article in the April 29, 1988 London
Tablet. Describing his years of study in Rome, Fr. Hollings recalls Bobby Dyson, SJ,
a Byzantine Rite Jesuit I had the privilege of meeting and serving as cantor at his
Divine Liturgy during my first visit to Rome in May 1959, on my way back to the US
from my years of teaching in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1956-1959, when I stayed at the
Biblical Institute where Dyson was professor. Hollings describes how in Rome
The most memorable lecturer was a Jesuit, Fr. Dyson of the Biblical Institute. In four
years of scripture lectures, we covered almost everything under heaven, without
ever moving beyond the first three chapters of Genesis One phrase has always
remained in my mind from Fr. Dysons teaching about creation. The Hebrew for the
early state of the earth was tohu and bohu trackless waste and emptiness.
Since I began to think and pray seriously, I have come to realize that tohu and bohu
was not only the situation at the dawn of the world but continues where I stand
today. It is upon this formless mass, this mess, that God works.
This so resonated with the way my life sometimes seems that I have saved
that clipping these twenty-four years, and still derive wry consolation from it every
time I read it. The active life of a minister in todays Church is tohu and bohu
indeed, but we can let God give it form and shape through our prayer.
V. Basic Principles for a Life of Prayer
What, then, does my experience recommend as ways of prayer for the busy
worker in Gods vineyard? First, a few simple but ironclad principles for a life of
prayer: [1] lead a regular life; [2] keep the method of prayer simple; [3] give your
prayer a framework; [4] prepare for your prayer; [5] keep at it no matter what.
1. Lead a regular life. Any life, and especially any spiritual life, needs a rule
of life, its pravilo, for without regularity, prayer is usually the first thing that
falls by the wayside. A Jesuit Superior General once wrote that half the
problems our men have with prayer would disappear if they would just learn
to go to bed on time. I say Amen! to that, since it has also been my own
experience. So set yourself a schedule for retiring and rising except on
special days, days off, holidays, whatever, days when church services or
other duties may force changes in the usual scheduleand then stick to it.
2. Keep the method of prayer simple. In a moment I shall suggest some
very basic, tried and proven traditional methods of prayer. I strongly suggest
not getting involved in complicated, convoluted methods involving all sorts
of mental gymnastics or physical exercises.
3. Prepare for prayer. It is a great assist to prayer if one takes a few minutes
the night before to prepare the material for the next mornings prayer: i.e.,
to choose the scriptural text, the psalm, the icon, the theme, the prayer
text, whatever, one wishes to use as the springboard of the next days
prayer. For example, maybe one is going through the Divine Liturgy day
after day, reflecting on and interiorizing each of its prayer texts. If so, read
over the prayer for the next day. Or perhaps one is praying ones way
through one of the Gospels chapter by chapter. If so, read over the
upcoming chapter the night before.
4. Give your prayer a framework. This means having a more or less set way
to begin your prayer when the circumstances allow it. A minimum framework
might comprise, for example, recollecting oneself in silence for a moment,
recognizing that one is always in the presence of God. Some spiritual writers
call this putting oneself in the presence of God, but of course it is God who
has put us in his holy presence for always! It is we who have to bring that
reality to our consciousness with an act of faith and adoration. Then make a
great metany or velikij poklon, recite the polnoe nachalo (from Blessed is
our God up to the triple O come let us worship and bow down), and
focus on the matter of our prayer by asking God what we specifically hope to
receive from him as the grace or fruit of the day and its prayer.
5. Keep at it no matter what. There are many obstacles to prayer: overwork,
fatigue, anger, depression, discouragement, distraction, temptation, sin I
shall talk about some of these problems shortly. But we should never let
them interfere with or destroy our life of prayer, for let me repeat: without
prayer there is no Christian spiritual life.
VI. Ways of Prayer for the Busy Worker in Gods Vineyard
What follows deals not with the theory of daily prayer but with its practice,
and is largely based on my personal experience, in an area for which I claim no
special expertise and certainly no infallibility. My own experience of what the
spiritual literature euphemistically calls spiritual direction has often been
negative, and I have no romantic views of my own competence in the process.
Furthermore, what appears to me as little better than the tyranny exercised today
by spiritual fathers or mothers and confessors in some Eastern Christian traditions,
who arrogate to themselves the right to refuse people access to Holy Communion,
is for our times in my view an intolerable violation of freedom of conscience. 10
That said, for what its worth, here are some of my views on the prayer of the busy
Christian actively engaged in ministry or other activities in todays hectic world.
1. Lectio divina: The first way of prayer I recommend is the classic monastic
method Feofan Zatvornik calls prayer of the mind that leads to the spiritually
purer prayer of the mind in the heart, a method similar to what is called in
the West lectio divina. This consists of placing oneself before God and reading
a text of scripture, a psalm, a prayer, a troparion, the apophthegmata or
sayings of the Fathers, indeed any spiritual or liturgical text, internalizing it,
talking to God about it, and listening in the quiet of ones heart to what he has
to say. I find the psalms ideal for this sort of prayer, and one can do the same,
mutatis mutandis, contemplating an icon.
2. Interiorizing Prayer: What I call interiorizing prayer, a method most useful
for sacred ministers whose life is taken up with celebrating the Sacred
Mysteries of the Church, applies the lectio divina to liturgical texts. By
ruminating prayerfully on the prayers of the Divine Liturgy or other mysteries,
one learns to interiorize and intensify ones liturgical life and ministry, making
it not only the Prayer of the Church, but also ones own.
3. Distracted prayer: The perhaps infelicitous name distracted prayer or
prayer of distraction is of my own coining. Contrary to what the spiritual
guides tell us to do, I have found it impossible to banish distractions from
prayer and long ago concluded it is useless to try. Rather, I simply fold them
into my prayer, making them the subject of my conversation with God, telling
him I am a poor sinner unable to think of him for two minutes without my mind
wandering, perhaps having doubts of faith, even erotic thoughts and
temptations, asking him to be with me even in my smallness, my sinfulness,
my inadequacy
4. Prayer anywhere: Prayer anywhere means just what it says: prayer wherever
we find ourselves. Prayer while walking on the sidewalk, prayer while shopping
in the supermarket, prayer on a train or plane or bus, prayer in the subway
prayer wherever. Here too, one cannot help but be distracted, distracted by
the crowds, distracted by attractive women, distracted by wackos and pests,
turned off by the nuisance of beggars or the homeless Well, my solution is
just to pray for them, all of them, together or individually. I place them in Gods
hands. I ask him to bring the unbelievers and unevangelized to faith in him
and to hope in his divine mercy; to bring the unbaptized and unchurched to
the saving waters of Baptism; to give those in sin his saving grace of
conversion and repentance. I ask him to heal the sick and the aged, to comfort
the sad and lonely. I thank him for my health of mind and spirit, for the fact
that I have many friends to be with me, that I do not have to worry about food
and shelter and medical care and the other necessities of life This kind of
10
On Orthodox usage see the recent much-needed and excellent study of Archimandrite Job
Getcha, Confession and Spiritual Direction in the Orthodox Church: Some Modern Questions to
A Very Ancient Practice, St. Vladimirs Theological Quarterly 51 (2007) 203-220, esp. 212-15.
prayer anywhere is perfectly eastern and traditional: as St. John Chrysostom

says in his Selection on Prayer 2: It is possible to offer fervent prayer even
while walking in public or strolling alone, or seated in your shop,while buying
or sellingor even while cooking.11 All I have done is give it a modern spin.
5. The Jesus Prayer: The Jesus Prayer, a tradition that lies at the very heart of
Orthodox spirituality, is also a prayer for everywhere. St. Symeon of
Thessalonika (d. 1429) says this of the holy and deifying Jesus Prayer in
chapter 297 of his treatise On Divine Prayer that has been incorporated into
the Philokalia: Pray this name always as a prayer, with the intellect, and with
the tongue, whether standing still or walking, whether sitting or lying down,
while saying or doing whatever, always striving to do this. 12 The Jesus Prayer
is in some ways the prayer that would become characteristic of interior prayer
in Byzantine Orthodox spirituality. Rooted in the Scriptures, it is composed of
two elements from the Gospels, the prayer of the blind man in Lk 18:38:
Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me! and the prayer of the publican in Lk
18:13: God be merciful to me a sinner! 13 Rooted in the Old Testament
reverence for the Divine Name, the Jesus Prayer also finds justification and
explanation in several NT texts that glorify the name of Jesus and calling on
that name in prayer (Mt 1:21, Jn 16:23-24; Acts 4: 10, 12; Phil 2:9-10; 1 Cor
12:3). This Jesus Prayer is another of my favorite ways of prayer not only
because it works anywhere, but because it is a prayer for forgiveness, of which
I am always in need, and because it is an ideal prayer for those many times
when one is overworked, harassed, tired, upset, feeling low, with no energy for
anything else but the comforting Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on
me a sinner! Repeating it over and over again, counting off the petitions on
the komvoschonion or chtki. the rosary-like Byzantine prayer cord, it
coordinates with ones breathing and gradually takes off by itself, eventually
becoming reduced to Jesus, mercy! with each breath.
6. Prayer when in sin: The Jesus Prayer is a prayer of sinners, which we all are,
and of which I am the first, as we say in the Prayer Before Holy Communion.
There are times when we feel guilty of serious sin, of having lost Gods
friendship and grace, of having willfully expelled the Holy Spirit who was
dwelling in the temple of our soul. This is a dangerous time for prayer, for we
may feel unworthy to approach God even in prayer. That would be a grave
mistake, for it is precisely in the fire of prayer that our sins are burned away by
the divine compassion and love, and we are returned to grace. Perhaps we do
not yet have the courage to go to confession. Well, talk to God about your sin,
tell him you fear his wrath, are even afraid to go to confession, explain to him
what happened. Of course he already knows it better than we do, but no
matter: give him your point of view, tell him how you see it, whateverbut
above all, pray. Pray, and you will feel his loving forgiveness and call to
penitence enter and warm your heart and cleanse away your sin, making you
ready for the grace of the mystery of confession. And let your own sinfulness
be for you the best lesson on how you must act as confessor and spiritual
father, never bringing harshness or judgment or the curiosity of unnecessary
questioning to your ministry, but only the love and peace of Christ who was
crucified not only for your penitents sins, but also for yours.
7. Praying forward to open the day: At the beginning of the day we are often
preoccupied about what the day will bring, how we will be able to manage the
many tasks on our agenda. This is a time to pray forward, as I call it, a sort
of spiritual gearing up for the day ahead. 14 The normal material of the daily
prayer of the busy servant of God is the issues we are facing day by day. First
11
PG 63:585 cited in CCC 2743.
12
PG 155:548.
13
I am following here Wares excellent Introduction to The Art of Prayer 27-37.
of all we should know what we want to ask for in this prayer, id quod volo
what I want, as St. Ignatius calls it. The aim of the prayer is just to be with
God, but we must focus, must know what we want from him this day. As we
move into our prayer, we review the day ahead and ask Gods help in what we
foresee. Where will we need him especially today? What specifically do we ask
of the Lord this day? Then begin the lectio divina of the material chosen for
your prayer, and read until something slows you down. If nothing seems to
work, just settle into God and let the day float by and be with him in
reviewing it. Bring to him the things on your mind, and test your feelings and
reactions to them against his presence, and ask for his help in all.
8. Praying backwards to close the day: At the end of the day, do the same
thing in reverse.15 This is the awareness examen or consciousness
examen, as St. Ignatius General Examination of Conscience (SpEx 43) is
now more subtly called. After praying for the grace of Gods illumination, in
repentance and thanksgiving we review the events and feelings both positive
and negative that surface in our replay of the day, pray over them in thanks
and/or sorrow, and look forward to tomorrow and Gods help for its tasks and
problems.
9. The prayer of thankful love: A longer, more substantial prayer of the same
sort is my simplified version of St. Ignatius Contemplatio ad amorem
Contemplation to Attain the Love of God (SpEx 230-237). It too is an easy
prayer when one is tired and discouraged and without much energy, a prayer
of great consolation and grace. I just review my whole life from the start, see
Gods guiding hand through it all, and let my love and gratitude for his
providential care well up into prayer of loving thanks. I thank him that he
brought me into being, that I was born in a free country to a family of fervent
Catholics who had me baptized and raised me in the love of the Church and
our Christian faith and practice, rather than to atheistic or non-Christian
parents. I thank him for the Catholic education I received at home and from
the Christian Brothers in high school, for my vocation and the grace to
persevere in it. I thank him for my friends who have loved and supported me,
and I ask him to forgive my failings, my infidelities to them and to him, and
especially my many sins.
VII. For Our Prayer Today
For our prayer today, let us take what remains of this hour with God, resting
quietly in him and looking back on the past year 2007the places we have been, the
people whose lives have crossed ours, what we have done for good or for bad, the
graces we have received and those we have rejectedand ask God to tell us where
he is leading us, where he wants us go from here, what we need to do to clean up our
act and get back to where he wants us to be. If it helps, I would suggest you take one
of two prayers from the Divine Liturgy, the Trisagion Prayer or the No one is worthy
prayer just before the Great Entrance, both of them prayers of preparation expressing
the qualities we need to dare to stand before the altar of God as his sacred ministers,
and reflect before God on our lives in the context of what we are preparing for, and
where we stand now in the light of these dread requirements and the grave
responsibilities they entail.
14
The material in this paragraph, taken from my old retreat notes of April 3, 1993, jotted down
from my reading during those days of prayer, is doubtless not original but I have long forgotten
to what source these ideas must be credited.
15
See Dennis Hamm, Rummaging for God: Praying Backwards Through Your Day, America
(May 14, 1994) 22-23.
2: Liturgical Prayer, Icon of Our Life in Christ 14
Reflection 2: Liturgical Prayer, Icon of Our Life in Christ
I. Christian Life is Liturgy Personalized

In 1513, Michelangelo Buonarroti completed the frescoes in the Sistine
Chapel. In the magnificent creation scene, the life-giving finger of God stretches
out and almostbut not quitetouches the outstretched finger of the reclining
Adam. Liturgy is what fills the gap between those two fingers. For God in the
Sistine metaphor is a creating, life-giving, saving, redeeming hand, ever reaching
out toward us, and salvation history is the story of our hands raised (or refusing to
be raised) in never-ending reception of, and thanksgiving for, that gift. Of course
here I am using the term liturgy in the broadest, Pauline sense, to include what
the Fathers of the Church called the entire oikonomia or commercium, that
ongoing, saving, give-and-take between God and us, the Jacobs ladder of
salvation history.
This theology of Christian liturgy flows from the seminal principle of New
Testament teaching that all salvation history is recapitulated and personalized in
Jesus. Everything in sacred historyevery event, object, sacred place, theophany,
culthas been assumed into the person of the Incarnate Christ. He is Gods
eternal Word,16 his new creation17 and the new Adam, 18 the new Pasch and its
lamb,19 the new covenant,20 the new circumcision21 and the heavenly manna;22
Gods temple,23 the new sacrifice and its priest; 24 the fulfillment of the Sabbath
rest25 and the Messianic Age that has come. 26 All that went before is fulfilled in
him: For the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true
form of these realities, Heb 10:1 affirms, and that includes all worship.
This revelation lays the foundation for any Christian theology of liturgy and
spirituality. True worship pleasing to the Father is none other than the saving life,
death, and resurrection of Christ. But since through baptism we too are Christ, our
worship is his same sacrificial existence in us. To live is Christ, Paul tells us in Phil
1:21, and to be saved is to be conformed to Christ by dying to self and rising to
new life in him,27 who as the last Adam (1 Cor 15:45) is the definitive form of
redeemed human nature. 28 For we know the power of his resurrection only if we
share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death (Phil 3:10).
This liturgy of life, our true Christian liturgy, is the Churchs common
celebration of our salvation in Christ. As such, it is the most perfect expression and
realization of the spirituality of the Church. The spiritual life is life in Christ, and
this life is created, fed and renewed in the liturgy. Baptized into the mystery of his
death and resurrection, 29 we rise in him, having put on Christ (Gal 3:27), so that,
as St. Paul says, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but
Christ who lives in me.30 Henceforth he dwells in us, prays in us, proclaims to us
the Word of his New Covenant, seals it with his sacrifice, feeds us with his Sacred
Body and Blood, draws us to penance and conversion, glorifies the Father in us. In
16
Jn 1:1, 14.
17
2 Cor 5:17, Gal 6:15, Rom 8:19ff, Rev 21-22.
18
1 Cor 15:45, Rom 5:14.
19
1 Cor 5:7; Jn 1:29, 36; 19:36; 1 Pet 1:19; Rev 5ff.
20
Mt 26:28; Mk 14;24; Lk 22:20; Heb 8-13.
21
Col 2:11-12.
22
Jn 6:30-58; Rev 2:17.
23
Jn 2:19-27.
24
Eph 5:2; Heb 2:17-3:2, 4:14-10:14.
25
Col 2:16-17; Mt 11:28-12:8; Heb 3:7-4:11.
26
Lk 4:16-21; Acts 2:14-36.
27
2 Cor 4:10ff, 13:4; Rom 6:3ff; Col 2:12-13, 20, 3:1-3; Gal 2:20; Eph 2:1ff; Phil 2:5ff, 3:10-
11, 18, 21.
28
1 Cor 15:21-22; Rom 5:12-21; Col 3:9-11; Eph 4:22-24.
29
Rom 6:3-11; Col 2:12-13, 20, 3:1-4.
30
Gal 2:20; cf. Col 2:6.
proclamation and preaching he communicates to us his life; in rite and song he

celebrates it with us; in sacramental grace he gives us the strength to live it.
The mystery that is Christ is the center of Christian life, and it is this
mystery and nothing else that the Church renews in the liturgy so that we might
be drawn into it. When we leave the liturgical assembly to return to our other
tasks, we have only to assimilate what we have experienced and realize the
mystery in our lives: in a word, to become other Christs. For the purpose of the
liturgy is to generate in our lives what the Church realizes for us in its public
worship. The spiritual life is just another word for a personal relationship with God,
and the liturgy is nothing less than the common expression of the Churchs
relationship with God.
This is what justifies the Catholic Churchs extraordinary claims about the
nature of Christian worship, as in the striking assertion of the Vatican II
Constitution on the Sacred LiturgySacrosanctum Concilium 2, which says that
...it is the liturgy through which the work of our redemption is accomplished. And
it is through the liturgy, especially, that the faithful are enabled express in their
lives and manifest to others the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true
Church.31 Pope Pius XII affirmed the same doctrine in his 1947 encyclical Mediator
Dei, the Magna Carta of the modern Catholic Liturgical Movement: It is an
unquestionable fact that the work of our redemption is continued and that its fruits
are imparted to us during the celebration of the liturgy... (29). 32 Hence, Pius XII
continues, liturgical prayer, being the public supplication of the illustrious Spouse
of Christ, is superior to private prayers (37), and The worship rendered to God
in union with her divine Head is the most efficacious means of achieving sanctity
(26). The implications of that last statement for our spiritual lives should be
obvious. Liturgy is at the very center of the redemptive work Christ exercises
through the ministry of the Church. Anyone who does not celebrate and live the
liturgy of the Church according to the mind of the Church, cannot pretend to be
either a Christian or an apostle, true to the Church of Christ.
But this teaching is not just Catholic. It goes back to the mystery-
theology of the Fathers of the Church and the classical Byzantine liturgical
commentators, which asserts that liturgy is nothing less than the ongoing saving
work of Gods Only-begotten Son. That is why one of the great Latin Fathers, Pope
St. Leo the Great (440-461), could dare to say that: What was visible in our
Redeemer has passed into the liturgy 33in other words, what Jesus did
historically during his earthly life, he continues to do sacramentally through the
liturgical mysteries he celebrates in and with his Church.
II. Liturgy and Spiritual Formation
Our basic identity is Christian, and to be Christian is to be another Christ.
That is what the liturgy makes us in baptism, nourishes in the eucharist and the
proclamation and preaching of the Word, restores in confession and anointing of
the sick Liturgy, then, is a locus of our spiritual lives because in the liturgy it is
Christ himself who forms us into other Christs by conforming us to himself.
This is the teaching of St. Nicholas Cabasilas (ca. 1350), greatest of the
Byzantine liturgical theologians, in his treatise on the sacraments entitled The Life
in Christ, Book I 6:
In the Sacred Mysterieswe depict His burial and proclaim His death. By
them we are begotten and formed and wondrously united to our Saviour, for they
are the means by whichWe live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28).
Baptism confers being and in short, existence according to Christ. It receives us
when we are dead and corrupted, and leads us to new life. The anointing with
chrism perfects him who has received [new] birth by infusing into him the energy
31
Vatican II documents are referred to by paragraph number and cited from Vatican Council
II, The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. A. Flannery (Collegeville 1975).
32
Texts cited by paragraph number from Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Pius XII on the
Sacred Liturgy. Vatican Library Translation (Washington, DC, no date).
33
Quod itaque Redemptoris nostri conspicuum fuit, in sacramenta transivit: Sermo 74
(De ascens. 2), 2, PL 54:398. Of course the Latin term sacramentasacraments in the
language of the Fathers refers to the whole visible, liturgical ministry of the Church, and not
just the sacraments in the narrow modern sense of the term.
that befits such a life. The Holy Eucharist preserves and continues this life and
health, since the Bread of life enables us to preserve that which has been acquired
and to continue in life In this way we live in God. 34
So it is through the liturgy that the Spirit of Christ forms us into Christians by
inserting us into and conforming us to Christs life, and by continuously nourishing
and strengthening that life in us.
III. Liturgy Interiorized and Lived
Another way the liturgy is formative of our Christian lives is when we make
it our own, living our lives according to the model the liturgy proposes. For liturgy
that is not a reflection of life, liturgy in which the reality symbolized does not
correspond to the reality lived, is bad liturgy. In short, the touchstone of our liturgy
is whether or not it is being lived out in the communion of our lives. Does the
symbolic moment symbolize what we really are? Is our shared celebration of life a
sign that we truly live in this way? In 1 Cor 11, Paul tells the Corinthian community
that its eucharist is no true eucharist at all, for in their lack of charity they fail to
attend to the needs of the bodyi.e., of the community as the Body of Christ: For
any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks
judgment unto himself (1 Cor 11:29).
Liturgy, therefore, is formative also because it provides us a prophetic voice
of judgment on the quality of our Christian lives. So the full, active, conscious,
interiorized participation in liturgy the Vatican II Liturgy Constitution (esp. 14-30)
demands, requires that we see the liturgy as the true source and fount of our
spiritual lives. For the liturgical tradition of a local Church we call its ritelike our
Byzantine-Slavonic riteis the model of our ecclesial life, and the wellspring of the
spiritual life of the Church.
Unless seen in this broader context of the whole of Christian life, what we
do in our liturgies does not make much sense, for liturgy is not an end in itself. It is
only the means and expression of a life together in Christ. It is that which is
primary: a common life of mutual support and generosity, of putting self second so
that others can be first. Prayer in common is one of the means to this unity, part of
the groups cement, as well as its joyful celebration of the fact that inchoatively, if
not perfectly, this unity exists already.
For liturgy is a present encounter. Salvation is now. The death and
resurrection of Jesus are past events only in their historicity, that is, with respect to
us. But they are eternally present in God, who has entered our history but is not
entrapped in it, and they have brought the presence of God among us to
fulfillment in Jesus, who is the permanently present saving reality we encounter at
every moment of our lives. The saving past we memorialize in liturgy is in fact the
efficacious saving event of salvation now, made present once again in symbol. In
the Risen Lord, creation is at last seen as what it was meant to be, and Christ is
Adam, that is, all humankind.
IV. Becoming Other Christs
But this fulfillment of the past is directed at the future. For just as Christ
has become everything and fulfilled all, for us to be fulfilled we must become him.
And we can do this only by letting him conform us to himself, to his pattern, the
model of the new creation. It is this remaking of us into a new humanity that is the
true worship of the New Law, and the true identity formation of all Christians. The
old cult and priesthood have been replaced by the self-offering of the Son of God,
and our worship is to repeat this same pattern in our own lives, a pattern we
celebrate in symbol when we gather to remember what he was and what we must
be in him. This, then, is how liturgy is a locus of formation: it grafts us into Christ.
To express this identification with Christ, St. Paul uses several compound
verbs that begin with the preposition syn (with): I suffer with Christ, am crucified
with Christ, die with Christ, am buried with Christ, am raised and live with Christ,
am carried off to heaven and sit at the right hand of the Father with Christ. 35 This is
34
Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ. Translated from the Greek by Carmino J.
deCatanzaro (Crestwood 1974) 49-50.
35
Rom 6:3-11; Gal 2:20; 2 Cor 1:5, 4:7ff; Col 2:20; Eph 2:5-6. Cf. D. Stanley, A Modern
Scriptural Approach to the Spiritual Exercises (Chicago 1967) 210-211.
one of St. Pauls ways of underscoring the necessity of personal participation in

redemption. We must put on Christ (Gal 13:27), and assimilate him, experience
in mystery the principal events by which Christ has saved us and repeat them in
the pattern of our own lives, so that we can affirm with Paul in Gal 2:20: I have
been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. In
the New Testament dispensation, therefore, liturgy is simply a celebration of the
Christian life, a common celebration of what we have become and are becoming
evermore in Christ.
V. How Liturgy Does This
How can liturgy do this? Because the liturgy of the New Covenant is Jesus
Christ. As the classic Antiochene-type eucharistic prayers like our Byzantine
anaphoras of St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom never tire of repeating, when we
were mired in sinfulness, Jesus died for our sins and rose for our salvation, bringing
us into unity with God and with one another in him. According to the New
Testament, it is this incarnate Lord and savior in his self-giving, reconciling
obedience to the will of the Father that for the followers of Jesus is the new liturgy.
It is this, and not a new ritual system, that fulfills and replaces what went before.
The new temple and its priest and sacrifice and victim; the new creation and the
new Adam; the new covenant and the new circumcision and the new Sabbath rest;
the new Pasch and its Paschal Lambare all Jesus Christ in his saving life-for-
others. He is quite simply all in all, as Col 3:11 puts it, the alpha and the
omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end (Apoc 1:8, 2l:6, 22:13)
All that went before is fulfilled in him: For the law has but a shadow of the good
things to come, instead of the true form of these realities (Heb 10:1), including
liturgical realities: Let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink
or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath. These are only a shadow
of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ (Col 2:16-17).
Our liturgy is this same reality, Jesus Christ, in us. Our true divine service
is to be drawn into him, who is our incarnate salvation, and to live out his life, the
same pattern he has exemplified for us, dying to sin to rise to new life in him. In
short, our salvation is Gods glorification, and he gives it to us, not we to him. He
does this through his Spirit dwelling and moving in his Church.
Our liturgies in the narrower sense of our worship services or liturgical
celebrationsare one privileged ground of this divine encounter, one theophany
or revelation of Gods saving presence among us in the world today. The New
Testament portrays the gatherings of the nascent Church to hear the Word and
break the Bread as privileged moments of the presence of the Risen Lord. They are
by no means the only ground of this encounter, however, for God does not depend
on our liturgies to meet us and call us to him.
Since the basis and source of this grace-filled encounter is the death and
resurrection of Jesus, all Christian liturgy plays out this single root metaphor of the
Paschal Mystery as the disclosure, to those who will enter it in faith, of ultimate
reality, the final and definitive meaning of all creation and history and life. For the
Christian, Jesus is the image of God, and all other experiences, and the images to
which they give rise, are shaped and qualified and reinterpreted in the light of this
one, just as the whole experience of Israel was seen as recapitulated in the
Exodus-Covenant event. In short, Christian liturgy is an enactment of the Paschal
Mystery of Jesus as the disclosure of God and his plan for us. Col 1:15 calls Jesus
the image of the unseen God, and, for the Greek Fathers, liturgy is the image of
that image.
VI. Liturgy is Now
The actuality, the presentness of it all, is because we are celebrating not
something from the past, but a permanent present reality, an ongoing call and
response, a new life, which we call salvation, that was called into being by saving
events that are past only in their historicity. The salvific events of Jesus earthly life
are more than just an epiphany or sign, more than just a manifestation of
salvation. They are the actual means of that salvation, its very instrumental cause.
For the same events of the past are past only in the historical mode of their
manifestation, that is, as they are perceived within human history by us. For our
tradition teaches with the prologue of John that Jesus Christ is not only man but
also the eternal Word of God. As such, he is for all eternity that which he has done.
Not only is his saving, self-offering eternal; he is his eternal self-offering, and it is
in his presence among us that this sacrifice is eternally present to us.
So our liturgy does not celebrate a past event, but a present person, who
contains forever all he is and was, and all he has done for us. That is why the Latin
Church can sing in the ancient hymn: Iam pascha nostrum Christus est, paschalis
idem victimaFor our very Pasch is Christ, and he its very paschal victim.
In other words, Jesus Christ our Lord and our God is a constitutive
component of the liturgy. This is seminal: Jesus is not extrinsic to our worship; he is
its foundational constituent. He, Paul tells us, is the head of the body, and, to
continue the metaphor, just as in any living body, it is only the signals from the
head and their reception and execution by the members, that makes the
celebration a celebration. If one is missing, Jesus giving, our receiving, there is no
celebration.
But we too are one of liturgys integral component parts. If according to the
New Testament, the new worship, the only cult henceforth worthy of the Father, is
the self-giving kenosis of his Son, do not think that leaves us out in the cold. For
our worship is that same sacrificial life, eternally personalized in the Risen Lord,
communicated and expressed and lived in us through the Spirit in the worship of
the Church.
VII. Liturgys Source
Christian liturgy, then, is based on the reality of the Risen Christ, called
liturgie de source in the felicitous phrase of the Melkite Catholic theologian Jean
Corbon.36 Because the Risen Jesus is humanity glorified, he is present through his
Spirit to every place and age not only as savior, but as saving; not only as Lord,
but as priest and sacrifice and victim. Nothing in his being or action is ever past
except the historical mode of its manifestation. As the Byzantine Liturgy prays to
and of him, You are the offerer and the offered, the recipient and the gift.
Thomas J. Talley once put it this way:
By virtue of the resurrection, Christ is now transhistorical and is available to every
moment. We may never speak of the Risen Christ in the historical past. The event of
his passion is historical, but the Christ who is risen does not exist back there, but
here, and as we live on this moving division line between memory and hope,
between the memory of his passion and the hope of his coming again, we stand
always in the presence of Christ, who is always present to everyone. This is where
the real substance of our anamnesis lies.37
So if the Bible is the Word of God in the words of men, the liturgy is the
saving deeds of God in the actions of those men and women who would live in
him. Its purpose, to complete once again our circle and return to the Pauline
theology of liturgy with which we began, is to turn you and me into the same
reality. The purpose of baptism is to make us cleansing waters and healing and
strengthening oil; the purpose of Eucharist is not to change bread and wine, but to
change you and me. Through baptism and Eucharist, it is we who are to become
Christ for one another, and a sign to the world that is yet to hear his name.
Our true Christian liturgy, therefore, is just the life of Christ in us that we
both live and celebrate. That life is none other than what we call the Holy Spirit.
This is salvation, our final goal. The only difference between this and what we hope
to enjoy at the final fulfillment is that the mirror spoken of in 1 Cor 13:12 will no
longer be needed: as Adrien Nocent put it, the veil shall be removed.
As 7 of the Vatican II Liturgy Constitution affirms:
36
Translated as The Wellspring of Worship (New York 1988).
37
From his unpublished class notes on the Liturgical Year (emphasis added), which the late
Fr. Talley kindly placed at my disposition several years ago.
To accomplish so great a work [of salvation through the ministry of the Church]
Christ is always present in His Church, especially in her liturgical celebrations. He is
present in the Sacrifice of the Mass not only in the person of his ministerbut
especially in the Eucharistic species. By his power he is present in the sacraments
so that when anybody baptizes it is really Christ himself who baptizes. He is present
in his word since it is he himself who speaks when the holy scriptures are read in
the Church. Lastly, he is present when the Church prays and sings
Down through the centuries, Christian liturgy has celebrated this root
metaphor in Word and Sacrament, principally and most primitively in baptism,
Eucharist, Sunday, and Easter, but also in Matins and Vespers and funerals and
weddings and feasts and, indeed, whenever Christians have gathered in Jesus
name. As Dom Gregory Dix so lyrically expressed it in his liturgical classic, The
Shape of the Liturgy:
At the heart of it all is the eucharistic action, a thing of an absolute
simplicitythe taking, blessing, breaking and giving of bread and the taking,
blessing and giving of a cup of wine and water, as these were first done with their
new meaning by a young Jew before and after supper with His friends on the night
before He died He had told His friends to do this henceforward with the new
meaning for the anamnesis of Him, and they have done it always since.
Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century,
spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth,
this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every
conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it,
from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and
dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their
crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride
and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a
good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick
old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus
setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of
a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a
village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed;
because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the
settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so,
wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on
the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly
through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth
anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day
in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc
one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a
hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a
hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes
of christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebes sancta Deithe
holy common people of God.
To those who know a little of christian history probably the most moving of
all the reflections it brings is not the thought of the great events and the well-
remembered saints, but of those innumerable millions of entirely obscure faithful
men and women, every one with his or her own individual hopes and fears and joys
and sorrows and lovesand sins and temptations and prayersonce every whit as
vivid and alive as mine are now. They have left no slightest trace in this world, not
even a name, but have passed to God utterly forgotten by men. Yet each of them
once believed and prayed as I believe and pray, and found it hard and grew slack
and sinned and repented and fell again. Each of them worshipped at the eucharist,
and found their thoughts wandering and tried again, and felt heavy and
unresponsive and yet knewjust as really and pathetically as I do these things.
There is a little ill-spelled ill-carved rustic epitaph of the fourth century from Asia
Minor: Here sleeps the blessed Chione, who has found Jerusalem for she prayed
much. Not another word is known of Chione, some peasant woman who lived in
that vanished world of christian Anatolia. But how lovely if all that should survive
after sixteen centuries were that one had prayed much, so that the neighbours who
saw all ones life were sure one must have found Jerusalem! What did the Sunday
eucharist in her village church every week for a life-time mean to the blessed
Chioneand to the millions like her then, and every year since? The sheer
stupendous quantity of the love of God which this ever repeated action has drawn
from the obscure christian multitudes through the centuries is in itself an

overwhelming thought. (All that going with one to the altar every morning!)
It is because it became embedded deep down in the life of the christian
peoples, colouring all the via vitae of the ordinary man and woman, marking its
personal turning-points, marriage, sickness, death and the rest, running through it
year by year with the feasts and fasts and the rhythm of the Sundays, that the
eucharistic action became inextricably woven into the public history of the Western
world At Constantinople they do this yet with the identical words and gestures
that they used while the silver trumpets of the Basileus still called across the
Bosphorus, in what seems to us now the strange fairy-tale land of the Byzantine
empire. In this twentieth century Charles de Foucauld in his hermitage in the Sahara
did this with the same rite as Cuthbert twelve centuries before in his hermitage on
Lindisfarne in the Northern seas
It is not strange that the eucharist should have this power of laying hold of
human life, of grasping it not only in the abstract but in the particular concrete
realities of it, of reaching to anything in it, great impersonal things that rock whole
nations and little tender human things of one mans or one womans living and
dyinglaying hold of them and translating them into something beyond time. This
was its new meaning from the beginning. The Epistle to the Hebrews pictures our
Lord as saying from the moment of His birth at Bethlehem, Other sacrifice and
offering Thou wouldest not, but a Body hast Thou prepared for me; Lo I come to do
Thy will, O God [Heb 10:5]. On the last night of His life it was still the same: This is
My Body And now I come to Thee [Jn 17:13]. It was the whole perfect human life
that had gone before and all His living of it that was taken and spoken and
deliberately broken and given in the institution of the eucharist. 38
That says it all.
VIII. For Our Prayer
For the remainder of the hour let us go apart and reflect on the great
mystery of Christ you are called to celebrate with him some day as presbyters of
his Holy Church. Take the Anaphora of St. Basil the Great and apply the method of
lectio divina to it, reading slowly and prayerfully its blessed words and making
them your own, in thankful wonder at the mystery of Gods Economy of Salvation
for us detailed so beautifully in this great prayer you shall one day stand before
the altar and pray.
38
G. Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London 1946) 743-46.
3: Liturgical Prayer, Icon of Our Prayer Life 21
Reflection 3: Liturgical Prayer, Icon of Our Prayer Life

In our previous reflection we saw how the primacy of liturgy, the official
prayer of the Church, rooted in the Bible and tradition, is seminal for our lives of
salvation in Christ Jesus. As such our liturgy, the icon and model and school of our
salvation, should also mold our personal prayer, especially for those who are
liturgical ministers of the Church consecrated for Gods liturgical service. In short,
the Churchs liturgy is our pravilo: our typikon or rule of prayer is our traditions rule
of salvation, presenting us with the rule of faith for the Churchs doctrinal and
liturgical life.39 This vision finds expression in western sources as well. St. Gertrude
prayed ut devotio ipsius concordet cum officiis ecclesiaethat her piety might be
in agreement with the Offices of the Church. And the ordination prayer in the Latin
rite instructs the ordinands: Imitamini quod tractatisImitate what you do! In
other words, the priest should imitate in his life what he celebrates in the liturgical
services.
This liturgical pravilo encompasses all the hours, days, weeks, months, and
years of our Christian lives with the sacred rhythms of its daily cycle of Hours, its
weekday commemorations, its sanctoral and feast-day cycle, and its sacred
seasons, filling the whole year with reminders of God and what he has wrought in
his saints. What could be a surer guide that our lives and our prayer are on the right
path?
This primacy of the liturgy as the Churchs main school and model of prayer
is revealed in the many ways of prayer we learn from the liturgy. First of all, liturgy
teaches us anamnetic, biblical prayer. Based on models inherited from Israel (e.g., Is
61:10, 63:7), biblical memorial or anamnesis informs not only the Eucharist Do
this in my remembrance (anamnesis) (Lk 22:19; 1 Cor 11:25-26)but provides the
dynamic of all Christian prayer. As in Marys Magnificat: He who is mighty has done
great things for me, and holy is his name! (Lk 1:49), we first recall Gods saving
action, which is always prior; then we respond in thankful praise and glorification for
his mighty deeds. This pattern of liturgical prayer so common in the structure of our
orations goes back to the Old Testament, which ceaselessly recounts the saving
actions of God (O God, who) in order to glorify him for them.
Liturgy teaches us balanced, objective, traditional, ecclesial prayer. As the
prayer of the Church, the liturgy is the prayer of Christ himself, the full Christ, head
and members. This alone gives a transforming value to our prayer that it cannot
have when done alone. Liturgy is traditional ecclesial prayer in that it has stood the
test of time, and has been with the Church from its origins. Liturgy is balanced,
objective prayer because it is not something that depends on our tastes and
sentiments, but is the Churchs efficacious encounter with God in the worship of the
Father through Jesus in his ever-forming Spirit. So liturgy is the Churchs ancient
school and model of prayer, in which she teaches her age-old ways of how to glorify
God in Christ as Church, together as one Body, in union with and after the example
of Jesus her head. Through this constant diet of Sacred Scripture, not only does God
speak his Word to us, not only do we contemplate over and over again the central
mysteries of salvation, but our own lives are gradually attuned to this saving
rhythm, and we meditate again and again on the mystery of Israel, recapitulated in
Jesus, which is also the saga of our own spiritual odyssey. The march of Israel across
the horizon of Sacred History is a metaphor for the spiritual pilgrimage of us all.
This gives liturgical prayer a concentration on the essential rather than the
peripheral; it gives our prayer equilibrium insofar as its rhythms are set by the
Church and not by our own private subjectivity and sentiment. How much penance,
how much contrition, how much praise, how much petition, how much thanksgiving
should our prayer-life contain? It is all right there in the pedagogy of the Churchs
liturgy. How much devotion to the Holy Trinity, how much attention to the Mysteries
of Christs life, how much to his Passion, how much to the Mother of God, how much
to the saints? How much fasting, how much feasting? Our liturgical calendar with its
seasonal and festive rhythms has it all. This gives a balanced and objective
39
A. Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology (The Library of Orthodox Theology 4,
London/Portland 1966) 165-66.
comprehensiveness to the Churchs prayer that is a sure remedy for the one-sided
excesses and exaggerations of a subjective devotionalism that emphasizes only
those aspects of prayer that have personal appeal to some particular culture or
individual at any given moment, often for less than ideal reasons.
Furthermore, the liturgy furnishes us with our own divinely revealed response
to the prophetic Word of God in our lives. For in the psalms we answer God in his
very own revealed prayers.
Liturgy teaches us incessant prayer. The command to pray always, one of
the New Testaments most frequently repeated imperatives (Lk 18:1, 21:36; Eph
6:18; Col 4:2; 1 Thess 5:16-18), is the foundation of Early Christian monastic prayer.
For the early monastics, life was one continual prayer, with no compartmentalization
of life into prayer and other kinds of activity. The one rule was the absolute primacy
of the spiritual in the everyday lives of these ascetics. Such single-mindedness is
still the model of our lives consecrated to the service of Christ, for the aim of our
Christian existence is the life with God.
So the early monastics prayed while they worked and worked while they
prayed. Wherever they were, refectory, oratory, workshop, cell, the differences were
only accidental. What they sought ultimately was what modern spiritual writers
would call a state of prayer, that degree of spiritual perfection sought by the
hesychasts, in which ones every breath, ones very existence, even while at work,
is a continuous, unbroken prayer.
Liturgy teaches us to pray regularly at set times. This is not only part of
tradition. It is also a psychologically astute pedagogy. Without living a regular life,
following a pravilo, no one will ever learn to pray regularly. Some of my graduate
students used to ask me, Father, what do I have to do to become a scholar like
you? To their surprise I would answer, Learn to go to bed on time, at the same
time, every workday. As I already noted above in Reflection 1, one of my Jesuit
General superiors once wrote in a letter on prayer that most of the problems we
Jesuits have with prayer would disappear if we would only learn to go to bed on
time!
And so at the start of the day our pravilo teaches us to do as Jesus did (Mk
1:35): get up in the morning and begin the day with prayer. In Matins we renew our
commitment to Christ by consecrating the day through thanks and praise. And in
Vespers, after the days work is done, we turn once more to God in prayer. The
passing of day reminds us of the darkness of Christs passion and death, and of the
passing nature of all earthly creation. But the gift of light reminds us again of Christ
the Light of the World. And as in morning prayer, the service closes with
intercessions for the needs of all humankind, and then in the collect and final
blessing we thank God for the graces of the day, above all for the grace of the Risen
Christ. We ask pardon for the sins of the day and request protection during the
coming night, for Eph 4:26-32 exhorts us: do not let the sun go down on your
anger and give no opportunity to the devil...let all bitterness and wrath and anger
be put away from you, with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted,
forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave youand the motivation is clear:
for we are members of one another (Eph 4:25).
So the Divine Office, like the Divine Liturgy, is not just prayer but also a
school of prayer. The morning office dedicates the new day to God, and the evening
office at the close of day leads us to reflect on the hours just passed, with
thanksgiving for the good we have done and repentance for the evil. In the limpid
simplicity of the early Churchs liturgical theology, morning and evening prayer, like
all prayer in both the Old and New Testament, are a glorification of God that wells up
from the joyful proclamation of his saving deeds.
Liturgy teaches us contemplative prayer. In a certain sense one can say that
the early Fathers and saints lived the liturgy rather than celebrating it. Their whole
life was a living prayer. The Dei of Opus Dei or Work of God is an objective as
well as subjective genitive: a work of God in us before it is Gods work we do in
response to his call. Hence our sacred liturgical offices teach us contemplative
praise, for they repeatedly commemorate the motive for our praise of Gods great
works, which we contemplate in order to thank and glorify God for them.
Liturgy teaches us intercessory prayer. Our prayer of petition does not tire
God. In the New Testament Jesus exhorts us to ask God for what we want: Ask, and
it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened (Mt 7:7-8).
Liturgy teaches us to pray in the Communion of the Holy Spirit, as the
Divine Liturgy repeats time and again.
Liturgy teaches us the prayer of the Mother of God, the prayer of acceptance
of Gods will: Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to
your word (Lk 1:38); and her prayer of praise and glorification: He who is mighty
has done great things for me! Holy is his name! (Lk 1:49), as well as the model of
life in and for Christ alone that she teaches to us. Liturgy also teaches us prayer in
the communion of saints, which is why our tradition is so replete with
commemorations of the saints and of those who have gone before us, having
reposed in the Lord. I shall return to some of these themes in our reflections during
these days of prayer.
For the moment I would like to concentrate on one last kind of prayer the
liturgy teaches us: eschatological prayer. This is prayer made as wait in joyful hope
for the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ, in the words of the Embolism of the
Roman Mass. We make this kind of prayer when we keep vigil, following the example
of Jesus night prayer (Lk 6:12), which acquires its eschatological dimension from
the New Testament exhortations to watch and pray (Mt 26:40-41; Lk 21:36; Col 4:2),
and to keep vigil for the coming of the Lord, for we know not the day nor the hour
(Mt 24:36, 25:13). Death comes like a thief in the night (1 Thess 5:2; 2 Pet 3:10; Rev
3:3, 16:15); the bridegroom comes at night and we must be found waiting, lamps in
hand (Mt 25:1-13).40 This is a standard theme of vigil prayer, like the cosmic theme
of early monasticism that those at vigil join their voices to those of the angels and
all creation in praise of God, while the world sleeps. It is also the origins of our
English term wake, an old word for keeping vigil by the body of the deceased, as
was the custom in early monasticism, an act of faith in the resurrection of the dead,
in imitation of the Myrrhbearing women who watched by the tomb of Christ and
became the first witnesses to the resurrection.
Canon 27 of the Canons of Hippolytus from Egypt around 336-340 expresses
this eschatological theme, showing how it forms the bridge uniting Vespers and
Matins, which, once again, like all liturgy, are simply moments expressive of the
ceaseless hymn of praise that is Christian life:
Let each one take care to pray with great vigilance in the middle of the night,
for our fathers have said that at that hour all creation is assiduous in the service of
praising God, all the angelic hosts and the souls of the just bless God. For the Lord
testifies to this saying, In the middle of the night there was a cry: Behold, the
bridegroom has come, go out to meet him (Mt 25:6). At cockcrow, again, is a time
when there are prayers in the churches, for the Lord says, Watch, for you do not
know at what time the Master will come, in the evening, or in the middle of the night,
or at cockcrow, or in the morning (Mk 13:35), which means we must praise God at
every hour. And when a man sleeps on his bed, he must pray to God in his heart. 41
The major liturgical expressions of this type of prayer are vigils and Lent,
penance, asceticism, and fasting. In the New Testament, sole revealed source for
the understanding of Christian life, the place of penance and self-abnegation is
undeniable. The very overture to the preaching of the kingdom, its first word in fact,
is metanoeite, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand (Mt 3:2). And the life of the
preacher witnessed to what he preached. The Baptists metanoeite is often
translated do penance. But what John the Baptist or Precursor as he is known in
the Christian East, the one who went before to prepare the way for the Messiah,
preached was conversion, a change of mind or mentality, metanous, as is clear not
only from the Greek, but from what John did. He did not drive his hearers before him
into the desert to imitate his ascetic life; he invited them to change their lives and
bear good fruit, lest the axe be laid to the root.
40
The Parable of the Virgins and the Bridegroom (Mt 25:1-13, Lk 12:35-46)the bridegroom
is obviously Jesus (Mt 9:14-15; Mk 2:18-20; Lk 5:33-35)is interpreted as a Christian
Passover Haggadah. See A. Strobel, Ursprung und Geschichte des frhchristlichen
Osterkalendars (Texte und Untersuchungen, Berlin 1977) 29-45.
41
Patrologia Orientalis 31:397.
Jesus proclamation of the New Law in the Beatitudes of Mt 5, states that we

are blessed, happy, enjoy the favor of God, for ill-fortune. It is good to be poor and
suffer persecution; it is good to suppress self-affirmation and ambition, good to be
meek. Why? It is only the cross that provides us with a basis for a truly Christian
theology of self-denial and penance. The New Testament says practically nothing
about what is often understood today as penance: the infliction of self-punishment.
New Testament penance is metanoia: the imitation of Jesus by putting off the old
Adam to put on the new, dying to self so that we might rise again in Christ. And this
implies asceticism: If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, take up
his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever
loses his life for my sake will find it.42
So New Testament penance is eschatological, lived in the sign of the cross,
before the mystery of death that leads to new life, a sign of proximity to God, for
Christ is First born from among the dead (Rev 1:5). And the following of Christ on
both the operational and mystagogical (or if you prefer, ontological) plane is a
radical transformation into the death of Christ. We are created according to the
image of Godkateikona tou Theoubut according to the Greek Fathers, this
image of God is Logos; hence we live as the image of a God who died. The great
paradox of Christian life is that the death of Jesus was the death of death. Yet we
can enter this new life only by death to self, including the acceptance of physical
death.
The Canadian Jesuit scripture scholar David M. Stanley expressed this Pauline
teaching as follows:
By accepting his death in all its concrete reality from the hand of his Father, Jesus
Christ destroyed forever the sinful solidarity which had bound humanity to the first
Adam. For he freely became obedient even to death, yes, death upon the cross (Phil
2:8), as the one effective, redeeming representative of the whole race. By his
resurrection, Christ created a new, supernatural solidarity of grace, thereby creating
the possibility of an entirely new relationship for man towards God as his Father,
through his union with the unique Son of God. And he died for all, in order that the
living might no longer live for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for
them (2 Cor 5:15).
Yet in order that man personally might attain this salvation, he must pass
through the ultimate redemptive experience, Christian death, the new creation that
became a reality in Jesus own death. The possibility of attaining this crucially
necessary experience, Paul teaches, is initially opened to the individual human being
through baptism, the sacramental participation in Jesus redeeming death (Rom 6:34).
Yet another experience, participation in Jesus resurrection, which his baptism also
makes possible, is also needed for the completion of mans salvation: and it is to
occur at the parousia (1 Cor 15:23ff).
Thus the emphasis in Pauls thought is not upon the vicarious nature of Jesus
redemptive work, although that element is not absent, but rather upon the efficacy of
Christs death and resurrection in involving man in a totally new human experience.
For this he is prepared here below by the Christian sacraments, principally by baptism
and the Eucharist. Ultimately however he is saved by being totally conformed through
death in Christ and resurrection to Christ, who exhibits in himself the definitive form
of redeemed human nature as the last Adam.43
This theme of death marks the very outset of Christian life, when in baptism
we are baptized into the death of Christ, as St. Paul said: Do you not know that all
of us who have been baptized into Christ were baptized into his death? We were
buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from
the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life (Rom 6:3-
4; cf. 6:5-11, Col 2:12-15). It is this that renders conformity to his life, his image,
possible. For the Christian the following of Christ is never merely operational, but a
conformity of us to him, by him, in the mystery of his Spirit now dwelling in the
Church. As the 4th c. Fathers make clear, we not only strive to imitate the goodness
of his life, but he conforms us to himself in the liturgical mystery of the Church.
42
Mt 16:2425; cf. Mk 8:3435; Lk 9:23-24.
43
A Modern Scriptural Approach to the Spiritual Exercises (Chicago 1967) 294-295.
If Christian life in essence is a configuration to the death and resurrection of

Christ, the sacraments of initiation are only the radical, mystagogical initiation of a
long exodus of spiritual combat, according to the teaching of Chrysostom. For as he
says, the Christ present in us is a crucified Christ, and his life will grow only in a
crucified flesh. Both Chrysostom and Cyril of Jerusalem express this process of
growth in terms of a spiritual exodus which the neophyte, like the Jew in Egypt,
begins in company with the whole Church. And according to Evagrius, askesis is an
essential element of this process, because it is the only method God has given us to
detach ourselves from ourselves, in his pregnant phrase.
This leads us to the practice of Lent, which will be the topic of a separate
reflection.
For Our Prayer
For our prayer let us take the eschatological petitions of the prositelnaja
ektenijathe aiteseis or biddings, as they are called in Greekthe Angel of
Peace litanya litany of passage between the liturgical service and the liturgy
after the liturgy, that is found both before and following the anaphora in the Divine
Liturgy and concludes every major service in our tradition, forming the bridge
between liturgy and the basic needs of Christian life:
Deacon: That this whole day may be perfect, holy, peaceful, and sinless,
let us ask the Lord.
Choir: Grant it, O Lord!
Deacon: For an angel of peace, faithful guide and guardian of our souls and
bodies, let us ask the Lord.
Deacon: For the forgiveness and remission of our sins and offences, let us ask
the Lord.
Deacon: For what is good and profitable for our souls and for peace in the
world, let us ask the Lord.
Deacon: That we may spend the rest of our life in peace and repentance,
Deacon: For a Christian end to our lives, unashamed, peaceful and without
suffering, and for a good defense before the dread judgment seat of Christ, let
us ask the Lord.
Deacon: Commemorating our most holy, most pure, most blessed and glorious
Lady, the Mother of God and ever-virgin Mary, with all the Saints, let us commend
ourselves, one another, and our whole life to Christ our God.
Choir: To Thee, O Lord!
4: The Earthly Temple, Icon of Our Redeemed World 26
Reflection 4: The Earthly Temple, Icon of Our Redeemed World
I. The Byzantine Vision

The Byzantines of old saw their highly-ritualized society as nothing less
than an image of the divine world. This was especially true of their churches and
the liturgy celebrated therein. As Patriarch St. Germanos I of Constantinople (715-
730) famously wrote, The church is heaven on earth, where the God of heaven
dwells and moves.44 This lapidary definition, endlessly repeated down through the
ages, set the parameters of all future discussion on Byzantine worship and its
setting.
The legendary origins of Kievan Christianity also confirm that worship is the
supreme crystallization of our faith. According to the so-called Chronicle of Nestor
for the year 987, the Bulgars (Moslems), Germans (Latins), Jews and Greeks had all
tried to persuade Prince Vladimir of Kiev to adopt their faith as the religion of Rus.
So the prince sent out emissaries to examine what these faiths had to offer. When
the embassy reached Constantinople, the Chronicle recounts:
the Emperor sent a message to the Patriarch to inform him that a Russian
delegation had arrived to examine the Greek faith, and directed him to prepare the
church and the clergy, and to array himself in his sacerdotal robes, so that the
Russes might behold the glory of the God of the Greeks. When the Patriarch
received these commands, he bade the clergy assemble, and they performed the
customary rites. They burned incense, and the choirs sang hymns The Emperor
accompanied the Russes to the church, and placed them in a wide space, calling
their attention to the beauty of the edifice, the chanting, and the pontifical services
and the ministry of the deacons, while he explained to them the worship of his God.
When they arrived home, the ambassadors reported to Vladimir. The

worship of the Moslems had not impressed them. As for the Germans [i.e., Latins],
they had seen them performing many ceremonies in their temples; but we beheld
no glory there. Then we went to Greece, and the Greeks led us to the edifices where
they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth.
For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to
describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is
fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty. 45
This Byzantine world-view is not fantasy: it is based on the mystery of

Christs Incarnation, announced in the Scriptures and explicated in the texts of our
liturgy. The Letter of St. Paul to the Philippians 2:5-11, captures the entire
kerygma:
Christ Jesus,
though he was in the form of God,
did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a servant,
being born in the likeness of men.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself and became obedient unto death,
even death on a cross.
Therefore, God has highly exalted him,
and bestowed on him the name which is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God, the Father!
This lyrical creed summarizes the doctrinal basis for Orthodox Catholic
liturgical theology in the Paschal Mystery of Christ, from the kenosis or self-
emptying of his Incarnation, Passion, and Crucifixion; to his exaltation via
44
St. Germanus of Constantinople, On the Divine Liturgy, The Greek Text with Translation,
Introduction and Commentary by Paul Meyendorff (Crestwood 1984) 56, 58; my translation
cited here.
45
S.H. Cross and O.P. Sherbowitz-Weltzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle. Laurention Text
(Cambridge, MA 1953) 110-11.
Resurrection, Ascension, and Session at the right hand of the Father; unto ultimate
glorification in the celestial liturgy of the Lamb, with the angels and saints before
the throne of God. These interdependent doctrines, seminal to the Byzantine
world-view, are like successive interlocking links in a chain, the whole pendent
from the Incarnation of the God-man Jesus.
What had once been seen as an unbridgeable gulf between the divinity and
humankind had, for Christians, been bridged by the Incarnation of the eternal
Word of God made flesh. This not only bridged the gulf between the divinity and
humankind. It also made Gods saving dispensation a permanent reality. For
Byzantine culture it also made the divine portrayable in icon and ritual: the
defenders of the holy images founded the possibility of Christian iconography on
the fact of the Incarnation of the Word.46 As St. John Damascene (ca. 675-d. 749),
last of the Greek Fathers, taught in his First Apology Against Those Who Attack
the Divine Images 16: In former times God, who is without form or body, could
never be depicted. But now when God is seen in the fleshI make an image of the
God whom I see.47 In this theology, church ritual constitutes both a
representation and a re-presentationa rendering present againof the earthly
saving work of Christ. In his Dialogue Against All Heresies 289-290, St. Symeon
of Thessalonika (d. 1429) gives this vision Byzantine theological expression thus: 48
Jesus, who is bodiless, ineffable, and cannot be apprehended, but who for
our sakes assumed a body, and becoming comprehensible was seen and
conversed with men (Bar 3:38), remaining God, so that he might sanctify us in a
twofold manner, according to that which is invisible and that which is visible... And
thus he transmitted the sacraments to us in a twofold form, at once visible and
material, for the sake of our body, and at the same time intelligible and mystical,
and filled with invisible grace for the sake of our soul
There is one and the same church, above and below, since God came and
appeared among us, and was seen in our form and accomplished what he did for us.
And the Lords priestly activity and communion and contemplation constitute one
single work, which is carried out at the same time both above and here below, but
with this difference: above it is done without veils and symbols, but here it is
accomplished through symbols...
II. Worship as Icon
The integrity and equilibrium of this symbolic matrix, a sense of the
balanced wholeness of things, is a basic quality of the eastern liturgical
experience: transcendent but not distant, hieratic but not clericalized, communal
but not impersonal, traditional but not formalistic. How easy it is to shatter the
equilibrium by omitting one tessera from the mosaic of integral parts! This may be
because of the iconographic nature of worship in the East: the liturgical action is
not just a ceremony; it is an object of contemplation, an awesome vision, full of
mystery, before which one prostrates in reverential fear.
This is true not only of the rite itself but of the whole atmosphere of
sacredness and mystery that surrounds its every movement and communicates a
sense of reverential awe. In the creation of this spirit it would be hard to
exaggerate the importance of the church and its iconography. How flat and
uninspiring a Byzantine liturgy can appear when celebrated in a Western church!
But to see it in a properly appointed Byzantine church is to cross the threshold to
another world, or rather to this world made visible in its redeemed reality as the
transfigured cosmos beyond time.
This is why icons are called windows to another world, why the most
humble village church is heaven on earth according to St. Germanos of
Constantinople, the place where the God of Heaven dwells and moves; where
one can lay aside all worldly care, as the Cherubic Hymn enjoins, to receive the
46
V. Lossky, Tradition and Traditions, in id. and Leonid Ouspensky, The Meaning of Icons,
trans. G.E.H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky (Crestwood 1982) 9-22, here 14.
47
John of Damascus, On the Divine Images. Three Apologies Against Those Who Attack the
Divine Images, trans. D. Anderson (Crestwood 1980) 23.
48
PG 155:524D-525A and 340AB, trans. adapted from Nicholas Constas.
King of all. It is the heavenly sanctuary where men and women, according to
their capacity and desire, are caught up into the adoring worship of the redeemed
cosmos; where dogmas are no barren abstractions but hymns of exulting praise. 49
III. The Iconography of the Church
An essential component of this iconographic vision is the church building
with its liturgical disposition and ambience of iconographic programs explicitly
designed to portray and highten this multi-tiered Neoplatonic vision of mystery. By
obliterating the distinction between architecture and decoration, the interior of the
Middle and Late Byzantine church building becomes a mystical image of the
Christian cosmos. For iconography does not mean just images painted on separate
wooden panels; it also includes the entire mosaic- or fresco-covered walls of
churches.
Let us enter into this Symbolgestalt or symbolic form, with its power to
evoke the ineffable that it is still at work to this day in the Orthodox culture of
Byzance aprs Byzance. Let us enter the earthly temple of our church and make it
another teacher and model of our prayer, allowing its symbolic cocoon to
interpret the milieu our tradition has evolved for its prayer. For the church and its
iconography come alive only during the actual liturgical celebration; only then do
the mysteries being celebrated reflect the churchs true dynamic, at once earthly
and heavenly.
IV. A Living Icon
Eastern Christians chanting the liturgy in this atmosphere, as clouds of

incense rise with their prayers toward Christ-Pantocrator in the dome, are in the
world of the Fathers of the Church. Their theology of visible creation as a symbol of
the invisible, of the incarnation as the icon-restorer of the reflection of divine
beauty to humankind, thus making Christian iconography possiblethis is the soul
of the Byzantine liturgical and aesthetic spirit.
The appointments and spatial disposition of the Byzantine church reflect

this vision. On entering a Byzantine church one feels at once in a place of mystery,
a holy place, detached from the world and flooded with the presence of God. The
great barrier of the iconostasis rises up before the sanctuary, Holy of Holies and
throne of God. Through the doors of this altar-screen none but the sacred ministers
dare to pass. For the Eastern Christian, the Latin Catholics claim to gaze on the
Lord, to be admitted at any moment to his presence, is indeed an extraordinary
one. In the East the throne must be viewed from afar.
But this sanctuary barrier that at some moments of the service may hide
the altar from our view is not a hindrance to popular participation in the mysteries
of the liturgy, but rather an aid, an aid to the Eastern spirit of worship. For Eastern
devotion is aroused by concealment as well as by exposition, and the doors and
veils of the iconostasis are not only to hide, but also to reveal. Understood in this
way, the icon screen is a tangible witness to the mystery we live in the liturgy. It is
not a barrier but a symbolic gateway into the kingdom of heaven, presented here
below in mystery. As the well-known writer Gogol says in his Meditations on the
Divine Liturgy:
Now the Royal Gates are solemnly opened, as though they were the gates of the
Kingdom of Heaven itself opening wide, and before the eyes of the worshippers the
altar, radiant, stands revealed like the habitation of the glory of God and the seat of
heavenly wisdom whence flows out to us knowledge of truth and the proclamation
of eternal life.50
49
P. Hammond, The Waters of Marah. The Present State of the Greek Church (London 1956)
16.
50
N.V. Gogol, The Divine Liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church, trans. R. Edmonds
(London 1960) 19.
In the present dispensation it is only in this way, in symbo1, that we are

enabled to enter behind the veil where our forerunner Jesus Christ has entered for
us (Heb 6:20). The entrance is none the less real, however, for since Christ has
entered once for all through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made
by hands (Heb 9:11), a breach has been opened in the wall of heaven, and we are
in communion with the celestial liturgy offered by the heavenly powers around the
throne of God.
V. The Heavenly Liturgy
The several dimensions of the iconographic programs all belong to the

same liturgical dynamic, bringing alive in the celebration the earthly-heavenly
liturgy that continues the Saving Work of Jesus in Salvation History. The church
building and the ritual it enfolds are designed to image forth the earthly-heavenly
dynamic of this mystical Jacobs Ladder. In the present age of the Church the
divine grace is mediated out to those in the world (nave) from the divine abode
(sanctuary) and its worship, icon of the heavenly liturgy. And our worship rises to
the throne of God from the earthly altar, only to be returned to us as the heavenly
gift of the Spirit.
The sanctuary and its altar are at once Holy of Holies, Cenacle of the Last
Supper, Golgotha, and Holy Sepulchre of the resurrection, from which the sacred
gifts of the Risen Lord, his Word and his Body and Blood, issue forth to illumine the
sin-darkened world (the nave). Germanos unveils this twofold perspective as
follows:
The church is heaven on earth, where the God of heaven dwells and
moves The holy altar stands for the place where Christ was laid in the grave, on
which the true and heavenly bread, the mystical and bloodless sacrifice, lies It is
also the throne of God on which the incarnate God reposes...and like the table he
was at in the midst of his disciples at his Mystical Supper... 51
The surfaces of the church interior become so enveloped in this imagery
that building and icon become one in evoking that vision of the Christian cosmos
around which the Byzantine liturgy revolves. From the central dome the image of
the Pantocrator dominates the whole scheme, giving unity to the heavenly-earthly
liturgy and Salvation-History themes. The movement of the former is vertical,
uniting the present, worshiping community assembled in the nave with the rest of
the Communion of Saints depicted in the ranks of confessors, martyrs, prophets,
patriarchs, apostles, ascending to the Lord in the heavens attended by the
heavenly choirs.
The liturgical theme, extending upward and outward from the sanctuary, is
united both artistically and theologically with the Communion of Saints theme. In
the dynamics of the liturgical theme, the enclosed sanctuary wherein the
mysteries of the covenant are renewed is conceived as the divine abode, its
iconostasis enclosure as the link between heaven and earth through whose central
doors grace irradiates out from heaven (the sanctuary) to earth (the nave). Before
these Holy Doors the deacon, link between the various orders in the Church and
leader of the people in their intercessions, stands at the head of the congregation
knocking at the gates of heaven through prayer, in the lively image of St. John
Climacus.
Behind the altar, on the wall of the sanctuary apse, are depicted the great
Fathers, especially the liturgical Fathers, St. Basil the Great and St. John
Chrysostom, to whom the Orthodox eucharistic liturgies are attributed. They stand
around the altar bowed, in the traditional Byzantine posture of liturgical prayer,
holding scrolls with the text of the liturgy as if concelebratingas indeed they are
in the one liturgy of the Communion of Saints in heaven and on earth. Another
concelebration scene may also be found above this in the sanctuary apse: the
Communion of the Apostles, with Christ the High Priest, surrounded by the
angels, serving Holy Communion to the Twelve.
51
Loc. cit. note 1 above.
VI. The Theotokos

Higher still, in the conch of the bema or sanctuary apse, the Mother of
God, arms extended in the orant position, sends up to the heavenly altar our
worship from the altar before her in the sanctuary below, as in the words of the
liturgy:
For the precious gifts offered and consecrated, let us praythat our God,
the lover of humankind, having received them on his heavenly and spiritual altar as
a pleasing spiritual fragrance, may send down upon us in return the divine grace
and the gift of the Holy Spirit...
A medallion in Marys bosom or the Mandylion above her may depict the
Christ, figure of the Incarnation that made this sacrificial intercession possible.
Above this, at the summit of the arch, may be the hetoimasa or Throne of Divine
Judgment, where the sacrificial mediation intercedes on our behalf, in the words
of the liturgy, for a good defense before the dread judgment seat of Christ.
VII. The Mysteries of Gods Saving Mercy
Outside the sanctuary, the Salvation History cycle, historically the last
series of frescoes to be added to the iconographic programs as well as the last
level of mystagogy to appear in the liturgical commentaries, presents to the
worshipers the Gospel mysteries of Christs life that are also represented in the
liturgical rites. Depicted clockwise in a lateral band of fresco panels extending
around the walls of the church, they bind past Salvation History into its ongoing
salvific continuation in the liturgy.
Within this setting, the liturgical community commemorates the mystery of
its redemption in union with the worship of the Heavenly Church, offering the
mystery of Christs covenant through the outstretched hands of his Mother, all
made present in the imagery of the iconographic scheme. Chanting the liturgy as
clouds of earthly incense mingle with the smoking thuribles of the Heavenly
Liturgy being imaged on earth, one can grasp something of what St. Symeon of
Thessalonika (d. 1429), last of the classic Byzantine commentators of the
Palaiologan era, meant in chapter 131 of his Dialogue Against All Heresies:
The church, as the house of God, is an image of the whole world, for God is
everywhere and above everything... The sanctuary is a symbol of the higher and
supra-heavenly spheres, where the throne of God and His dwelling place are said to
be. It is this throne that the altar represents. The heavenly hierarchies are found in
many places, but here they are accompanied by priests who take their place. The
bishop represents Christ, the church represents this visible world. The upper regions
of the church [building] represent the visible heavens, its lower parts what is on
earth and [the earthly] paradise itself. Outside it are the lower regions and the world
of beings that live not according to reason, and have no higher life. The sanctuary
receives within itself the bishop, who represents the God-man Jesus whose almighty
powers he shares. The other sacred ministers represent the apostles and especially
the angels and archangels, each according to his order. I mention the apostles with
the angels, bishops and priests because there is only one Church above and below,
since God came down among us, and was seen in our form and accomplished what
he did for us. And the Lords priestly activity and communion and contemplation
constitute one single work, which is carried out at the same time both above and
here below, but with this difference: above it is done without veils and symbols, but
here it is accomplished through symbols...52
VIII. The Communion of Saints
One of the articles of the Apostles Creed professes, I believe in the
communion of saints. That teaching means that there is but one Churchas St.
Symeon saidabove and below, and all its members are the saints. That is why
the ancient call to communion summons to the heavenly banquet with the cry:
The holy things for the Saints!
Our icons portray this communion, so we feel quite at home and not at all
overwhelmed by the symbolism with which our worship and iconography envelop
us. For it is here, too, that we are touched by the continuous tradition that is both
communal and our own. Latin Catholics often visit church to be alone with God.
This is not so in our tradition. On entering church we do not proceed to our private
prayers without first going round to visit the icons, kissing them and lighting a
52
PG 155:337-340.
candle before them, thus greeting our saints and expressing our faith that we
belong to their communion.
This sense of the Communion of Saints is one of the most profound
impressions of our worship. Iconographic representations of the saints cover the
walls of the church: patriarchs and prophets of the Old Law join fathers and
doctors of the New; Gregories and Cyrils of world-wide fame rub shoulders with
local saints and martyrs who may have lived in the very town where the church
stands. The hymns and canticles sung in their honor are to the faithful a part of
their own family history. Their legends are retold again and again, their
intercession constantly implored. Integral to this mentality is the great devotion to
the dead in the Christian East. Devotion to the saints and to the dead really
amount to the same thing: the sense of unity with a common past that is so strong
in the worship of the East.
Worshiping in this atmosphere of profuse symbolism, through which the
supernatural splendor of the inaccessible divine majesty and holiness is
approached, we witness the exaltation and sanctification of creation, the majestic
appearance of God who enters us, sanctifies us, divinizes us through the
transfiguring light of his heavenly grace. It is not only a matter of receiving the
sacraments, but of living habitually within a liturgical ambiance that
encompasses one in body and soul, transfiguring ones faith into a concrete vision
of spiritual beauty and joy.
Peter Hammond catches something of this in his description of humble
Greek village churches:
Outwardly they are scarcely distinguishable from the cottages which
surround them Within, however, one finds oneself in another world. Walls
unpierced by windows are covered with paintings which set forth the whole story of
creation and redemption. Patriarchs and prophets mingle with the saints of the new
dispensation; Elias is caught up to heaven in a chariot of fire and Jonah goes down
to the bottoms of the mountains with the weeds wrapped about his head; those
whose names are honoured throughout the length and breadth of Christendom,
Athanasius, Basil and Gregory the Divine, rub shoulders with local saints like St.
George of Iannina and the Neo-Martyrs; the Lord Christ is baptised in Jordan, He
changes the water into wine and reigns in triumph from the tree of Calvary; the
Holy Spirit descends in tongues of fire upon the apostles. 53
For the Greek Christianthe humblest village church is always heaven upon
earth; the place where men and women, according to their capacity and desire, are
caught up into the adoring worship of the redeemed cosmos; where dogmas are no
barren abstractions but hymns of exulting praise, and the saving acts of the divine
compassionthe cross, the tomb, the resurrection on the third day and the
ascension into the heavenly placesare made present and actual through the
operation of the Holy Spirit who ever was, and is and shall be; having neither
beginning nor ending, but for ever joined to and numbered with the Father and the
Son...through whom the Father is known, and the Son is glorified, and by all
acknowledged, one power, one worship and one order of the Holy Trinity. 54
IX. Come and See
This is not mere poetry. In the East, liturgy is theophany, the privileged
ground of our encounter with God, in which the mysteries are truly seen, albeit
only with eyes transfigured by faith. What this means to the Eastern Christian can
be seen in the following reply of a Russian Orthodox batjushka to a Latin Catholic
priest who tried to tell him that what was important was the conversion of sinners,
confession, the teachings of the catechism, prayer, beside which obrjad, rite,
plays only a secondary role.
The Russian priest replied:
Among you it is indeed only an accessory. Among us Orthodox (and at these words
he blessed himself) it is not so. The liturgy is our common prayer, it initiates our
faithful into the mystery of Christ better than all your catechism It passes before our
eyes the life of our Christ, the Russian Christ, and that can be understood only in
common, at our holy rites, in the mystery of our icons. When one sins, one sins
alone. But to understand the mystery of the Risen Christ, neither your books nor
53
The Waters of Marah 21-22.
54
Ibid. 16.
your sermons are of any help. For that, one must have lived with the Orthodox
Church the Joyous Night (Easter). And he blessed himself again. 55
In the same way, my words are hardly adequate to communicate the spirit
of a living tradition that is not an exotic curiosity, a pleasant antiquarian hobby
appropriate to the eccentric dabbler in things oriental, but a divine vision that
must be lived in faith and love. To do so we must contemplate it again and again,
in repeated obedience to the words of Philip to the skeptical Nathaniel: Come and
see (Jn 1:46).
X. For Our Prayer: Contemplating the Vision
For our prayer let us contemplate some of the elements of this heavenly
vision the liturgical space of our churches teaches us.
Iconostasis
Icons
Frescoes
Altar
DoorsPokajanija otverzi mi dveri zhiznodavche!
Prayers before the doors
Pantocrator in the dome
Heavenly Liturgy
55
C. Bourgeois, Chez les paysans de la Podlachie et du nord-est de la Pologne. Mai 1924
dcembre 1925, tudes 191 (1927) 585.
5: The Divine Liturgy, Icon of Our Prayer (I) 33
Reflection 5: The Divine Liturgy, Icon of Our Prayer (I)
I. The Byzantine Liturgical Synthesis

In Reflection 4, I discussed the iconography of the Byzantine church
building. The present reflection focuses on the Divine Liturgy celebrated in this
sacred setting as interpreted in the classical Byzantine liturgical commentaries.
These writings, sometimes disparagingly referred to as allegories, are not the
most esteemed theological literature today. 56 But only at the risk of ones
credibility as an objective student of cultural history could one summarily dismiss
so resiliently durable a literary genre. And recent research has already presented a
more nuanced evaluation of this material.57
In the present reflection, I shall concentrate on the commentaries of
Patriarch St. Germanos I of Constantinople (d. ca. 730), whose work had a seminal
influence in the final synthesis of Byzantine liturgical symbolism; and on the
commentary of St. Nicholas Cabasilas (ca. 1350), which I believe best represents
the final synthesis, when the Divine Liturgy had reached its full form.
II. Mystagogy
Those who cannot see beyond the external and visible
quality of the sign and who cannot progress beyond
the literal meaning of the words of the Bible are to be pitied,
for in both instances it is right to say
that while the spirit enlivens, the letter kills.
As against this, the least of symbols, if understood,
can greatly uplift the spirit, for it was for this purpose
that the things of this world were created.
(Frederik Van der Meer).58
Traditional Byzantine liturgical interpretation, called mystagogy, depends
on a ritual symbolism determined by the testimony of tradition rooted in the Bible.
Like the Scriptures, the rites of the Church require a hermeneutic to expound,
interpret, and apply their multiple levels of meaning in each age. Since mystagogy
is to liturgy what exegesis is to scripture, the commentators on the liturgy used a
method inherited from the older tradition of biblical exegesis.
FortheFathersoftheChurch,SacredScripturepresentsmorethan
aholyhistory.Contemplatedinfaith,thesalvificeventsnarratedinthe
Bibleareperceivedascontainingahighertruth,theireternalverity,as
wellasapracticalapplicationforhereandnow,andasignofwhatisto
56
E.g., O. Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration. Aspects of Monumental Art in Byzantium
(London 1947) 15; J. Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology. Historical Trends and Doctrinal
Themes (New York 1976) 118, 202ff; A. Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology
(Library of Orthodox Theology 4, London 1966) 99ff; id., The Eucharist, Sacrament of the
Kingdom (Crestwood 1988) chaps. 1-2 and passim; id., The Journals of Father Alexander
Schmemann 1973-1983, trans. Juliana Schmemann (Crestwood 2000) 220-21, against my
paper The Liturgy of the Great Church. An Initial Synthesis of Structure and Interpretation
on the Eve of Iconoclasm, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 34-35 (1980-1981) 45-75, reprinted in
Liturgy in Byzantium and Beyond (Variorum Collected Studies Series CS494,
Aldershot/Brookfield 1995) chap. I; H.-J. Schulz, Kultsymbolik der byzantinischen Kirche,
in Symbolik des orthodoxen und orientalischen Christentums (Stuttgart 1962) 17, 20-21; M.
Solovey, The Byzantine Divine Liturgy. History and Commentary (Washington, DC 1970)
70ff.; J. van Rossum, Dom Odo Casel O.S.B. (1948), St. Vladimirs Theological Quarterly
22 (1978) 150-51.
57
R. Bornert, Les Commentaires byzantins de la Divine Liturgie du VII e au XVe sicle,
(Archives de lOrient chrtien 9, Paris 1966); H.-J. Schulz, The Byzantine Liturgy. Symbolic
Structure and Faith Expression, trans. Matthew J. OConnell, English edition introduced and
reviewed by Robert Taft, S.J. (New York 1986).
58
Augustine the Bishop. The Life and Work of a Father of the Church, trans. B. Battershaw
and G.R. Lamb (London/New York 1961) 300.
come.Thesearethefamousfoursensespithilysummarizedintheoft
quotedmedievaldistichattributedtoAugustineofDacia(d.ca.1282):
Littera gesta docet, The literal sense teaches the events,
quid credas allegoria, The allegorical what you must believe;
moralis quid agas, The moral sense what you must do,
quo tendas anagogia.59 The anagogical where you must go.
Thus the Old Testament historical events are understood as only a
shadow of what is to come; the substance belongs to Christ (Col 2:17; cf. Heb.
10:1, Rom 5:14, 2 Cor 3:6-16). This is not a secondary, added sense. Until it is
grasped, the Old Testament has simply not been understood. To uncover this
Christian sense was the sole aim of Early Christian exegesis; its justification was
found in the words of Jesus Himself:
You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal
life; and it is they that bear witness to me (Jn 5: 39).
If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me (Jn 5: 46).
And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all
the scriptures the things concerning himself (Lk 24: 27).
Since Origen (d. 253), these two senses have been referred to as literal or
historical, and as spiritual or mystical or allegorical, though allegory
here does not bear its contemporary pejorative connotation. 60 Later classification
into four senses is just an explication of the spiritual sense under three
aspects:61
1. The allegorical or dogmatic aspect, which interprets the Old Testament as
referring to the mystery of Christ and of the Church. Its realm is faith.
2. The tropological or moral and spiritual aspect, which relates the allegorical
sense of the mystery to Christian life; what we believe to what we do. Its
realm is charity.
3. The anagogical or eschatological aspect, which points to the final
accomplishment we await in the kingdom to come, and to our present
contemplation of this future heavenly reality. Its realm is hope.
This exegesis is rooted in the conviction that the Bible has relevance for
human life in every age, a conviction based on the beliefstated explicitly in the
New Testamentthat the old dispensation prefigures and can be understood only
in light of the new; that the mystery of divine life revealed and lived by Christ is
the wellspring and model for the lives of all who are baptized into him; and that
this mystery will reach its hoped-for consummation in the end of days. This is quite
the opposite of modern scriptural studies, which interpret the New Testament in
light of the Old, not vice-versa as did the Fathers of the Church.
III. Theodore of Mopsuestia
59
On the text and its transmission, see H. de Lubac, Sur un vieux distique. La doctrine du
quadruple sens, in Mlanges F. Cavallera (Toulouse 1948) 347-66; id., Exgse
mdivale. Les quatre sens de 1criture, pt. I, vols. 1-2; pt. II, vols. 1-2 (Thologie 41, 42,
59, Paris 1959-1964) I.1, 23ff.
60
In classical rhetoric, allegory is an extended metaphor. Christian exegetes borrowed this
figure of speech and applied it not to language, but to event, as when the passage of the
Red Sea is seen as a figure of Christs baptism. It is not a question of the hidden sense of
the text, or of the relation between visible and invisible realities, but of the relation
between two historical events of different epochs in salvation history, such as the Passover
of the Jews and that of Jesus. But in addition to this allegoria facti there was also the
allegoria dicti, which sought hidden meanings, often contrived, in the biblical text. It is the
application of this arbitrarily extended metaphorical interpretation to liturgical rites in the
Middle Ages that contemporary liturgists generally refer to, pejoratively, as allegory.
61
All levels are expressed in Heb 13:11-16: . . .the bodies of those animals whose blood is
brought into the sanctuary by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the
camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his
own blood. Therefore let us go forth to him outside the camp, bearing abuse for him. For
here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come. Through him, then, let
us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge
his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are
pleasing to God.
In Theodore of Mopsuestias Catechetical Homilies, written around 388-392,

we see the first extensive application of this method, which views the eucharistic
liturgy as both an image and pre-figuration of the heavenly and eschatological
realities, and a memorial representation of the historical economy of Christ.
Homily 15 announces this dual spirit:62
(15) ...Since the bishop performs in symbol signs of the heavenly realities,
the sacrifice must manifest them, so that he presents, as it were, an image of the
heavenly liturgy... (19) It follows that, since there needs to be a representation of
the High Priest, certain individuals are appointed to preside over the liturgy of these
signs. For we believe that what Christ our Lord performed in reality, and will
continue to perform, is performed through the sacraments....
(20) ...Every time, then, there is performed the liturgy of this awesome
sacrifice, which is the clear image of the heavenly realities, we should imagine that
we are in heaven... Faith enables us to picture in our minds the heavenly realities,
as we remind ourselves that the same Christ who is in heaven...is now being
immolated under these symbols. So when faith enables our eyes to contemplate the
commemoration that now takes place, we are brought again to see his death,
resurrection, and ascension, which have already taken place for our sake.
Theodore also saw the liturgy as a dramatic reenactment of the historical
economy of salvation. The following paragraphs pull together both facets: earthly
economy and heavenly continuation.
(24) Christ our Lord established these awesome mysteries for us. We look
forward to their perfect fulfillment in the world to come, but we have already laid
hold of them by faith... Accordingly we need this sacramental liturgy to strengthen
our faith in the revelation we have received; the liturgy leads us on to what is to
come, for we know that it contains, as it were, an image of the mysterious
dispensation of Christ our Lord, and affords us a shadowy vision of what took place.
Accordingly at the sight of the bishop we form in our hearts a kind of image of
Christ our Lord sacrificing himself to save us and give us life. And at the sight of the
deacons who serve at the ceremony we think of the invisible ministering powers
who officiate at this mysterious liturgy; for the deacons bring this sacrificeor
rather the symbols of the sacrificeand lay it out on the awesome altar...
(25) By means of the symbols we must see Christ who is now being led out
and going forth to his passion, and who, in another moment, is laid out for us on the
altar... And when the offering that is about to be presented is brought out in the
sacred vessels...you must think that Christ our Lord is coming out, led to his
passion...by the invisible host of ministers... And when they bring it out, they place
it on the holy altar to represent fully the passion. Thus we may think of him placed
on the altar as if henceforth in a sort of sepulchre, and as having already undergone
the passion. That is why the deacons who spread linens on the altar represent by
this the figure of the linen cloths of the burial...and when we see the oblation on the
altar as if it were being placed in a kind of sepulchre after death, a great silence
falls on those present. Because that which is taking place is awe-inspiring, they
must look on it in recollection and fear, since it is suitable that now, by the
liturgy...Christ our Lord rise, announcing to all the participation in ineffable benefits.
We remember therefore the death of the Lord in the oblation because it makes
manifest the resurrection and the ineffable benefits.63
Theodore continues the analogy in Homily 16. The resurrection, effected in
the invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts, i.e., in the consecration, is the
effective sign of salvation (16:11-12), and this divine life comes forth to us from
the tomb in communion. The sharing of these gifts in communion is like the
appearances of the Risen Lord (16:18, 20). It is in reference to communion that
Theodore stresses the moral commitment to a Christian life of virtue that such a
participation in the immortal mysteries requires (16:22ff). It is perfectly clear that
Theodore is applying to the liturgy the methods of patristic exegesis described
62
Unless otherwise noted, I cite the version of E. Yarnold, The Awe-inspiring Rites of
Initiation. Baptismal Homilies of the Foutth Century (Slough 1971) who has taken the
liberty of collapsing Theodores verbiage into more manageable English.
63
I cite here the more literal version of A. Mingana, Commentary of Theodore of
Mopsuestia on the Lords Prayer and on the Sacrarnents of Baptism and the Eucharist
(Woodbrooke Studies, 6, Cambridge 1933) 85-89, somewhat revised on the basis of R.
Tonneau, R. Devreesse, Les homlies catchtiques de Thodore de Mopsueste (Studi e
testi 145, Vatican 1949) 503ff.
above. What is new is his systematic interpretation of the liturgical historia as a

dramatic reenactment of the passion of Christ.
IV. The Influence of Jerusalem
This perspective can be traced to 4th c. Jerusalem and the discovery of the
Holy Places after the so-called Peace of Constantine ca. 312/3, when we first
encounter the topographical system of church symbolism, in which various parts of
the building are deemed to represent places hallowed during the Passion Triduum:
Cenacle, Calvary, Holy Sepulchre.64 What was spread across the map of
Jerusalems holy history came to be written small in the humbler churches of
Eastern Christendom. Thus the sanctuary apse becomes the cave of the Holy
Sepulchre, and the altar Christs tomb from which salvation comes forth to the
world.
Theodore of Mopsuestias application of this symbolism to the eucharist
was so congruous as to be inevitable, thereby inaugurating a tradition of
interpretation that eventually spread throughout the whole of Christendom and
came to play a dominant role in the eucharistic symbol-system of the Byzantine
tradition, where it makes its first appearance ca. 730 in the commentary of
Constantinopolitan Patriarch St. Germanos I.
Germanos was writing on the eve of Iconoclasm, in an age hostile to the
spiritualization of symbolism. It is a commonplace to speak of the symbolic
character of Byzantine art and liturgy. But in the struggle with Iconoclasm what we
see is actually the victory of a more literalist popular and monastic piety, precisely
in favor of a less symbolic and more representational, figurative religious art:
already in the Quinisext Council in Trullo (691/2), canon 82 ordains that Christ be
portrayed henceforth in human form, and not symbolically as the Lamb of God. 65
Now symbolism and portrayal are not at all the same thing either in art or
in liturgy, and the effect of this popular mentality on liturgical theology can be
observed in the condemnation of the iconoclastic view that the eucharist is the
only valid symbol of Christ.66 Orthodoxy responded that the eucharist is not a
symbol of Christ, but indeed Christ himself. 67 Analogous developments reached
their head later, in the 9th c. West, but eastern image-theology was able to
preserve Byzantine liturgical theory from the radical disjunction between symbol
and reality that was to plague Western eucharistic theology until modern times. In
the aftermath of Iconoclasm the iconodule theory of religious images and liturgical
symbolism gain the upper hand in Byzantine theology at the same time, and
represent the victory of monastic popular devotion over a more spiritualist
approach.
V. St. Germanos and the Metaphorical Nature
of Religious Language
This is what Germanos effected for liturgy. How he did so can be seen in his
explanation of the church building, in one of the most frequently quoted passages
of Byzantine liturgical literature:
The church is heaven on earth, where the God of heaven dwells and moves.
It images forth the crucifixion and burial and resurrection of Christ. It is glorified
above the tabernacle of the testimony of Moses with its expiatory and holy of holies,
prefigured in the patriarchs, founded by the prophets, founded on the apostles,
adorned in hierarchs, perfected in the martyrs.
The holy altar stands for the place where Christ was laid in the grave, on
which the true and heavenly bread, the mystical and bloodless sacrifice, lies, His
flesh and blood offered to the faithful as the food of eternal life. It is also the throne
of God on which the incarnate God reposesand like the table at which He was in
64
This can be seen already ca. 384 in 24-28 of the diary of the famous peregrinating nun
Egeria, trans. J. Wilkinson, Egerias Travels (London 1971) 123-24.
65
Mansi 11:977-80.
66
Horos of the iconoclastic council of 754, Mansi 13: 264; C. Mango, The Art of the
Byzantine Empire, 312-1453 (Sources and Documents in the History of Art Series,
Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1972) 166.
67
VII Ecumenical Council (787), loc. cit. in the previous note.
the midst of His disciples at His mystical supperprefigured in the table of the Old
Law where the manna was, which is Christ, come down from heaven.
The same themes are resumed in the succeeding paragraphs. The
sanctuary is the place where Christ offered the Father his body as Lamb of God
and priest and Son of Man, the offerer and offered, prefigured in the Old Testament
Passover and consumed by the faithful, by which they become partakers of eternal
life. Further, this same sanctuary is a type of the invisible heavenly sanctuary
where the heavenly ministers mingle with the earthly, since the Son of God and
creator of all legislated both the heavenly rite and the earthly ritual. The
episcopal throne in the apse is where Christ presides with his apostles. It
foreshadows His session in glory at the Parousia. The chancel is like the chancel of
the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The monumental ambo rising up before the
central doors of the chancel is like the great stone rolled back from the mouth of
the tomb. From it the angel first proclaimed to the myrrhophores the good news of
the resurrection of the Lord.
And so Germanos proceeds step by step throughout the whole commentary
preceding the anaphora, adding to the traditional heavenly liturgy interpretation
the new level of meaning based on the historical economy of Christ. The sobriety
of this symbolism and the unity of method is so apparent that one is perplexed by
the strictures passed on it, as in this negative judgment of Otto Demus:
In the realm of topographical symbolismover-interpretation set in fairly
soon, more than one symbolic identification being applied to one locality or even to
a single object of church furniture. Examples of this can be found in the
Ecclesiastical History of the Patriarch Germanos...68
Demus completely misses the point because he fails to grasp the whole
basis of Germanos symbol-system. The problem of later medieval liturgical
allegory consists not in the multiplicity of systematically layered symbols such as
we find here and in patristic exegesis. The later one-symbol-per-object
correspondence results not from the tidying up of an earlier incoherent
primitiveness, but from the decomposition of the earlier patristic mystery-theology
into a historicizing system of dramatic narrative allegory. All levelsOld Testament
preparation, Last Supper, accomplishment on Calvary, eternal heavenly offering,
present liturgical eventmust be held in dynamic unity by any interpretation of
the eucharist. To separate these levels, then parcel out the elements bit by bit
according to some chronologically consecutive narrative sequence, is to turn ritual
into drama, symbol into allegory, mystery into history.
This is crucial: allegory represents the breakdown of metaphorical
language. The precise genius of metaphorical language is to hold in dynamic
tension several levels of meaning simultaneously. In this sense, one and the same
eucharistic table must be at once Holy of Holies, Golgotha, tomb of the
resurrection, cenacle, and heavenly sanctuary of the Letter to the Hebrews. So it is
not the multiplicity of meanings but the attempt to parcel them out that can lead
to an artificial literalism destructive of symbol and metaphor. That is precisely
what Germanos refuses to do, thereby remaining faithful to what J. Danilou
indicates as the unitary vision of these monuments of Christian culture:
The Christian faith has only one object: the mystery of Christ dead and
risen. But this unique mystery subsists under different modes: it is prefigured in the
Old Testament, it is accomplished historically in the earthly life of Christ, it is
contained in mystery in the sacraments, it is lived mystically in souls, it is
accomplished socially in the Church, it is consummated eschatologically in the
heavenly kingdom. Thus the Christian has at his disposition several registers, a
multi-dimensional symbolism, to express this unique reality. The whole of Christian
culture consists in grasping the links that exist between Bible and Liturgy, Gospel
and Eschatology, Mysticism and Liturgy. The application of this method to scripture
is called spiritual exegesis; applied to liturgy it is called mystagogy. This consists in
reading in the rites the mystery of Christ, and in contemplating beneath the
symbols the invisible reality. 69
68
Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration 15.
69
J. Danilou, Le symbolisme des rites baptismaux, Dieu vivant, 1 (1945) 17, emphasis
added.
The proof of the success of Germanos synthesis is its viability: for over six-
hundred years it reigned with undisputed primacy over the field of Byzantine
liturgical explanation.
VI. St. Nicholas Cabasilas: A Spirituality for the Masses
Not until the new 14th c. synthesis of the hesychast epoch, represented in
the liturgical codification of Patriarch St. Philotheos Kokkinos diataxis and in the
commentary of St. Nicholas Cabasilas, did Germanos dominance meet a worthy
challenger. Written around 1350, Cabasilas brilliant treatises combine the best in
humanism and hesychast spirituality to make him the classic exponent of
Byzantine liturgical theology during the hesychast revival. Cabasilas interpretation
is in no way extrinsic to the structure and meaning of the rites, nor is his
contemplation a substitute for sacramental participation, but only its prelude.
The Divine Liturgy, Cabasilas teaches, is ordered toward the sanctification
of the faithful who through these mysteries receive the remission of their sins and
the inheritance of the heavenly kingdom. All elsethe antiphons, lessons,
prayers, chantsis meant to dispose one for this central sacramental communion.
They turn us towards God, and make us fit for the reception and preservation of
the holy mysteries, which is the aim of the liturgy. 70
ButCabasilas continuesthere is another level of liturgical signification
another way in which these forms...sanctify us. It consists in this: that in them Christ
and the deeds he accomplished and the sufferings he endured for our sakes are
represented. Indeed, it is the whole scheme of the work of redemption which is
signified in the psalms and readings, as in all the actions of the priest throughout
the liturgy The whole celebration of the mystery is like a unique portrayal of a
single body, which is the work of the Saviour...
This representational aspect of the ritual ceremonies is not an empty show,
however: the ceremonies are meant to stimulate a personal response of faith.
Their purposeCabasilas specifiesis to set before us the Divine plan, that by
looking upon it our souls may be sanctified, and thus we may be made fit to receive
these sacred gifts. Contemplated with ardour by those who already have faith...
[the work of redemption] preserves, renews, and increases what already exists; it
makes the believers stronger in faith and more generous in devotion and love.
For Cabasilas, this liturgical symbolism does not depend on some abstruse
symbol-system. On the contrary, nothing could be more concretely realistic:
In beholding the unutterable freshness of the work of salvation, amazed
by the abundance of Gods mercy, we are brought to venerate him who had such
compassion for us, who saved us at so great a price: to entrust our souls to him, to
dedicate our lives to him, to enkindle in our hearts the flame of his love. Thus
prepared, we can enter into contact with the fire of the solemn mysteries with
confidence and trust.
This is no lofty gnosticism for a spiritual elite, but a profoundly imaginative popular
piety.
VII. For Our Prayer
Let use the rest of this hour to reflect and pray over some ritual action or
text of the Divine Liturgy of your own choosing within this symbolic matrix as
expounded in the writings of the major liturgical theologians of our traditionfor
example the Minor Introit or Little Entrance, as its called, as symbol of Christ
coming among us in as Divine Word, and what that means for the liturgy of our
life.
70
Passages of Cabasilas, Commentary I, 1, are cited from Nicholas Cabasilas, A
Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, trans. Joan M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty (London 1960)
26-29. On Cabasilas commentary on the Divine Liturgy, see Bornert, Les commentaires
byzantins 215-44; Schulz, The Byzantine Liturgy 124-32, 190-96.
6: The Divine Liturgy, Icon of Our Prayer (II) 39
Reflection 6: The Divine Liturgy, Icon of Our Prayer (II)

Let us continue our reflection on the Divine Liturgy as icon or source and
model of our prayer, meditating on its meaning as its deroulement unfolds step by
step.
I. Convocation
As the great Orthodox theologian Protopresbyter Fr. Aexander Schmemann
(1921-1983) reminds us in his writings, 71 the Divine Liturgy begins before we arrive
in church. For Church means ekklesia, a convocation, not just a congregation that
has come together, but one that has been summoned to gather by the call of God,
the divine summons to become the new Qehal Yahweh, Gods new Chosen People.
So our liturgy begins at home as we prepare to answer this divine call.
II. Preparation
This preparation continues when we arrive in church, greeting one another,
the living saints as well as our departed onesfor all the baptized are saints in
Christ72venerating their icons and confirming thereby our membership in the
Communion of Saints that is the Church. As we pray in wait for the Divine Liturgy
to begin, we might reflect on the nature of all Christian waiting, which is a vigil in
prayerful expectation of the coming of the Kingdom. As the Messianic Banquet of
the Kingdom, the eucharist, effective sacramental sign that the Kingdom has
indeed come, resolves this wait liturgically.
As we pray before the iconostasis, let us recall and meditate on the
preparatory prayer the sacred ministers recite before entering to the altar, asking
the Mother of God to open for us the portals of mercy leading to salvation, portals
symbolized by the still closed and curtained Holy or Royal Doors before which
we wait in prayerful hope: Blessed Mother of God, open the doors of your deep
mercy to us who put our trust in you!73
The central doors of the iconostasis are also Royal insofar as they
symbolize the entrance into the Kingdom Christ opened for us: Truly, truly, I say
to you, you will see heaven opened (Jn 1:51). This door to heaven is Christ
himself: I am the door; if any one enters by me, he will be saved (Jn 10:9). That
is why the icons on the Royal Doors customarily depict the mystery of the
Incarnation of the Word of God in the Annunciation mystery that inaugurated our
salvation, as we saw in Reflection 4. The icons on the Royal Doors also portray the
four evangelists whose Gospel, the Word of our salvation, is brought out and
proclaimed to us through these doors. So the doors of the iconostasis image a
basic religious symbol in human religiosity, including the New Testament:
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be
opened to you! (Mt 7:7; Lk 11:9); When once the householder has risen up and
shut the door, you will begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying,
Lord, open to us. He will answer you, I do not know where you come from! (Lk
13:25).
III. The Prothesis
Meanwhile, the priest and deacon are celebrating the Prothesis Rite or
Proskomidija, as it is called in Slavonic. This ritual, an active prophecy like the Last
Supper, foretells and prepares for what is to follow, the sacrifice of Christ made
71
See the first chapters of his For the Life of the World. Sacraments and Orthodoxy
(Crestwood 1988), and Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom (Crestwood 1973).
72
See R.F. Taft, Praying to or for the Saints? A Note on the Sanctoral Intercessions
Commemorations in the Anaphora: History and Theology, in M. Schneider, W. Berschin
(eds), Ab Oriente et Occidente (Mt 8,11). Kirche aus Ost und West. Gedenkschrift fr
Wilhelm Nyssen (St. Ottilien 1996) 439-455; id., The Veneration of the Saints in the
Byzantine Liturgical Tradition, in J. Getcha and A. Lossky (eds.), Thysia aineseos..
Mlanges liturgiques offerts la mmoire de lArchevque Georges Wagner (1930-1993)
(Paris 2005) 353-368; id., A History of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, vol. V: The
Precommunion Rites (OCA 261, Rome 2000) 234-36.
73
On the doors in religious symbolism across the traditions, see M. Sodi (ed.), Pellegrini alla
porta della misericordia (Quaderni di Rivista Liturgica 2, Padua 2000); for the Byzantine
tradition, see chap. 8: S. Parenti, Le porte nella liturgia bizantina, ibid. 111-120.
present again on our earthly altar, icon of the heavenly worship Christ continues
for all eternity before the throne of the Father.
The priest extracts the Agnets or Lamb from the first prosphora to the
prayer of Old Testament prophetic verses foretelling the sacrifice of Christ, the new
oblation of the true Paschal Lamb:
As a sheep he was led to the slaughter. And as a spotless lamb silent
before its shearer, he opens not his mouth. In his humiliation his judgment was
taken away. And who shall declare his generation? For his life was taken away
from the earth.
Then, in a striking icon of the Communion of Saints, the Church above
and below of those saved by the prophesied sacrifice of the New Lamb of God
who takes away the sins of the world, the priest offers on the diskos particles for
the Mother of God, for the heavenly choir of angels and saints, for the hierarchs of
the Church and for all the faithful, living and departed, either by name or in
general. So we too are there on the diskos, in this sobor of the heavenly and
earthly Church that is the Communion of Saints. And we pray that our presence
there not be an empty symbol of what we are not!
IV. The Sacrament of the Kingdom
In his book The Eucharist, Alexander Schmemann calls the Divine Liturgy
the Sacrament of the Kingdom, and indeed it is. For it resolves the fast and vigil
that precede it, which, like every Christian vigil, is the icon of our waiting in faith
and hope for the coming of the Lord in power and glory in his Parousia at the end
of days. It resolves it with the eucharist, the heavenly Messianic Banquet, effective
sign that the Kingdom had indeed come, as Jesus foretold in Lk 13:29 (cf. Mt 8:11):
men will come from east and west, and from north and south, and sit at table in
the kingdom of God. And in Rev 3:20: Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if
any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with
him, and he with me! That is why the Gospels devote so much space to
recounting how often the Risen Christ eats with his disciples. This is not because
Jesus was always hungrythe glorified Risen Lord had no need of earthly food
but because the evangelists, all Jews, understood the symbolic force of banqueting
with the Messiah as a sign that his Kingdom had come.
And so the Divine Liturgy opens with the invocation of this Kingdom:
Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now
and ever and unto the ages of ages! To which Gods Church, the seed of that
Kingdom here one earth, replies Amen! meaning Yes! So be it! May it indeed be
blessed by what we celebrate in mystery here and try to live out in our lives!
V. Peace from on high, Fruit of the Kingdom
Then the deacon proclaims the Mirnaja Ektenija or Litany of Peace, called
Ta eirenika in Greek.74 What is this peace from on high for which we pray? It is
directly linked to the opening greeting Blessed is the Kingdom, for The kingdom
of Godmeans righteousness and peace and joy brought about by the Holy Spirit,
St. Paul teaches in Rom 14:17.
Todays Enarxis or opening rite of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy had begun to
develop only by the eighth century. For most of the first millennium of its history the
very opening word of the Liturgy was peace. Peace to all! the presider would
greet the assembled congregation immediately upon entering church, reverencing
the altar, and reaching his throne in the apse. The earliest stratum of all Christian
liturgical witness to the biblical peace-theme is this Semitic greeting-cum-prayer of
peace, a prayer that runs throughout the first level of Christian supplication.
What is the nature of this peace? In biblical times as now, the Hebrew
Shalom was a common greeting, a wishing well. But it was more; Peace! is a
dynamic, grace-giving word (Jn 20:19-21), which, if rejected, returns to the
greeter (Mt 10:13; Lk 10:5). This peace was not understood on the purely human
level; it was not just the absence of war. In the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh himself is
peace (Judges 6:24), and peace is his gift. But if peace is well-being, it is so only
74
On the Eirenika and the whole question of peace and its meaning in the Bible and the
liturgy, see R.F. Taft, War and Peace in the Byzantine Divine Liturgy, in T.S. Miller & J.
Nesbitt (eds.) Peace and War in Byzantium. Festschrift for George Dennis, S.J. (Washington,
DC 1995) 17-32.
because to have it is a sign of communion with God, who gives his gift of peace to
those who serve him (Ps 85:8-13). This peace of God includes freedom from fear
and threat by enemies or beasts of prey. But it is not just prosperity and well-being,
but also righteousness, without which there is no real peace (Is 48:18-22,54:10ff,
60:17ff). This is also the principal meaning of eirene in the New Testament (e.g., Lk
1:79, 2:14,19:42), though the term is also found there in the more conventional
sense of freedom from war and strife (Mt 10:34; Lk 12:51).
In short, peace in the Bible is practically synonymous with salvation (Rom
16:20, 1 Thess 5:23). The saving God is a God of peace. Peace is communion
with God. Thus Jesus himself is our peace, since he is the bond of communion (Eph
2:14-17): We live in peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (Rom 5:1).
Peaceful and harmonious relations within the community are the fruit of this: The
kingdom of Godmeans righteousness and peace and joy brought about by the
Holy Spirit (Rom 14:17). Christians pray for peace, then, because true peace is
richer than anything they can accomplish of themselves: it is a grace of God in
Christ Jesus, through the Spirit. That is why in its New Testament understanding the
greeting Peace be with/to you is synonymous with the various biblical and
liturgical varieties of the Christian greeting, The Lord be/is with you all (Ruth 2:4,
Lk 1:28); Grace and peace be with you; the grace of the/our Lord Jesus be with
you (all) (1 Cor 16.23, cf. Tim 4:22); The grace of the Lord be with your spirit
(Gal 6:18, Phil 4:23). For, although Kyrios in both Septuagint and New Testament
texts can mean God without intending Christ (Col 3:22, 2 Cor 8:21, Lk 1:28), in the
New Testament this epithet, without further specification, and with or without the
article, usually refers to Jesus, as in Gal 1:20, 1 Cor 4:4-5, Rom 1:4all texts from
the earlier strata of NT writings. Furthermore, in the Pauline greetings, literary
parallels to our liturgical salutations, the Lord who is with us is unmistakably
Jesus (Gal 6:18, Phil 4:23, Philemon 25, 2 Tim 4:22, 2 Thess 3:16).
This being with us of the Lord, promised in Mt 28:18-20 and verified in
Acts 18:9-10, is a dynamic, saving presence, like that of Yahwehs promised being
with his Chosen People. So the being of God with us, W. van Unnik concludes, is
for Christians the present reality of the Holy Spirit in the Church, and represents
the dynamic activity of Gods Spirit given to chosen ones to enable them to do
Gods work.75
This first and most basic level of biblical peace is the peace for which
Christians pray repeatedly in the liturgy. The liturgy calls it the peace from on
high, as in the angelic greeting of Lk 1:14: Glory to God in the highest, and on
earth peace among men with whom he is pleased! It is this peace the liturgical
presider calls down upon all in the ancient opening greeting, Peace to all! This
peace is so characteristic of the Great Synapte or principal litany of the Byzantine rite
that it is commonly called ta eirenika, The Litany of Peace. Found today after the initial
blessing of the Divine Liturgy, it was originally the Litany of the Faithful, chanted just
before the Great Entrance. Its first three biddings are for peace:
1. In peace let us pray to the Lord!
2. For the peace from on high and for the salvation of our souls, let us pray to the
Lord!
3. For the peace of the whole world, for the welfare of the holy churches of God, and
for the union of all, let us pray to the Lord!
One further petition of the synapte asks For seasonable weather, an
abundance of the fruits of the earth, and for peaceful times, let us pray to the Lord!
In this context, the plural times here could also be understood in the sense of
seasons, though it also means the times in the sense of the state of affairs. As
elsewhere, in the liturgyindeed, especially in the liturgy, where language is
metaphorical as in all theological discoursewe need not presume that peace can
have but one precise meaning, any more, indeed, than the Greek term leitourgia itself,
which includes at once all the richness and ambiguity of its English equivalent,
service.
75
W.C. van Unnik, Dominus vobiscum: The Background of a Liturgical Formula, in id.,
Sparsa collecta. The Collected Essays of W.C. van Unnik, Part III. (Supplements to Novum
Testamentum 31) 363-391, here 380.
So right from the start we find peace prayed for in the liturgy in a twofold
sense: for peace in the conventional meaning of the absence of war and strife; but
also, and above all, for the biblical eschatological peace, peace as salvation, a gift
only God can give. In the New Testament this peace, eirenenot to be confused
with apatheia or peace of mindis the peace of Christ, fruit of the Gospel (Eph
6:15), the Lords gift that the world cannot give (Jn 14:27, 16:33, Phil 4:7). This
peace of Christ comes from being united in the one body of the Church (Col 3:11-
15), and is the fruit of the Holy Spirit (Gal 5:22, Rom 14:17) conferred in baptism,
when we receive the gift of adopted sonship in Christ (Gal 3:25-4:7). Peace is
communion with God, and Jesus himself is our peace, since he is the bond of our
communion (Eph 2:14-17), for We live in peace with God through our Lord Jesus
Christ, St. Paul teaches in Rom 5:1. No wonder, then, that we pray for this Peace
of the Kingdom not only at the beginning of our Divine Liturgy but, as we shall see,
time and again throughout the service.
VI. O Only Begotten Son and Word of God
As the Enarxis or opening rite of three antiphons proceeds, we sing the
Incarnation Hymn that once served as the troparion of the Introit Antiphon, Ps
94/95 (now often substituted by the Beatitudes of the Kingdom from Mt 5:3-12
prefaced by Lk 23:42):
Come, let us rejoice in the Lord, let us shout with jubilation unto God our
Savior,
Let us come before His countenance with thanksgiving, and with psalms let
us shout in jubilation unto Him.
For the Lord is a great God and a great king over all the earth. . .
O come, let us worship and fall down before Him...
O only-begotten Son and Word of God, though immortal you condescended
for our salvation to take flesh from the holy Theotokos and ever-virgin Mary. Without
change you became man and were crucified, Christ God, trampling down death by
death. You who are one of the Holy Trinity, glorified with the Father and the Holy
Spirit, save us!
VII. The Minor Introit or Little Entrance
Today the marvelously balanced structure of the Divine Liturgy opens each
of its two major parts, The Liturgy of the Word and The Liturgy of the Eucharistic
Sacrifice, with a symbolic procession that, like an active prophecy, images forth
what is to follow. The most important of these appearances are the two solemn
introits. The Minor Introit or Little Entrance when the priestly celebrants bear the
Gospel out from the altar and proceed to the Royal Doors is an epiphany of Christ,
symbolized in the Gospel book, coming to us as Incarnate Word of God. The
second procession, the Major Introit or Great Entrance that opens the eucharistic
part of the service, comprises the solemn transfer to the altar of sacrifice of the
gifts of bread and wine prepared before the beginning of the liturgy. It symbolizes
Christ being led to his sacrifice, and prefigures his coming to us in the sacrament
of his Body and Blood. These foreshadowings are fulfilled in two later appearances,
the procession of the deacon with the Gospel lectionary to the ambo for the
reading; and the procession of the celebrant to distribute in communion the
Sacred Gifts.
At the Little Entrance, all are turned in expectation to watch the
appearance of the sacred ministers and their retinue, splendidly attired in the rich
vestments of their order and bearing the Gospel and Cross, symbols of Christ, as
the Introit Antiphon is intoned, presaging the imminent symbolic appearance of
the Heavenly Celebrant himself in our midst.
Standing before the sanctuary doors, the celebrant recites the Introit
Prayer, whose words evoke the vision of the heavenly sanctuary he is about to
enter, resplendent there through the now open doors, before our very eyes:
O Lord and master, our God, who in heaven has established the orders and
armies of angels and archangels to minister unto your majesty, grant that the holy
angels may enter with us, concelebrating and glorifying with us your goodness, for
to you belongs all glory, honor and worship, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now and
ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen!
This Introit Prayer expresses the original symbolism and theological basis of
the Byzantine Divine Liturgy: that what we do on our earthly altars is the living
icon of and concelebration in the eternal worship that the Risen Son of God carries
on for all eternity before the Heavenly Altar of his Father above. Foras the Letter
to the Hebrews teachesChrist has entered not into a sanctuary made with hands,
a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of
God on our behalf (Heb 9:24). The eternal and ever-present force of our service
derives from the fact that it is in every sense a participation in the Heavenly
Worship of the Lamb as portrayed in the Apocalypse or Book of Revelation that
concludes the New Testament.
In his Dialogue Against All Heresies, St. Symeon of Thessalonika (d. 1429),
the last of the classic Byzantine liturgical commentators, expresses this theology
in these words:76
There is one and the same church, above and below, since God came and
appeared among us, and was seen in our form and accomplished what he did for us.
And the Lords priestly activity and communion and contemplation constitute one
single work, which is carried out at the same time both above and here below, but
with this difference: above it is done without veils and symbols, but here it is
accomplished through symbols...
Germanos interprets this Little Entrance, which he calls the entrance of
the Gospel, as the coming of Christ to the world:
The entrance of the Gospel shows the appearance and the entrance of the
Son of God into this world, as the apostle says, When Hei.e., God the Father
brings the first-born into the world, He says: Let all His angels worship Him (Heb. 1:
6).
The pontiff in his red vestments, continues Germanos, represents the
incarnate Christ, now appearing not in a manger of irrational beasts but in the
Table of the Word of rational men. Just as the angels at His coming sang Glory to
God in the highest (Luke 2:14), we sing O come, let us worship and fall down!
Save us, O Son of God! And as the Magi offered gold, frankincense, and myrrh, we
offer our faith, hope, and charity, expressed in the Trisagion hymn, which is
chanted right after the introit antiphon.
Note that Christ opened not just for the priests but for all of us this
symbolic entrance into the Heavenly Sanctuary of the Kingdom: Therefore,
brethren, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus,
by the new and living way he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through
his flesh (Heb 10:19). Hence the entrance of the priests symbolizes the
entrance of us all, as was captured in the variant Introit Prayer found in several of
the earliest manuscripts of the Chrysostom Liturgy:
Benefactor and artisan of all creation, receive the Church now entering,
bring to completion all that is for the good of each, guide all to perfection, and make
us worthy of your Kingdom. By the grace and mercies and love for humankind of
your Only-Begotten Son, with whom you are blessed
So it is the whole Church that is granted entrance into the Holy of Holies
something the Slavonic translators of the prayer could not understand, so they
mistranslated the Greek not as receive the entering Churchpriimi vxodjashchuju
cerkov, but receive [us] entering the churchpriimi [nas] v cerkov tvoju.77
VIII. The Trisagion
Meanwhile the priest recites the Prayer of the Trisagion, the original ancient
Refrain of the Introit Antiphon of the Divine Liturgy, expressing the sentiments
demanded of us as we complete the opening rites of the service:
O holy God, who rest among the Saints, whose praises are sung by the
Seraphim with the hymn of the Trisagion, who are glorified by the Cheru bim and
adored by all the powers of heaven; who brought all things into being out of
nothingness and created man according to your image and likeness and
adorned him with all the gifts of your grace; who give wisdom and
understanding to him who asks for them, and who do not turn away from the
sinner but off er him repentance for his salvation; who have allowed us, your
lowly and unworthy servants to stand at this moment before the majesty of
your holy altar and offer you proper worship and honoraccept, O Lord, even
76
PG 155:340AB, trans. adapted from Nicholas Constas.
77
See the Slavonic mss I cite in Taft, The Great Entrance 254.
from the mouths of us sinners, the hymn of the Trisagion and graciously look
down upon us. Forgive us every offense whether deliberate or indeliberate;
sanctify our souls and bodies and grant that we may serve you in holiness all
the days of our life; through the prayers of the holy Mother of God and all the
saints who have pleased you from the beginning of time. For you are holy, O
our God, and to you we give glory, to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
now and ever and unto the ages of ages, Amen!
Upon arriving at the throne in the apse to the chant of the Trisagion, the
presiding priest greets and blesses the congregation with the traditional Peace to
all.
IX. The Word of God
There follow immediately the Gradual Psalm or Prokeimenon, the Apostle,
the Alleluia Psalm, and Gospel. The Prokeimenon and Gospel herald once again the
appearance of Christ. Indeed, this presence or parousiaa term Germanos
uses five times in the context of the presence of Christ in the entrance rites and
Word serviceis the main theme he stresses in this part of the liturgy:
The Holy Gospel is the appearance of God in which He is seen by us, no
longer through clouds and speaking in riddles as once to Mosesbut He appeared
openly as true man and was seen by usthrough whom God the Father has spoken
to us face to face and not in riddles, concerning whom the Father gives witness from
heaven and says, This is my beloved son, wisdom, word and power, announced to
us in the prophets, and revealed in the Gospels, so that all who receive Him and
believe in His name receive power to become children of God. To Him whom we
have heard and with our own eyes have seen to be the wisdom and word of God, we
all cry Glory to you, O Lord! (31/43).
This is no more than an 8th c. Byzantine way of saying what Christians still
say of the first part of the Divine Liturgy, the Liturgy of the Word: In the liturgy
the living God comes to meet us in His Word and His Sacrament. 78 Christ is the
Word made flesh who still dwells among us in the Word of his revelation as well as
in the sacrament of his Sacred Body and Blood. For St. Germanos, the introit with
the Gospel, ritual symbol of Christs coming to us now in Word, reminds us of his
first appearance in the flesh, of which the presence in Word is but the continuation
in sacramental form, gauge of his Parousia or Second Coming in the final days.
Symbolism apart, what the proclamation of the Gospel must mean for us in
the concrete is taught in the Gospel Prayer, recited silently by the priest:
O Master who love humankind, make the spotless light of your divine
wisdom shine in our hearts and open the eyes of our mind to an
understanding of the things you teach us in the Gospel. Instil in us a fear of your
blessed commandments, so that, trampling upon the desires of the flesh, we
may begin to lead a spiritual life, both thinking and doing all things according
to your pleasure. For you are the enlightenment of our souls and bodies,
Christ our God, and we give glory to you, together with your eternal Father and
your all-holy, good and life-giving Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of
ages, Amen!
X. The Prayers
The Liturgy of the Word concludes with the litanies and prayers for the
different categories of the Church and their needs. One of the most moving is the
Prayer for the Reposedusually not chanted on Sundays, though it would be
difficult to find days more intimately linked to the mystery of risen life in Christ
than the Pasch of the Resurrection and Sundays!
God of the spirits and of all flesh, who have trampled on death and
vanquished the devil and given life to your world, give rest, O Lord, to the soul(s) of
your departed servant(s), NN., in a place of light, a place of refreshment, a place of
repose, from which pain, sorrow, and sighing have fled. Because You are good and
love humankind, forgive their/his/her every offense, whether in word or deed or
thought; for there is no one living and never will be who does not sin: You alone are
without sin, your righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and your word is
truth. For You are the resurrection and the life and the repose of your departed
servant(s), NN., Christ our God, and to You we give glory, together with your eternal
Father, and your all-holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now and ever, and unto the
ages of ages! Amen!
78
A. Verheul, Introduction to the Liturgy (Collegeville 1968) 21.
XI. The Major Introit or Great Entrance

Like the first introit chant, which served to prepare the people for the
coming of Christ in the mystery of His Word, the Cherubicon, sung during the Great
Entrance procession without the interruption of the later medieval
commemorations, served to prepare the people spiritually for the imminent
oblation (Anaphora) and communion, exhorting them to elevate their minds and
hearts to God as in the exhortation before the Anaphora, Lift up our hearts!, to
sing the angelic chant Holy, holy, holy, and to prepare to receive their King not in
the Great Entrance, as is sometimes mistakenly thought, but in Holy Communion.
For as I have shown, 79 the Cherubicon chant introduces the entire eucharistic part
of the Divine Liturgy, and not just the arrival of the gifts for the sacrifice:
Let us, who mystically represent the Cherubim and sing the thrice-holy
hymn to the life-giving Trinity, now lay aside all worldly care to receive 80 the King of
All escorted unseen by the angelic corps. Alleluia!
This procession and deposition of the gifts would come to symbolize, by a
sort of ritual synecdoche, the entire Byzantine Divine Liturgy, becoming the axis
around which the whole symbolic matrix turned: all that preceded and followed
came to depend on it. But the earliest level of symbolism, that of the angelic
liturgy which we already saw expressed in the Prayer of the Little Entrance, is also
that of the Cherubic Hymn introduced into the liturgy under Emperor Justin II in AD
573-574, and Germanos both continues and develops this hermeneutic.
By means of the procession of the deacons and the representation of the
ripidia bearing an image of the Seraphim, the Cherubic Hymn shows the entrance of
the saints and all the just, entering together before the cherubic powers and angelic
hosts, invisibly going before Christ the great king proceeding to the mystical
sacrifice
Symbolized in the fire and sweet smoke of incense is the presence of the
Holy Spirit, Who comes invisibly upon us and perfumes us with the mystical, life-
giving, and bloodless worship and fruition. And the angelic choirs, seeing Christs
economy consummated in His cross and death, and the victory over death,
descent into hell, and resurrection on the third day, sing with us alleluia!
In this interpretation of the Great Entrance as a prolepsis of the entire
eucharistic anamnesis, Germanos remains faithful to the earliest Byzantine
interpretation, expressed in the Cherubic Hymn. I have shown elsewhere that the
Great-Entrance chants of the Byzantineand indeed of most Eastern liturgical
traditionsare not offertory chants, but serve rather to introduce the whole
ritual to follow, much as the Introit Antiphon once did for the Synaxis of the Word.
But Germanos enriches this pristine interpretation with another, later
tradition that would eventually become normative: the procession and deposition
as the funeral cortge and burial of Christ.
It is also in imitation of the burial of Christ, just as Joseph took down the
Body from the cross and wrapped it in a clean shroud, and after anointing it with
spices and myrrh, carried it with Nicodemus and buried it in a new monument cut
from rock. The altar and depository is the antitype of the Holy Sepulchre, that is, the
Holy Table on which is placed the Immaculate and All-Holy Body.
XII. The Spiritual Preparation for the Anaphora
The material preparation for the Anaphora is completed with the transfer of
gifts, their deposition and covering on the altar, and their incensation. Then, while
the psalmists are completing the final repetition of the entrance troparion, the
presiding bishop or priest begins the spiritual preparation for the sacrifice in the
Rite of Access to the Altar that characterizes the preanaphoral rites of eastern
eucharistic liturgies.
Originally, the presiding celebrant then bowed to the concelebrants lined
up on either side of the altar, asking their prayers for the sacred action about to
begin. They responded with the annunciation text of Lk 1:35: May the Holy Spirit
come down upon you, and the Power of the Most High overshadow you. And the
79
Taft, The Great Entrance 62ff, 78-79, 227ff.
80
This is the correct translation of the original Greek text. The future participle
hypodexomenoi, mistranslated podimem in Slavonic, is the verb used in Greek for
receiving communion, as I have shown ibid. 62-68.
deacon intones the litany called the Synapte with Aiteseis or biddingsi.e., the
age-old Angel of Peace litany cited in the writings of St. Basil (d. 379) and St.
John Chrysostom (d. 407) and other 4th c. sources, and common also to the
ancient Jerusalem, Armenian, and Assyro-Chaldean liturgical traditions: 81
That this whole day may be perfect, holy, peaceful and sinless, let us ask
the Lord.
For an angel of peace, faithful guide and guardian of our souls and bodies,
For the forgiveness and remission of our sins and offences, let us ask the
Lord.
For what is good and profitable for our souls and for peace in the world,
That we may spend the rest of our life in peace and repentance, let us
ask the Lord.
For a Christian end to our lives, unashamed, peaceful and without
suffering, and for a good answer before the fearful judgment seat of Christ, let
us ask the Lord.
These biddings, as they are called, are one of the most beautiful
eschatological prayers in Christian tradition, worthy of meditation day after day;
biddings in which we pray for the ultimate needs of lifes end, when the time for
earthly liturgies has passed, and we stand before the dread judgment seat of
Christ, facing eternity, more than ever in need of that eschatological peace from
on high that the world cannot give.
Meanwhile the presider prepares for the Anaphora by reciting the
preparatory Proskomide Prayer:
Lord God almighty, who alone are holy, who alone accept the sacrifices of
praise from those who call upon you with whole heart, accept also the prayer of us
sinners, and bring us to your holy altar and enable us to offer you these gifts and
spiritual sacrifices for our own sins and for the faults of the people, and make us
worthy to find favor in your sight, that our sacrifice may be acceptable to you, and
that the good spirit of your grace may rest upon us, and upon these present gifts,
and upon all your people. Through the mercies of Your Only-begotten Son, with
whom you are blessed, with your all-holy and good and life-giving Spirit, now and
ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen!
This is not an Offertory Prayer, as it is almost always mistranslated and
misinterpreted, but an Accessus ad Altare Prayer, a Prayer of Approach to the
Altar expressing the purity of mind and heart needed for the awesome action
before us, begging the divine grace and assistance needed to be made worthy of
celebrating the awesome mysteries about to begin. In short, it is, as one finds
frequently in the structure of Orthodox liturgy, a prayer for the grace and
worthiness to do what we are about to doin this case, offer the Anaphora.
After this we profess our faith in the recitation of the Creed, and there
follows the Kiss of Peace, sign of our reconciliation before the anaphoral offering,
as commanded in Mt 5:23-24: If you are offering your gift at the altar, and there
remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there
before the altar and go; first be reconciled with your brother, and then come and
offer your gift.
XIII. For Our Prayer
As in the previous reflection, I suggest you use the rest of this hour to
meditate on and pray about some ritual action or text of the Divine Liturgy of your
own choosing within this symbolic matrix as expounded in the prayers of the
liturgy that accompany it, and as the major liturgical theologians of our tradition
explain itfor example the Major Introit or Great Entrance as symbol of Christ
coming among us in as the Bread of Life and the Cup of Salvation, and what that
should mean for the liturgy of our life.
81
See the commentary and references in Taft, War and Peace in the Byzantine Divine
Liturgy, 23-26.
7: The Divine Liturgy, Icon of Our Prayer (III) 47
Reflection 7: The Divine Liturgy, Icon of Our Prayer (III)

I. The Anaphora
Priests are often asked, What are you offering the liturgy for today,
Father? In the first place, I always reply, we, i.e., the whole Church, and in
particular its local manifestation in this gathered assembly, not just I, are offering
the liturgy. And what we are offering it for, I patiently explain, is always the same,
and it is all right there in the eucharistic prayer. Every eucharist is offered, by New
Testament mandate, in memory of Jesus, who is recorded as having left it to us
and as having ordered us to repeat it until he comes again: Do this in memory of
me For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup you proclaim the Lords
death until he comes. (1 Cor 11:24-26; Lk 22:19). It is offered for the Church and
world and their leaders, that they may work for, not against, the peace and
salvation of the whole world; for the living and dead, especially for those in special
need; and for all those and their needs for whom we wish to pray in particular; and
above all for those who have requested our prayers.
So what the Church is and does is a Divine Mystery, but it is certainly no
secret, for it is all expressed with utmost clarity in the prayers of the liturgy. If we
wish to know what the Divine Liturgy is all about, why it is offered, for whom, what
we are praying for and why, we need only read its prayers, the chief of which is the
eucharistic prayer or Anaphora, the prayer of the oblation. The Anaphora explains
itself by glorifying God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then by telling our story, the
story of who and what we are and why we are doing this in obedience to the Lords
command cited above.
Of course each tradition, and within each tradition, each Anaphora,
specifies this why, thereby giving expression to its own history and spirit.
Antiochene-type Anaphoras, of which the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom is by far
the most frequently used model, give expression to the fruits proper to the
eucharist within the Epiclesis, which invokes the Holy Spirit to hallow the offering,
then details why we celebrate these mysteries, why we call upon God to hallow
our offering in the first place.
II. The Epiclesis and the Fruits of the Eucharist
All Epicleses pray that the eucharist be what Jesus meant all he did to be:
unto our salvation. They express this both negativelythe remission of sins, the
healing of spiritual ills; and positivelyreconciliation with God, sanctification,
restoration to the life of grace, fullness of the Spirit, admission to the
eschatological Kingdom, a share in the inheritance with the saints, eternal life
The Chrysostom Epiclesis, for instance, specifies six graces or fruits of
communion we request of the eucharist:
Again we offer you this spiritual and unbloody worship, and we ask and pray
and beseech, send down your Holy Spirit upon us, and upon these offered gifts, and
make this bread the Precious Body of your Christ, and that which is in this chalice
the Precious Blood of your Christ, changing [them] by your Holy Spirit, so that for
those who receive [them] they might be
[1] for sobriety of soul,
[2] for forgiveness of sins,
[3] for communion in your Holy Spirit,
[4] for fullness of the kingdom,
[5] for filial confidence before you,
[6] not unto judgment or damnation.
Such enumerations of the fruits of eucharistic communion go right back to
the New Testament origins of the eucharist, first appearing in 1 Cor 10:16-17,
where St. Paul, addressing problems of disunity in the local congregation, stresses
the theme of union with one another in Christ as the fruit of communion:
The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of
Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?
Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of
the one bread.
But for those who communicate unworthily, their communion is not unto
salvation but unto condemnation, Paul continues in the same epistle, 11:27-34:
Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an
unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a
man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one
who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon
himself... So then, my brethren, when you come together to eat, wait for one
anotherif any one is hungry, let him eat at homelest you come together to be
condemned.
Later, in Jn 6:50-63, it is Jesus himself who expounds the fruits of the
eucharist, teaching that the Bread of Life is eaten unto immortality (verses 50, 58),
eternal life (51-2), resurrection on the last day (52), union with (56) and divine life
in him (57), and life in the Spirit (63):
This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it
and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of
this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the
world is my flesh... Truly, truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of
man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks
my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food
indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood
abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, so he who eats me will live
because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the
Fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever... Do you take offense
at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of man ascending where he was
before? It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have
spoken to you are spirit and life.
These fruits are the same as the fruits of faith for those who believe in Jesus (Jn
6:35-41): sacraments are sacraments of faith, and confer the same reality. So the
why of the eucharist is clear as far back as its New Testament foundations.
Amid the diversity of later liturgical texts expounding why the Church
celebrates the eucharist and the benefits she hopes to receive from it, the
testimony of tradition on one point is unanimous: the benefits derived from the
Supper of the Lord, like those of any other supper, are received by those who eat
and drink, those who communicate, not by those who stand by and watch others
partake. This remains an area of pastoral liturgy where Churches might wish to
confront their liturgical practice with the teaching of their own liturgical prayers. If
it is true that the eucharist is offered for a multitude of intentions, all prayed for
during the service, the immediate fruits of a communion service is to praise and
glorify God by doing what he told us to do. And what he told us to do was eat and
drink: For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the
Lords death until he comes (1 Cor 11:26). This is the unbroken testimony of the
early eucharistic prayers.
III. Communion in the Holy Spirit
In the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom the fruit of Holy Communion that
stands out through its ceaseless repetition is Communion in the Holy Spirit. It
opens the Anaphora, when the presiding celebrant proclaims the Pauline greeting
(2 Cor 13:13(14): The grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the
Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all! It is resumed in the
Chrysostom Epiclesis, as we saw already, as well as in the Epiclesis of the
Anaphora of St. Basil, which prays that all of us who partake of this one bread and
chalice may be united to one another in the communion of the one Holy Spirit.
What is this divine gift, this Pauline communion of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor
13:13/14, cf. Phil 2:1, Rom 8:1-30) our liturgies invoke time and again? Do we not
receive, rather, communion in the one eucharistic Body of Christ, according to 1
Cor 10:16-17? This is a pseudo-problem. In classic Trinitarian theology, the one
God in his divine nature is the cause of the whole economy of salvation, and this
divine nature is the nature of each of the three persons of the All-Holy Trinity.
St. John Chrysostom expounds this teaching relentlessly. In his sermon In
Rom hom. 13, 8, he insists: With the Spirit present, it cannot be that Christ not be
present. For where one hypostasis of the Trinity is present, the whole Trinity is
present, for they are inseparable.82 The Holy Spirit is the symbol of this unity, and
all Gods saving activity comes to us from the Father through the Son, but is
82
PG 60:519.
accomplished in the Holy Spirit. See how great is the power of the Spirit! What
God does, the Spirit is said to do, asserts Chrysostom, In Acta hom. 22, 4.83 So too
with the sacraments: ...the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit dispenses everything; the
priest lends his tongue and offers his hand, 84 Chrysostom teaches in his Homily
86 (87), 4, on the Gospel of John.
For Chrysostom, then, what we participate in through Holy Communion is
the divine nature of the Word Incarnate. It is this divine nature that nourishes us
spiritually under the material signs of the eucharist, just as it is the Incarnate Word
who in his Paschal Mystery saves us through his humanity, in a parallelism that is
constant in the Fathers since Justin and Irenaeus. To put it another way, as does
Chrysostom, In 1 Cor hom. 24, 2, our eucharistic communion in the one Body of
Christ is a communion with Christ himself. 85 It is the only-begotten Son of God
himself whom you receive (24, 5), in a communion whereby we become one body
in him (24, 2).86
But Chrysostom tells us in several passages that what we receive in
communion can also be named the grace of the Spirit:
In Mt hom. 82 (83), 5: ...let us approach this table and the nipple of the
spiritual cup...like nursing children let us eagerly draw out the grace of the Spirit, for
to share in the divinity of Christ is to be in communion also with the Father and the
Holy Spirit, who share the same divine nature. So to receive the eucharist is to
receive the Holy Spirit.87
In Mt hom. 45 (46), 2: He first gave you to drink from his own cup...he gave
you the Spirit to drink.88
In 1 Cor hom. 27, 5: Have you enjoyed a royal table? Have you been filled
with the Holy Spirit?89
Chrysostoms teaching reflects the developed Trinitarian theology of the
first two Ecumenical Councils, Nicea I in 325 and Constantinople I in 381, that is so
marked in his writings. He sums up this doctrine in In 2 Cor hom. 30, 2, his final
homily on the Pauline letter, commenting on the famous closing salutation with
which the epistle ends (2 Cor 13:13/14) and our Anaphora begins:
After having united them to one another by the salutations and the kisses,
he [Paul] again closes his speech with prayer, with much care uniting them to God
also. Where now are they who say that because the Holy Spirit is not inserted in the
beginning of the epistles, he is not of the same substance? For behold, he has now
enumerated him with the Father and Son. And besides this, one may remark, that
when writing to the Colossians and saying, Grace to you and peace from God our
Father [Col 1:3], he was silent about the Son, and did not add, as in all his [other]
epistles, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Is the Son, then, not of the same
substance either, because of this? No, these reasonings are of extreme folly. For this
very thing especially shows him to be of the same substance, that Paul uses the
expression [or not] indifferently. And [to know] that what is here said is no
conjecture, hear how he mentions Son and Spirit, and is quite silent about the
Father. For writing to the Corinthians, he says, But you were washed, but you were
sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the
Spirit of God [1 Cor 6:11]. What then, tell me, were these not baptized into the
Father? Then, assuredly, they were neither washed nor sanctified. But in fact they
were baptized. Why, then, did he not say, You are washed in the name of the
Father? Because it was indifferent, in his view, at one time to make mention of this,
at another of that person; and you may observe this custom in many passages of
the epistles. For writing to the Romans he says: I beseech you therefore by the
mercies of God [Rom 12:1], although those mercies are of the Son; and: I beseech
you by the love of the Spirit [Rom 15:30], although love is of the Father. Why, then,
did he not mention the Son in the mercies, nor the Father in the love? Because,
since they are things plain and admitted, he was silent about them. Moreover, he
will be found to invert the gifts again. For having said here, The grace of Christ,
83
PG 60:173.
84
PG 59:472.
85
PG 61:201.
86
PG 61:200, 205.
87
PG 58:744.
88
PG 58:474.
89
PG 61:232.
and the love of the God and Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit; in
another place he speaks of the communion of the Son, and of the love of the
Spirit. For, I beseech you, he says, by the love of the Spirit [Rom 15:30]. And in
his letter to the Corinthians, God is faithful, by whom you were called into the
communion of his Son [1 Cor 1:9]. Thus the things of the Trinity are undivided. And
whereas the communion is of the Spirit, it has been found of the Son; and whereas
the grace is of the Son, it is also of the Father and of the Holy Spirit; for [we read],
Grace be to you from God the Father [Col 1:3]. And in another place, having
commemorated many forms of it, he added, But all these the one and the same
Spirit works, apportioning to each one individually, as he will [1 Cor 12:11]. And I
say these things, not confusing the persons (perish the thought!) but recognizing
both the individuality and the distinctness of the persons, and the unity of the
substance.90
So for Chrysostom, in the eucharist we receive, through the Son,
communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit, for, as he tells us in In Ioh hom.
86 (87), 3, of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit there is one gift and
power.91
IV. The Precommunion
The Precommunion Litany following the Anaphora resumes the same theme
when it prays: Having asked for the unity of faith and the communion of the Holy
Spirit, let us commend ourselves and one another and all our life to Christ our
God! Finally, the petition for communion in the Holy Spirit is resumed once again
in the Precommunion Prayer accompanying this litany in the Chrysostom Liturgy, a
prayer that is an obvious clone of the Chrysostom Epiclesis, as I have shown
elsewhere:92
To you, O Master and lover of humankind, we entrust our whole life and
hope. We implore, you, we pray you, we entreat you, make us worthy to receive
your heavenly and awesome mysteries from this holy and spiritual table with a pure
conscience for the remission of sins, for the forgiveness of offenses, for the
communion of the Holy Spirit, for the inheritance of the heavenly kingdom, for filial
confidence before you, not for judgment or condemnation.
V. The Manual Acts
Finally, the Holy Spirit is invoked just before Holy Communion in the
manual acts, as liturgists call the material preparation of the gifts for communion,
which in the Byzantine tradition comprises the fraction, the commixture or
commingling, and the zeon/teplota or pouring of boiling water into the consecrated
chalice. It is the last two actions that interest us here.
At the commingling the priest drops a particle of the consecrated bread into
the chalice, saying, The fullness of the Holy Spirit. What this formula means can
be seen in a homily attributed to John Chrysostom. The homilist says the chalice is
sealed in the name of the Lord; one who drinks from it, filled with the joy of the
Holy Spirit, will be introduced into the holy choir of the martyrs, in Christ Jesus our
Lord...93 In other words, just as the newly baptized are sealedi.e., perfected
with The seal (pechat) of the gift of the Holy Spirit, so too the chalice is
perfected symbolically by the commingling.
So the commingling completes the mystery by perfecting the symbol of
the reunion of the elements as a sign of the resurrection and consequent perfect
union of Body, Blood, and Spirit in the incorruptible Risen Lord, so that we, in turn,
may be united to the Spirit in Holy Communion. Though the reality was already
accomplished at the Epiclesis, it must also appear so in sign at the completion of
the sacrifice, before being manifested and distributed in communion.
Our earthly gifts are returned to us as heavenly food. Whereas the double
consecration of bread and wine is a twofold sign of Christs sacrificial Body and
Blood, the Commingling symbolizes the union of the two Species and therefore the
glorified humanity of the risen Christ, laden with gifts that lead man to a
90
PG 61:607-8; translation revised from NPNF ser. 1, vol. 12:418-19.
91
PG 59:471.
92
Taft, The Precommunion Rites 105-111.
93
In illud: Credidi propter quod locutus sum (Ps 115:1-3), ed. S. Haidacher, Drei unedierte
Chrysostomus-Texte einer Baseler Handschrift, Zeitschrift fr katholische Theologie 31
(1907) 349-360, here 358.
participation in His divinity and immortality. In this symbolic sequence of

ceremonial, the Commingling was intended to express the sacramental effect of
Communion. Commingling, then, symbolizes the transfiguring Resurrection of
Christ, His humanitys being taken up by the Spirit of God, thereby able to fill other
men with the same Spirit. Hence, this rite of Commingling was meant to be a visual
representation of what was verbally expressed in the Epiclesis, namely, that Gods
Spirit descend upon the elements and transform them into the life-giving Christ.
Both Epiclesis and Commingling are situated on the symbolic level, pointing to and
unfolding the same reality of the Eucharist as Sacrament of mans spiritual
transfiguration through eating and drinking Christs glorified Body and Blood. 94
The next ritual, the rite of adding boiling water (zeon, teplota) to the
chalice, is a liturgical usage found only in the Byzantine eucharistic liturgies.
Immediately after the commixture, the deacon, bearing in his right hand a vessel
of boiling water, approaches the right side of the presiding celebrant standing
before the altar and says Bless, master, the hot water. The priest makes the sign
of the cross over the water, saying, Blessed is the fervor of your saints, always,
now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen, after which the deacon, pouring
the hot water into the chalice in the form of a cross, says: Fervor of faith, fullness
of the Holy Spirit!
From the 11th c. on the Byzantine Orthodox liturgical commentators are
consistent in their mystagogy of the zeon: hot water is added to the chalice to
show that we receive in Holy Communion not the cold body and blood of a
cadaver, but the warm and life-giving Sacred Body and Blood of our Redeemer.
The Orthodox explained this theologically as the result of the continued presence
of the Spirit even to the body of the crucified Jesus dead on the cross, from whose
side blood and water gushed forth in a living stream. This also explains both the
zeon rite and the later interpolation of Holy Spirit formulas into it, as Jn 6:63 says:
It is the Spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail.
So the late-11th c. commentary known as the Protheoria 36 (ca. 1085-
1095) explains that the zeon is added to the Precious Blood in order that the hot
water poured in at the time of communion complete the perfect type, just as they
[blood and water] came forth from the living divine side, both filled with warmth,
with those communicating from the nipple of the chalice as if touching the very
life-giving side [of Jesus].95
One finds similar expressions in Latin liturgical texts like this Gallican
oration: ...the cup turned into blood we receive in the chalice, that which flowed
from your side on the cross. Your body crucified for us we eat, and your holy blood
poured out for us we drink...96 Such wound in the side symbolism is a
commonplace in Orthodox liturgy: Joseph Ledit has gathered and translated fully
342 other Byzantine liturgical texts illustrating this theme. 97 And Catholic authors
have long pointed out the similarity between these texts and Catholic devotion to
the Sacred Heart of Jesus, pace the mania with which some authors seek
frantically to show how different East and West are in everything.
VI. The Thanksgiving and Dismissal
After Holy Communion, the Sacred Gifts are removed and the Divine Liturgy
moves swiftly to an end. The Thanksgiving Prayer after communion is really a
prayer of conclusion, bridging the liturgy and the mundane concerns of everyday
life:
We thank you, Master-Philanthropos, benefactor of our souls, because this
day you have deemed us worthy of your heavenly and immortal mysteries. Make
straight our path, confirm us all in your fear, watch over our life, make sure our
steps, through the prayers and intercession of the glorious Theotokos and ever-
virgin Mary, and of all your saints. For you are our sanctification and to you we send
up glory, to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto
the ages of ages.
94
J.P. de Jong, Commingling, The New Catholic Encyclopedia (1st edition) 4:11.
95
PG 140:464B.
96
Cited in L.H. Grondijs, Liconographie byzantine du crucifi mort sur la croix, (2nd ed.
Bibliotheca Byzantina Bruxellensis 1, Brussels 1947) 64.
97
J. Ledit, La plaie du ct (Rome 1970).
The dismissal command Let us depart in peace! follows immediately, and

at this point the liturgy originally concluded and the clergy retired to the
skeuophylakion or sacristy, and recited the final Prayer in the Skeuophylakion
at the consummation of the leftover gifts. The one from the Liturgy of St. Basil
summarizes perfectly the Byzantine vision of what the liturgy had accomplished:
The mystery of your dispensation, O Christ our God, has been accomplished
and perfected insofar as is within our power. For we have had a memorial of your
death, we have seen a figure of your resurrection, we have been filled with your
unending life, we have enjoyed your inexhaustible delight. May you be pleased to
grant all this to us also in the age to come. Through the grace of your eternal
Father, and of your holy and gracious and life-giving Spirit, now and ever, and unto
the ages of ages. Amen.
Everything that follows in todays liturgical ordo is a later addition, as I have
shown in my latest book.98
VII. The Interaction of Liturgical Piety, Ritual, and Mystagogy
By way of conclusion, let me make some final comments on how liturgical
piety, ritual, and mystagogy interact in the context of the radically Trinitarian
theology of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy.
Liturgies have both an inner and an outer history that interact in dialectical
tension, reciprocally molding and informing each other. This is especially true in
the East, where the spiritual understanding of ritual has contributed vitally to the
development of its symbolic form. The Orthodox Divine Liturgy takes the shape it
has in form and formula, text and symbol, because of its radically Trinitarian shape
and theology, a shape and theology quite different from the Christological
emphasis of the ancient Roman Canon Missae, largely unaffected by the later
Trinitarian controversies that embroiled the Christian East from the late 4th c. on.
This Trinitarian eucharistic theology of the Byzantine Rite, and its symbolic
expression in ritual details like the zeon, though to some they may seem
insignificant in themselves, are integral to a total Symbolgestalt or symbolic
matrix, none of whose elements can be understood or judged in isolation, apart
from the integrated eucharistic pneumatology as expressed in the Chrysostom
Anaphora and in the prayers immediately before and after it.99
By a common process of emphasis via duplication. eastern eucharistic
formularies developed backwards and forwards from the Anaphora by prefixing
and appending prayers that anticipate and resume themes already expressed in
the eucharistic prayer itself. Thus the Prayer of the Proskomide preceding the
Anaphora, central formula of the Accessus ad altare rites in which the main
celebrant prays for the grace to do what he he is about to dopreside at the
offering of the eucharistic sacrificeanticipates the entire movement of the
eucharist, with the same structure as the Epiclesis, invoking the descent of the
Spirit upon us, upon the gifts, and upon all the people.
Immediately thereafter, in the opening blessing of the Preanaphoral
Dialogue derived from 2 Cor 13:14, the priest opens the Anaphora with the
Trinitarian theme: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God the
Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
All this is resumed in the Epiclesis, which again prays that God send his
Holy Spirit upon the worshipers, their offered gifts, and all Gods people, and
enumerates among the fruits we pray to receive in the eucharist the communion
in the Holy Spirit, and the fulfillment (or inheritance) of the Kingdom, prayed for
also in the litany and prayer before the Our Father, as we have already seen.
These two fruits of communion are inseparable sides of the same coin. For if
communion in the Holy Spirit or the gifts of the Holy Spirit refers primarily to
our union with God via the eucharistic Body of Christ, that communion in the Spirit
of God unites us not only to the divine life of the Holy Trinity, but also to one
another in the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church. And the Church is the fullness
of the Kingdom, not just a future, eschatological reward, but the life of the
98
R.F. Taft, A History of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, vol. VI: The Communion,
Thanksgiving, and Concluding Rites (OCA, Rome 2008) in press.
99
See J. Mateos, Laction du Saint-Esprit dans la liturgie dite de S. Jean Chrysostome,
Proche-orient chrtien 9 (1959) 193-208.
Kingdom inchoatively present to us now in the ecclesial communion of saints,

the Church above and below, of which the eucharistic Messianic Banquet is the
sacrament.
The final Trinitarian moment of the liturgy comes just before communion.
The great 14th c. Byzantine liturgical theologian St. Nicholas Cabasilas expounds
this doctrine in chapter 37 of his commentary on the Divine Liturgy to explain how
the work of the Holy Spirit in the eucharist is symbolized in the zeon rite:
the priest100drops into the chalice a little warm water, to symbolize the
descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Church. For the Holy Spirit came down when the
whole plan of redemption had been completed. And now the descent of the Holy
Spirit comes about when the sacrifice has been offered and the holy offerings have
reached their perfection; it will be completed in those who communicate worthily.
The whole scheme of Christs work, as we have seen, is depicted in the Host
during the liturgy; there we see the symbol of the infant Christ, of Christ led to
death, crucified and pierced with a lance; then we see the bread transformed into
the most holy Body which actually endured these sufferings, and rose from the
dead, and ascended into Heaven, where it sits at the right hand of the Father. So it
is fitting that the later fulfillment of all these events should be symbolized, that the
celebration of the liturgy may be complete, the final effects being added to the work
of redemption.
What is the effect and the result of the sufferings and works and teaching of
Christ? Considered in relation to ourselves, it is nothing other than the descent of
the Holy Spirit upon the Church. So it is fitting that this should be represented after
the other mysteries, as it is when the warm water is poured into the chalice.
Since this warm water is not only water, but shares the nature of fire, it
signifies the Holy Spirit, who is sometimes represented by water, and who came
down upon the Apostles in the form of fire. This point of the liturgy represents that
moment in time, for the Holy Spirit came down after all things pertaining to Christ
had been accomplished. In the same way, when the holy offerings have attained
their ultimate perfection, this water is added.
For the mysteries also represent the Church, which is the Body of Christ; she
received the Holy Spirit after our Lords ascension; now she receives the gift of the
Holy Spirit after the offerings have been accepted on the heavenly altar; God, who
has accepted them, sends upon us the Holy Spirit in returnfor then and now there
is one Mediator and one Spirit.101
According to this teaching, in the Divine Liturgy the Holy Spirit comes down
upon the gifts at the Epiclesis to transform them into the Body and Blood of Christ,
and, at communion, upon the Church to transform it into the Mystical Body of
Christ through its communion in those Sacred Gifts. So Cabasilas zeon mystagogy
just explicitates the common teaching that eucharist, like baptism, repeats
sacramentally the Pentecostal coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Church.
The Catholic Byzantinist and theologian Severien Salaville has
demonstrated that this eucharistic Pentecost theology of communion developed
by Cabasilas is perfectly traditional, and common to both East and West: several
Latin liturgical sources reflect the same teaching. 102 So once again we see that if
instead of just repeating clichs one submits to the hard and exacting labor of
studying textsnot just a tendentious selection of texts but all the texts across the
traditionsone returns to the basics where one is able to find doctrinal agreement
in the midst of a marvelous variety of cultural and theological expression.
For your prayer take any one of these richly symbolic aspects of the Divine
Liturgy we have discussed and reflect on it prayerfully, interiorizing it and making
it your own.
100
This is in fact assigned to the deacon: see Taft, The Precommunion Rites chapter IX.
101
Trans. Hussey-McNulty 90-91.
102
S. Salaville, Notes complmentaires: La Pentecte eucharistique, SC 4bis:334-36.
8: The Divine Office, Icon of Our Prayer 54
Reflection 8: The Divine Office, Icon of Our Prayer

I. The Spirit of the Divine Office
We have seen that liturgy is simply a celebration of the Christian life, our
spiritual life, and that is equally true of the Liturgy of the Hours. It is no more, no
less than a common celebration of what we are, or rather of what we have
become and are ever becoming in Christ. We do the Hours preferably in common
because all Christian life is a shared life, a group life. What we are as a group is the
Body of Christ, and if the eternally present Christ is an everlasting hymn of praise
and glory before the throne of the Father, it is our vocation to enter into this
salvific event; to live that Christ-life of priestly praise and glory. And so the
Church, as his Mystical Body, associates herself with the eternal priestly prayer of
her head. In so doing, she truly participates in the salvific praise of Christ,
according to the theology of the Vatican II Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy 83-
85:
Jesus Christ, High Priest of the New and Eternal Covenant, taking hu man
nature, introduced into this earthly exile that hymn which is sung throughout all
ages in the halls of heaven. He attaches to himself the entire com munity of
mankind and has them join him in singing his divine song of praise. For he
continues his priestly work through his Church. The Church, by celebrating the
Eucharist and by other means, especially the celebration of the divine office, is
ceaselessly engaged in praising the Lord and interceding for the salvation of the
entire world.
The divine officeis truly the voice of the Bride herself addressed to her
Bridegroom. It is the very prayer which Christ himself together with his Body
addresses to the Father.
Hence all who take part in the divine office are not only performing a duty
for the Church, they are also sharing in what is the greatest honor for Christs
Bride; for by offering these praises to God they are standing before Gods throne
in the name of the Church, their Mother.
Matins and Vespers have been the principal ways in which the Church exercises
this leitourgia of the Hours. As the beginning and end of the day, it was natural to
select these times as the symbolic moments in which we express what ought
to be the quality of our whole day lived in Christ. By the beginning of the 5th
c. the cathedral offices had fleshed out the bare bones of psalmody and prayer
with rites and symbols that revealed the morning and evening hours as
sacraments of the mystery of Christ. In this way time was sacramentalized
into a symbol of the time that transcends all time. For the Christian everything,
including the morning and evening, the day and the night, the sun and its
setting, can be a means of communication with God, as Ps 18:1 proclaims: The
heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
II. God is Light (1 Jn 1:15)
The basic natural symbol from which this ritual elaboration springs is
light, a theme that can be traced back to the Old Testament and beyond, to the
prominent use of sun imagery in the paganism of the Mediterranean world. As
Jaroslav Pelikan wrote:
Behind the imagery of the light and the sun in the religions of the Near East was the
attempt to find meaning and hope for human life in the daily victory of light over
darkness: the dawn was the harbinger of divine rescue and of eternal salvation.
Indeed, the power of the light to bring hope is much older and deeper than mere
human history. In responding as they did to the power of light, the religions of the
Near East gave liturgical expression to the yearnings and the stirrings of the
protoplasm, the nameless need in the very stuff of life to be sustained by light. 103
103
J. Pelikan, The Light of the World. A Basic Image in Early Christian Thought (New
York 1962) 13.
Christians were quick to apply this symbolism to Christ: it is a constant

New Testament theme, especially in the Johannine literature:
In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the
darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. There was a man sent from God,
whose name was John. He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all
might believe through him. He was not the light, but carne to bear witness to the
light. The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world (John
1:4-9).
I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but
will have the light of life (John 8:12; cf. 9:5).
He who sees me sees him who sent me. I have come as light into the world,
that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness (John 12:45-46; cf. 12:35-
36).
In Christ, this illumination has already been accomplished:
(give) thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the
inheritance of the saints of light. He has delivered us from the dominion of darkness
and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have
redemption, the forgiveness of sins (Col 1:12-13; cf. 1 Thess 5:5; Heb 6:4; 10:32).
Eph 5 and 1 John stress that this illumination has a moral and
communitarian dimension:
God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship
with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth;
but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one
another, and the blood of Jesus his son cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:5-7).
Yet I am writing you a new commandment, which is true in him and in you,
because the darkness is passing away and the light is already shining. He who
says he is in the light and hates his brother abides in the darkness still. He who
loves his brother abides in the light, and in it there is no cause for stumbling. But
he who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does
not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes (1 John
2:8-11).
But perhaps the most pregnantly beautiful passage is the description in

the Apocalypse of the light of the Lamb in the City of God, the New Jerusalem.
The visionary is describing the Heavenly City:
And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty
and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the
glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light shall the nations
walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it, and its gates shall
never be shut by day and there shall be no night there . . . (Rev 21:22-26).
The passage is a deliberate fulfilment of the prophecy of Isaiah (60:1-3,
11, 19-20) in the prophets vision of the same heavenly abode:
Arise, shine; for your light has come
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
For behold, darkness shall cover the earth . . .
but the Lord will arise upon you,
and his glory will be seen upon you.
And the nations shall come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your rising
Your gates shall be open continually;
day and night they shall not be shut...
The sun shall be no more your light by day,
nor for brightness shall the moon give light to you by night;
but the Lord will be your everlasting light,
and your God will be your glory.
Your sun shall no more go down,
nor your moon withdraw itself;
for the Lord will be your everlasting light,
and your days of mourning shall be ended
It was not long before this symbolism passed into the poetry and hymnody
of Christian worship. A venerable hymn is cited in part in Eph 5:14. Clement of
Alexandria (d. 215), Protrepticus 9, 84:2, gives the full text:
Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead,
and Christ shall give you light,
the sun of the resurrection,
begotten before the morning star (Ps 109),
who gives life by his own very rays.
This light Christ gives is salvation, and it is received in baptism. Heb 6:4-6,
in a passage strikingly reminiscent of the three stages of initiation, speaks of
those who havebeen enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and
have become partakers of the Holy Spirit and have tasted the goodness of the
word of God and the power of the age to come That is why in the Early
Church baptism was called phtismos or phtisma, illumination; those to
be baptised were illuminandi, phtizomenoi, those to be enlightened.
It is not surprising, then, that Early Christians prayed facing East, seeing in
the rising sun a symbol of the Risen Christ, light of the world. For Malachi 4:2
prophesied, the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings, and
Zechariah proclaimed that in Jesus the day shall dawn upon us from on high to
give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our
feet into the way of peace (Luke 1:78-79). Nor is it remarkable that at Vespers,
celebrated at the setting of the sun and the onset of darkness, the hour of
lamp-lighting, Christians were drawn to see the evening lamp as a symbol of
Christ the light of the world, the lamp of the Heavenly City where there is no
darkness or night but only day, and to render thanks to God for it.
Already in the last decade of the first century, Clement of Rome (1 Clem.
24:1-3) relates the natural succession of light and darkness to the resurrection
of the just at the parousia, and around 250 Cyprians treatise On the Lords
Prayer 35-36 first applies the resurrection theme to early Christian prayer
times:
One must also pray in the morning, that the resurrection of the Lord may
be celebrated by morning prayer Likewise at sunset and the passing of the day
it is necessary to pray. For since Christ is the true sun and the true day, when
we pray and ask, as the sun and the day of the world recede, that the light may
come upon us again, we pray for the coming of Christ, which provides us with the
grace of eternal light. For in the psalms the Holy Spirit declares that Christ is
called the day This is the day that the Lord has made; let us exult and rejoice in
it (Ps 117:24). Likewise the prophet Malachy testifies that he is called the sun,
when he says: But unto you that fear the name of the Lord the sun of justice
shall arise, and in his wings there is healing (Mal 3:20).
From what follows it is evident that Cyprian looked on these times as signs
of what every Christian time must be. For he continues:
But if in the Holy Scriptures Christ is the true sun and the true day, no hour
is excepted in which God should be adored frequently and always, so that we who
are in Christ, that is, in the true sun and should be insistent throughout the whole
day in our petitions, and should pray. And when by the laws of nature the return of
night, recurring in its turn, follows, for those that pray there can be no harm from
the nocturnal darkness, because for the sons of light, even in the night there is
day. For when is one without light who has light in the heart? Or when does one
not have the sun and the day, for whom Christ is sun and day?
So let us who are always in Christ, that is in the light, not cease praying
even at night Let us, beloved brethren, who are always in the light of the
Lord . . . count the night as day. Let us believe that we walk always in the light.
Let us not be hindered by the darkness which we have escaped, let there be no
loss of prayers in the night hours Let us, who by Gods indulgence are
recreated spiritually and reborn, imitate what we are destined to be. Let us who in
the kingdom are to have only day with no intervening night, be as vigilant at
night as in the light [of day]. Let us who are to pray always and render thanks to
God, not cease here also to pray and give thanks.
III. Matins
These symbols have remained an integral part of the fabric of Christian
daily prayer. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a 20th c. martyr whom no one could accuse of
being cut off from modern culture and the agonies of contemporary history,
speaks of common Christian morning prayer in terms with which the Cyprians
and the Clements, the Basils and the Benedicts, would have been completely
at ease:
The Old Testament day begins at evening and ends with the going down of
the sun. It is the time of expectation. The day of the New Testament Church begins
with the break of day and ends with the dawning light of the next morning. It is the
time of fulfillment, the resurrection of the Lord. At night, Christ was born, a light in
darkness; noonday turned to night when Christ suffered and died on the Cross. But
in the dawn of Easter morning Christ rose in victory from the grave Christ is the
Sun of righteousness, risen upon the expectant congregation (Mal 4:2), and
they that love him shall be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might (Judg
5:31). The early morning belongs to the Church of the risen Christ. At the break of
light it remembers the morning on which death and sin lay prostrate in defeat and
new life and salvation were given to mankind.
What do we today, who no longer have any fear or awe of night, know of
the great joy that our forefathers and the early Christians felt every morning at
the return of light? If we were to learn again something of the praise and
adoration that is due the triune God at break of day, God the Father and Creator,
who has preserved our life through dark night and wakened us to a new day, God
the Son and Saviour, who conquered death and hell for us and dwells in our midst
as Victor, God the Holy Spirit, who pours the bright gleam of Gods Word into
our hearts at the dawn of day, driving away all darkness and sin and teaching us
to pray arightthen we would also begin to sense something of the joy that
comes when night is past and brethren who dwell together in unity come together
early in the morning for common praise of their God, common hearing of the
Word, and common prayer. Morning does not belong to the individua l, it belongs to
the Church of the triune God, to the Christian family, to the brotherhood
Common life under the Word begins with common worship at the beginning
of the day The deep stillness of morning is broken fi rst by the prayer and song
of the fellowship
For Christians, the beginning of the day should not be burdened and
oppressed with besetting concerns for the days work. At the threshold of the new
day stands the Lord who made it. All the dark ness and distraction of the dreams of
night retreat before the clear light of Jesus Christ and his wakening Word. All
unrest, all impurity, all care and anxiety flee before him. Therefore, at the
beginning of the day let all distraction and empty talk be silenced and let the first
thought and first word belong to him to whom our whole life belongs. Awake thou
that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light (Eph
5:14). 104
And so at the start of the day we do as Jesus did (Mark 1:35), we be gin
the day with prayer. In morning praise we renew our commitment to Christ by
consecrating the day through thanks and praise. And the hour provides our
symbols. The rising sun, one of the ongoing marvels of Gods creation, a source of
life and food, warmth and light, leads spontaneously to praise and thanks, and
to prayer for protection throughout the day. And since we celebrate what we
are, and our core reality is that we have been saved by the saving death and
resurrection of Jesus, the rising sun calls to mind that true Sun of Justice in
whose rising we receive the light of salvation. Another part of our celebration is
the exercise of our priestly intercession for the whole world, for as Christs body
we share in his responsibilities, too.
St. Basils Longer Rules 37:3, Chrysostom in his Commentary on Ps 140

and his Baptismal Catecheses VIII, 17, and the Apostolic Constitutions VIII, 38-
39, all make it clear that morning praise served to consecrate the day to the
work of God, to thank him for benefits received, especially the benefit of
104
D. Bonhoeffer, Life Together (San Francisco 1954) 40-43.
redemption in the rising of his Son, rekindle our desire for him as a remedy
against sin during the beginning day, and to ask continued help. In Conference
21:26 Cassian has Abbot Theonas exhort the monks at length on the same
themes: 21
But what shall I say of the first fruits that surely are given by all who serve
Christ faithfully? For when people waking from sleep and arising with renewed
activity after their rest, before they take in any impulse or thought in their heart,
or admit any recollection or consideration of business, consecrate their first and
earliest thoughts as divine offerings, what are they doing indeed but rendering
the first fruits of their produce through the High Priest Jesus Christ for the
enjoyment of this life and a figure of the daily resurrection? And also when roused
from sleep in the same way they offer to God a sacrifice of joy and invoke him with
the first motion of their tongue and celebrate his name and praise, and throwing
open, as the first thing [they do], the door of their lips to sing hymns to him, they
offer to God the offices of their mouth; and to him also in the same way they bring
the earliest offerings of their hands and steps, when they rise from bed and stand
in prayer and before they use the services of their limbs for their own purposes,
take to themselves nothing of their services, but advance their steps for his glory,
and set them in his praise, and so render the first fruits of all their movements by
stretching forth the hands, bending the knees, and prostrating the whole body.
For in no other way can we fulfill what we sing in the psalm: I anticipated the
dawning of the day and cried out, and My eyes have antici pated the break of
day, that I might meditate on your words, and In the morning shall my prayer
come before you (Pss 118:147-148; 87:14), unless after our rest in sleep when, as
we said above, we are restored as from darkness and death to this light, we have
the courage not to begin by taking for our own use any of all the services both
of mind and body And many even of those who live in the world observe this
kind of devotion with the utmost care, as they rise before it is light, or very early,
and do not engage at all in the ordinary and necessary business of this world
before hastening to church and striving to consecrate in the sight of God the first
fruits of all their actions and doings. 105
IV. Vespers
Then in the evening, after the days work is done, we turn once more to
God in prayer. The passing of day reminds us of the darkness of Christs passion
and death, and of the passing nature of all earthly creation. But the gift of light
reminds us again of Christ the light of the world. With Vespers the Church closes
the day. And as in Matins, the service of Vespers concludes with intercessions for
the needs of all humankind, and then in the collect and final blessing we thank God
for the graces of the day, above all for the grace of the Risen Christ. We ask
pardon for the sins of the day and request protection during the coming night, for
we are exhorted, Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no
opportunity to the devil . . let all bitterness and wrath and anger be put away
from you, with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving
one another, as God in Christ forgave you (Eph 4:25-32).
In his Longer Rules 37:4, Basil emphasizes thanksgiving and confession of the
faults of the day as the purpose of the evening hour:
And when the day is finished, thanksgiving should be offered for what has been
given us during the day or for what we have done rightly, and confession made for
what we have failed to doan offence committed, be it voluntary or involuntary, or
perhaps unnoticed, either in word or deed or in the very heartpropitiating God in
our prayers for all our failings. For the examination of past actions is a great help
against falling into similar faults again.
The collect that concludes evensong in the Apostolic Constitutions VIII, 37
expresses a like spirit:
O Godwho has made the day for the works of light and the night for the
refreshment of our infirmitymercifully accept now this, our evening thanksgiving.
105
Trans. adapted from NPNF series 2, vol. 11, 513-514. Note in this passage how the
ancients looked on sleep as a sort of death. On this see H. Bacht, Agrypnia. Die Motive de
Schlafentzugs im frhen Mnchtum, G. Pflug, B. Eckert, H. Friesenhahn (eds.), Bibliothek-
Buch-Geschichte. Festschrift fr K. Kster (Frankfurt/M 1977) 357-360.
You who have brought us through the length of the day and to the beginning of the
night, preserve us by your Christ. Grant us a peaceful evening and a night free from
sin, and give us everlasting life by your Christ
The second basic element of Vespers is thanksgiving for the light, in which
the Church uses the lamp-lighting at sunset to remind us of the Johannine vision of
the Lamb who is the eternal lamp of the Heavenly Jerusalem, the sun that never sets.
We see this already at the beginning of the 2nd c. in the domestic rite alluded to by
Tertullian in his Apology 39:18 and described in the Apostolic Tradition 25, with its
thanksgiving prayer at the bringing in of the evening lamp:
We give you thanks, Lord, through your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, through
whom you have shone upon us and revealed to us the inextinguishable light. So
when we have completed the length of the day and have come to the beginning of
the night, and have satisfied ourselves with the light of day which you created for
our satisfying; and since now through your grace we do not lack the light of
evening, we praise and glorify you through your Son Jesus Christ our Lord,
through whom be glory and power and honour to you with the holy Spirit, both
now and always and to the ages of ages. Amen.
Chrysostom insists more than once on the theme of penance and
reconciliation at evensong:
Let each one go to his affairs with fear and trembling, and so pass the
daytime as one who is obliged to return here in the evening to give the master an
account of the entire day and ask pardon for failures. For it is impossible even if we
are ten thousand times watchful to avoid being liable for all sorts of faults. . . . And
that is why every evening we must ask the masters pardon for all these
faults Then we must pass the time of night with sobriety and thus be ready to
present oneself once again at the morning praise (Baptismal Catecheses VIII, 17-
18).
Indeed, repentance is the reason why the Fathers chose Ps 140 for Vespers.
According to Chrysostoms Commentary on Ps 140, I: They ordered it to be
said as a salutary medicine and forgiveness of sins, so that whatever has dirtied
us throughout the whole length of the day . . . we get rid of it in the evening
through this spiritual song. For it is indeed a medicine that destroys all those
things. 106
For Chrysostom, then, Vespers is basically a penitential service and, we
might add, an efficacious one, for the forgiveness humbly requested is, in fact,
granted. In the Eastern traditions the oblation of incense that accompanies this
vesperal psalm (inspired undoubtedly by verse 2: Let my prayer rise like
incense before you, the lifting up of my hands like the evening sacrifice.) has a
penitential meaning referring to our self-offering of repentance rising with our
prayers and uplifted hands.
Note the limpid simplicity of the Early Churchs liturgical theology
reflected in the basic structure and spirit of morning praise and evensong. Like
all prayer in both the Old and New Testaments, they are a glorification of God
that wells up from the joyful proclamation of his saving deeds: The almighty has
done great things for me! Holy is his name! (Luke 1:49). This is the core of
biblical prayer: remembrance, praise, and thanksgivingand these can then
flow into petition for the continuance of this saving care in our present time of
need. Remembrance, anamnesis, is also at the heart of all ritual celebration, for
celebrations are celebrations of something: through symbol and gesture and
text we render presentproclaimonce again the reality we feast.
V. The Paschal Mystery, Source of the Hours
In the early liturgical tradition this reality is one unique event, the paschal
mystery in its totality, the mystery of Christ and of our salvation in him. This is
the meaning of baptism; it is the meaning of Eucharistand it is the meaning
of the Divine Office as well. The anamnesis of the Christ-event is the wellspring of
all Christian prayer. This is still reflected in the proper of the Byzantine Office
found in the daily cycle of the Oktoechos: the texts are all focused squarely on
106
Ed. A. Wenger, SC 50:256-57.
the paschal mystery of salvation. Here for example are some of the refrains of
the Byzantine Office for Saturday Vespers, tone 3:
Everything has been enlightened by your Resurrection, O Lord, and Paradise

has been opened again; all creation, extolling you, offers to you the perpetual
hymn of praise.
We bow down in worship before your precious Cross, O Christ, and we
praise and glorify your Resurrection: for it is by your wounds that we have been
healed.
We praise the Savior, incarnate of a Virgin: for he was crucified for us and
rose on the third day, giving us the great mercy.
The Christ, having descended among those who were in Hell, proclaimed,
saying: Take courage, I have conquered. I am the Resurrection and I shall lead you
away, after having destroyed the gates of death.
We, who unworthily stay in your pure house, intone the evening hymn,
crying from the depths: O Christ our God, who have enlightened the world with
your Resurrection, free your people from your enemies, you who love
humankind.
O Christ, who through your Passion have darkened the sun, and with the
light of your Resurrection have illumined the universe: accept our evening hymn
of praise, O you who love humankind.
Your life-giving Resurrection, O Lord, has illumined the whole world, and
your own creation, which had been corrupted, has been called back. Therefore,
freed from the curse of Adam, we cry: O Lord almighty, glory to you.
You underwent death, O Christ, so that you might free our race from death;
and having risen from the dead on the third day, you raised with you those that
acknowledge you as God, and you have illumined the world. O Lord, glory to
you. 25107
It is incorrect, then, to view praying the Divine Office as a sanctification

of time rather than as eschatological. The eschaton, the final fulfilment of
history, has already occurred in Christ. The time of the kingdom, the beginning
of the final days, is already begun. In all true Christian worship the basic
emphasis must always be on this eschatological element; on salvation history,
yes, but as one indivisible, eternally present reality that is the Kingdom of God in
its fullness in the Passover of Christ. Hence the Liturgy of the Hours, like all
Christian liturgy, is an eschatological proclamation of the salvation received in
Christ, and a glorification and thanksgiving to God for that gift. Christians by
faith had the supreme joy of knowing that they lived a new life in Christ, a life
of love shared with all of the same faith.
VI. The Divine Office as a Celebration of Our Life in Christ
That is why the Liturgy of the Hours is an icon of our prayer, turning to God
at the beginning and end of each of its days to do what all liturgy always does
to celebrate and manifest in ritual moments what is and must be the constant
stance of our every minute of the day: our unceasing priestly offering, in Christ,
of self, to the praise and glory of the Father in thanks for his saving gift in
Christ. All true Christian liturgy is a celebration of that reality. Thus the offices at
the beginning and end of the day are but ritual moments symbolic of the whole
of time. As such they are a proclamation of faith to the world and partake of our
mission to witness to Christ and his salvation. They are also a praise and
thanksgiving for this gift of salvation in Christ. Lastly, they are our priestly prayer,
as Gods priestly people, for our needs and those of the entire world.
VII. For Our Prayer
For our personal prayer during what remains of this hour, I would
recommend taking one or more of the priests silent prayers found now at the
beginning of Vespers and/or Matins and applying to them the method of prayer I
have described to interiorize their meaning, asking God to transform them for us
into Feofan Zatvorniks prayer of the mind in the heart, so as to enrich and make
107
Trans, adapted from A. Nadson, The Order of Vespers in the Byzantine Rite (London
1965) 42-43.
them our own for our liturgical celebration of these key services that mark the
borders of our day in Christ.
9: Mary-Theotokos, Icon of Our Prayer 62
Reflection 9: Mary-Theotokos, Icon of Our Prayer

I. Introduction
In this reflection, let us consider the basis for Marian veneration in the
shared tradition of the patristic and early conciliar period in the Churches of East
and West. The problem of liturgical devotion to Mary began in Byzantium with the
question that opens the Theotokion addressed to the Mother of God in the
Byzantine Hour of Prime:
What shall we call you, O woman full of grace? A heaven, for you have given
rise to the Sun of Justice; a paradise, for you have brought forth the Flower of
Immortality; a virgin, for you have remained undefiled; a mother, a pure mother,
holding in her holy arms a Son who is the God of all! Intercede with him for the
salvation of our souls!108
It is only with the crisis over the title Theotokos and its resolution at the
Council of Ephesus in 431 that the Byzantine Church gave its definitive answer to
this question, What, in Orthodox-Catholic Christianity, may one call Mary? So it is
only after the Council of Ephesus that we see the beginnings of the veneration of
Mary in our liturgy.
This late development should not surprise us. The early liturgy was firmly
and exclusively focused on the Paschal Mystery of Christ sacramentalized in
baptism and eucharist, and celebrated weekly on Sunday and annually at Easter.
The Early Church, like the primitive Pauline kerygma, stressed what came at the
end of Jesus life. Jesus beginnings, his pre-existence as Word of God from all
eternity, his human Incarnation as Son of Man, his birth from Mary, became a
liturgical issue only when they became a theological issue, beginning with
Gnosticism and coming to a head during the Arian crisis in the first quarter of the
4th c. Until then, Christians did not even celebrate a feast of Jesus Nativity.
But these Christological disputes also involved the Late-Antique Churchs
teaching and piety about Mary. For if Jesus were not the eternal preexisting Word
of God, then of course Mary would not be Theotokos, the Mother of God, but only
the mother of the man Jesus. So another by-product of this tenacious Christological
crisis in Byzantium was the introduction of our first Marian feasts 109: the Hypapante
(Sretenie) on February 2, the Annunciation (Blagoveshchenie) on March 25, the
Dormition (Uspenie) on August 15, and Marys Nativity (Rozhdestvo) on Sepember
8.
These developments were intimately connected to the development of the
incarnational Nativity/Theophany cycle. This is of prime importance for
understanding the theological significance of Marian commemorations in the
liturgy. Mary is venerated not in isolation, because of her preeminent personal
holiness and virtue alone, but because of her role in Salvation History, in intimate
and unbreakable connection to the work of the Father through Hisand herSon.
Whenever Catholic Marian piety has lost sight of this, it has found itself in trouble.
Hence our first and all-important conclusion concerning liturgical veneration
of Mary is that all Marian dogmas are Christological dogmas. Liturgical veneration
of Mary is not about her as an individual, as some sort of female goddess set
alongside Christ. Our Marian veneration makes this abundantly clear: in the
Byzantine tradition Mary never stands alone, is never venerated in isolation, apart
from her Divine Son. That is also why the Byzantine tradition shows a certain
confusion as to whether some of the five Great Feasts considered to be Mother of
God celebrationsBogorodichnye prazdnikiare in fact more Christological than
Marian. The answer, of course, is that they are both, for they commemorate
salvific mysteries where Mary played a role, but which are in fact all mysteries of
salvation in Christ.
108
English trans. J. Raya and J. de Vinck, Byzantine Daily Worship (Allendale, NJ 1969) 211,
214.
109
For the beginnings of the Marian cult in Constantinople, see the richly informative study
of Margot Fassler, The First Marian Feast in Constantinople and Jerusalem: Chant Texts,
Readings, and Homiletic Literature, in P. Jeffrey (ed.), The Study of Medieval Chant. Paths
and Bridges, East and West (Woodbridge, Suffolk 2000) 25-87.
II. How the Byzantine Tradition Celebrates Mary-Theotokos

Our Byzantine tradition celebrates Mary not only in specific Marian feasts
and celebrations like the Akathistos Hymn (Akafist), the Marian canons, and
occasional services like the Moleben or Paraklesis. The entire Byzantine tradition is
permeated with references to Mary so that one can truly say with the great Irish
Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), that Mary is everywhere, as he
writes in his profoundly theological poem entitled The Blessed Virgin Compared to
the Air We Breathe. In the Byzantine tradition a liturgical service with no mention
of Mary is simply inconceivable: she is commemorated and prayed to just
everywhere.
In the fixed weekly cycle the Mother of God is commemorated every single
day. Then there is the annual cycle of fixed feasts, which the Byzantine call the
Menaion (Slavonic Mineja) or monthly, comprising those commemorations that
fall on a fixed date in the calendar. The offices or liturgical propers of these
feasts comprise a staggering amount of textual material in the official liturgical
books. Suffice it to say that each day for the Divine Office alone occupies some
thirty pages in a normal edition and includes about seventeen refrains for Vespers,
140 for Matins, and half a dozen for Compline. In this system, twelve annual Great
Feasts hold pride of place, five of which are the Marian feasts of Marys Nativity
(Sept. 8), Entrance into the Temple (Nov. 21), Encounter or Hypapante (Feb. 2),
Annunciation (March 25), and Dormition (Aug. 15), To which Russian usage adds
the Pokrov or Protection of the Mother of God on October 1.
III. The Byzantine Synthesis
The theology of any Byzantine liturgical day or feast is expressed
principally in this highly charged liturgical poetry of the Divine Office, and this is
preeminently true of Byzantine Mariology. This poetry quickly conquered the
terrain to become the characteristic of the Byzantine Divine Office. This liturgical
poetry is characterized by an exuberance of language and imagery in stark
contrast to the sobriety of the Latin liturgy. The interplay of simile and metaphor;
the use of allegory, Old-Testament typology, paradox and flights of hyperbole; all
make for a rich diet. But with regard to Mary, one basic theme remains clear
through it all: her essential place in Salvation History. We revere Mary not because
she is our Italian mamma, nor a model of female modesty and chastity, nor
because Jesus is divine and forbiddingly distant and we need a more benign
surrogate to take his place, but because she brought salvation into the world by
accepting to be Gods instrument in the Incarnation of his Divine Son.
IV. Christ-Typology Applied to Mary in the Apocrypha
The basis for Early Christian Mariology was the application of Christologized
Old-Testament typology to Mary. The New Testament presents the story of Jesus
the story of his entering sinful humanity and returning it to the Father through
acceptance of the Crossas the story of everyone, the archetype of our
experience of returning to God through a life of death to self, lived after the
pattern Christ showed us: He died for all, that those who live might live no longer
for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised (2 Cor 5:15).
This is also true of Mary, who, like the rest of us, is also saved by the blood of her
Son, even if she was born free from sin as the first fruits of humanitys redemption.
So early church writers apply New Testament typology of life in Christ to
Mary as the type of human fulfillment in him. If Jesus is the New Adam, Mary is the
New Eve. Jesus was born free of sin; so too Mary. Jesus was presented in the
temple; so too was Mary. Jesus ascended into heaven; Mary was assumed into
heavenly glory too, thereby anticipating the eschatological salvation that will once
be ours at the end of days. The major early writings in which this Marian Salvation
History first appears are the apocryphal Protoevangelion of James from the end of
the second century, and, for the Dormition/Assumption, the numerous 5th c.
Transitus Mariae accounts.
V. Mary in the Byzantine Liturgical Texts
But to see what our tradition singles out in Mary as our model, we must let
the liturgical texts speak for themselves. It is immediately apparent that the
fundamental theme of Marian theology in these texts is the Incarnation: Mary is
Temple, Mary is Ark, Mary is Mother and model of the Church, Mary is candelabrum
of the Light of the World, Mary is privileged Intercessorbut only because she is
Theotokos, the one who brought forth God. A sampling of refrains from the
enormous anthology of material in the Byzantine liturgical books will serve to
illustrate how Byzantine liturgical theology depicts Mary.
Dormition 15 August: 110
1. What songs of awe did all the Apostles of the Word offer you then, O Virgin, as they
stood around your deathbed and cried out with amazement: The Kings palace is
being taken up. The Ark of sanctification is being exalted. Be lifted up, you gates,
that the Gate of God may enter with great joy, as without ceasing she asks his great
mercy for the world?
2. Come, gathering of the lovers of festivals; come, and let us form a choir; come, let
us garland the Church with songs as the Ark of God goes to her rest. For today
heaven unfolds its bosom as it receives the one who gave birth to him whom
nothing can contain. The earth, as it gives back the source of life, is robed in
blessing and majesty. Angels with Apostles form a choir as they gaze with fear while
she who gave birth to the Prince of life is translated from life to life. Let us all
worship her as we beg: Sovereign Lady, do not forget your ties of kinship with
those who celebrate with faith your all-holy Falling Asleep.
3. Riding as though upon a cloud, the company of the Apostles was being gathered to
Sion from the ends of the earth to minister, O Virgin, to you, the light cloud, from
which God the Most High, the Sun of righteousness had shone for those in darkness.
4. The inspired tongues of men who were theologians, resonant with the Spirit, cried
out more loudly than trumpets the burial hymn for the Mother of God: Hail,
unsullied source of Gods incarnation, origin of life and salvation for all.
5. Set a rampart about my mind, my Savior, for I dare to sing the praise of the rampart
of the world, your all-pure Mother For every gift of enlightenment is sent down
from you, Giver of light, who dwelt in her ever-virgin womb. The all-blameless Bride
and Mother of the Fathers Good Pleasure, who was foreordained by God as a
dwelling for himself of the union without confusion, today delivers her immaculate
soul to her Maker and God. The Bodiless Powers receive her in a manner fitting God,
and she, who is indeed Mother of life, passes over to life, the lamp of the
unapproachable Light, the salvation of the faithful, the hope of our souls.
6. With what lips may we, poor and worthless, call the Mother of God blessed? She is
the unshakeable throne of the King; the house in which the Most High made his
dwelling; the salvation of the world; the Sanctuary of God
Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple, 21 November 111
7. Today let us, the faithful, dance for joy, singing to the Lord with psalms and hymns,
venerating his hallowed Tabernacle, the living Ark that contained the Word who
cannot be contained. For she, a young child in the flesh, is offered in wondrous
fashion to the Lord, and with rejoicing Zacharias the great High Priest receives her
as the dwelling place of God.
8. Today the living Temple of the holy glory of Christ our God...is offered in the temple
of the Law, that she may make her dwelling in the sanctuary...
9. The young girls rejoice today, and with their lamps in hand they go in reverence
before the spiritual Lamp, as she enters into the Holy of Holies
10. O gate of the Lord! Unto thee I open the gates of the temple
11. let Joachim and Ann be glad, for a holy child has come forth from them, Mary the
Lamp that bears the Divine Light
12. Today the Theotokos, the Temple that is to hold God, is led into the temple of the
Lord
13. Having opened the gates of the temple of God, the glorious gate (Ez 44:1-3)...she
now urges us to enter with her...
14. O Virgin, fed in faith by heavenly bread in the temple of the Lord, you have brought
forth unto the world the Bread of life that is the Word; and as his chosen Temple
without spot, you were betrothed mystically through the Spirit...
15. Let the gate of the temple wherein God dwells be opened: for Joachim brings within
today in glory the Temple and Throne of the King of all...
110
English translations downloaded from http://www.anastasis.org.uk/oktoich.htm,
copyright Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, here slightly adapted to American orthography and
with italics added for emphasis. The texts are basically the same as those in Mother Mary
and Archimandrite [now Metropolitan] Kallistos Ware, The Festal Menaion (The Service
Books of the Orthodox Church, London 1969) 504-29.
111
Translations adapted from Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, The Festal Menaion 164ff.
From these texts, and they could be multiplied almost ad infinitum, one
sees that the Marian veneration of the Byzantine Orthodox tradition is inextricably
linked to Mother Marys role in Salvation History as mother of the Savior,
Theotokos, the one whose fiat in obedience to Gods will led to her instrumental
role in that same history.
VI. Mary Co-redemptrix?
But do not some of these liturgical texts seem to support a strong Mary co-
redemptrix theology of the sort some Roman Catholic Marian devotees would like
to have defined as dogma? First of all, liturgical texts must be accorded the same
exegetical courtesy we demand when judging any written statements: they must
be interpreted in their context. Byzantine liturgical texts were not honed in
theological dialogue with the 16th c. Protestant reformers. They were composed in
the historical context of the formation of the Byzantine theological synthesis at the
first seven Ecumenical Councils, long before anyone ever heard of Protestantism.
Secondly, they are poetry, Byzantine Greek poetry, with all the twists and turns of
imagery, typology, allegory, rhetorical flourishes, and figures of speech, including
hyperbole, that implies. To interpret them as if they were conciliar dogmatic
canons is simply out of place. Unlike patristic and Byzantine homiletic material,
doctrinal writings in prose, such hymns tend to be figurative, allegoricaleven
emotional, sentimental, subjective. As Christian Hannick, the expert on Byzantine
hymnography, sagely observed:
In this respect hymnography, and (in particular) church poetry in honour of
the Theotokos, is in an ambiguous situation. In many cases it is not immediately
clear whether the author of a given hymn to the Theotokos, who is in any case
writing in poetic language, intends to make a doctrinal declaration or to elicit
feelings of devotion from his audience. This ambivalence explains why in theological
studies less attention is given to hymnography than to homiletics. 112
So expressions that would seem to exalt Mary almost to the level of savior
of the human race Most holy Theotokos, save us (Presvjataja Bogorodice, spasi
nas)! is the one heard most frequently in Byzantine liturgical servicesmust be
put in the context of what else is said of Mary and Jesus in those same services
and in the entire liturgical and theological tradition it expresses and serves.
Furthermore, the notion of co-redeemer/co-redemptrix must be
contextualized within the whole of Orthodox-Catholic theology. This is true of so
much of our pious rhetoric. Catholics call the pope the Vicar of Christ, and he is
but so is every baptized Christian a vicar of Christ. For we are all called to be
other Christs and collaborate in Christs salvation of this sinful world. So there is
a very real sense in which not only Mary but each one of us is a co-redeemer.
That is what St. Teresa of vila (1515-1582), Doctor of the Church (1970),
expresses in her beautiful prayer:
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands but yours,
no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which
Christs compassion must look out
on the world.
Yours are the feet with which
He is to go about doing good.
Yours are the hands with which
He is to bless us now.
And it is also what St. Teresa contemporary and fellow Spaniard, St.
Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Jesuits, teaches on every page of
his Spiritual Exercises. The fundamental Ignatian vision of salvation is that only
God can save the world, but he deigns to use us as his instruments in that process.
This Ignatian soteriological vision is strongly Pauline in its understanding of our
lives as instruments of the saving Christ present and working through us in the
world today. The Jesus of the Spiritual Exercises, like the Jesus of the liturgy, is not
112
Ch. Hannick, The Theotokos in Byzantine Hymnography: Typology and Allegory, in
Maria Vassilaki (ed.), Images of the Mother of God. Perceptions of the Theotokos in
Byzantium (Aldershot/Burlington 2005) 69-76, here 70.
the historical Jesus of the past, but the Heavenly High Priest interceding for us
constantly before the throne of the Father (Rom 8:34; Heb 9:11-28), and actively
directing the life of us, his Church, today (Rev 1:17-3:22 and passim). So we are all
co-redeemers because we are all Church, and the Church is first and foremost an
activity of God in Christ, who saves through the ages in the activity of the Body of
which he is the Head.
VII. Orthodox-Catholic Marian Piety
and the Catholic Magisterium
This ByzantinE Mariology is in full accord with the teaching of the Catholic
Church on the theological basis of all Marian piety as expressed in the Vatican II
Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, Lumen gentium 66-67, and the
Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium 103. These texts
(which I give in the Appendix and have numbered to facilitate reference) are
extraordinary for the richness of their theology as well as for the sober precision of
their theological language and teaching. They provide a concise summary of
essential Catholic teaching on Mary that has been resumed and enrichedbut not
alteredin later magisterial documents by Pope Paul VI 113 and Pope John Paul II,
especially in the discourses and liturgies of the 1987-1988 Marian Year. 114
The theological basis and parameters of the veneration of Mary in these
authoritative Catholic magisterial pronouncements may be summarized as follows:
1. The veneration of Mary, which has existed from the birth of the Church (4), is
rooted in Scripture and Tradition, and based on her inseparable relationship to
her Son in the History of Salvation (1-3, 8, 11).
2. Though Mary is above the angels and saints in dignity and honor (1), the
veneration we pay her, while special and unique, is essentially different from
that paid to the Triune God: Mary is honored; she is not worshiped or adored
(4).
3. Veneration of Mary is not an absolute veneration of her as a separate individual,
in isolation, based on personal qualities and merits unrelated to the gifts
received from God. Rather, we venerate Mary for a holiness and a role in
Salvation History that is totally relative and derived. It is inseparably related to
her Divine Sons saving work (11), and derived from and dependent on it (8).
As Mary herself said, All generations shall call me blessedbut only because
he that is mighty hath done great things for me (Lk 1:48-49)i.e., because of
her role in the mysteries of Christ (1).
4. Hence our veneration of Mary must contribute to (5), not detract from our faith
in and worship of her Divine Son, the source of all holiness, including that of his
Mother, who like everyone else was redeemed by the blood of Christ (8, 12-
13).
5. Marian devotion, like all true devotion, is related to life: we venerate Mary not
because it makes us feel good, but to become like her. In Mary-Theotokos the
Church beholds the perfect image of what she herself is and hopes to be (10,
12).
Also notable in this teaching (7, 9-10) is the scarcely veiled condemnation
of a certain type of Marian piety that tends to exalt Mary in isolation, apart from
her inseparable link to what alone is the source of her veneration: her role in
bringing to the world her Son. It is not by accident that traditional Eastern
Christian icons of the Mother of God (apart from depictions of her in mysteries of
Salvation History occurring before Jesus birth) never portray Mary alone. She is
always holding her Divine Son. Her one role is to bring him to us; that alone is why
we venerate her.
Typically western statues of Mary alone speak volumes of the western
reductionist individualism in Marian devotion that leads to the sort of abuses and
exaggerations the Vatican II Fathers decry. Another manifestation of this
depressing infantilism is that Mary is presented as a model only for women to
113
E.g., the Apostolic Exhortations Signum magnum, 13 May 1967, on Mary as Mater
Ecclesiae, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 59 (1967) 465-475; and Marialis cultus, 2 Feb. 1974, Acta
Apostolicae Sedis 66 (1974) 113-168, esp. 5 concerning the Jan. 1 feast.
114
Liturgie dellOriente cristiano a Roma nellAnno Mariano 1987-88 (Vatican 1990).
imitate, in direct contradiction of Churchs teaching that Mary is the model of the
Church, and hence of everyone. A further by-product of this reductionism is to
isolate Mary from her true place inseparable from her Son in Salvation History,
giving her a value in isolation, as if her exalted role was the result of some
personal quality. This is especially deplorable when carried to the point of reducing
Mary to nothing more than a model of female chastity, as if her glorious titles The
Immaculate One and Ever-Virgin Mary signified only abstention from sex, rather
than expressing the sublime doctrine of the divine origin ab aeterno of the only-
begotten Son and Word of God, and the saving action of the Holy Spirit in Jesus
absolutely sinless and divine Incarnation!
VII. Mary-Theotokos, Icon of Our Prayer
As with so much in Christianity, things once proper to all those baptized
into Christ, like the title saint, 115 became clericalized and considered the
exclusive prerogative of the communitys elite, i.e., its official representatives and
professional holy onesJesus, Mary, the martyrs and other canonized saints,
dead presbyters, monasticswho were considered nearer to God. But through
baptism, the role of Mary as God-bearer has been given to us all, if not to the
same unique degree.
Mary-Theotokos is called to bring her Son to birth in the hearts of us all. Is it
our vocation to do any less? Mary, the Ark of the New Covenant, is a New Temple
of Gods dwelling among humankind. Is that not the vocation of all the baptized?
Paul tells us in 1 Cor 3:16-17: Do you not know that you are Gods temple and
that Gods Spirit dwells in you? If any one destroys Gods temple, God will destroy
him. For Gods temple is holy, and that temple you are (cf. Eph 2:19-22, 1 Pet 2:4-
5). Mary, like John the Baptist, was called to prepare the way of the Lord. Are we
called to anything less? For Mary is not the only Theotokos or God-bearer, any
more than the pope is the only Vicar of Christ, or that only the ordained share in
his priestly leitourgia (cf. 1 Pet 2:9), or that only deacons are called to diakonia,
both of which mean service. These ministries exemplified for us by Jesus, Mary, the
saints, and the liturgy of the Church, are the vocation of all the baptized.
For this is the meaning of all the liturgical and sacramental life of the
Church. As Church we baptize and anoint, pardon and proclaim, heal and feed,
because it is we who are called to become the cleansing, refreshing waters of
salvation, the oil of healing, the voice of Gods consoling, forgiving word, the food
of lifeand, yes, the Theotokos, the one who helps bring to birth in us Gods divine
Son ever anew to illumine our sin-darkened world. That is why Mary-Theotokos is
the model not only of women, or of mothers, or of virgins but of us all.
For our prayer, let us take some of the refrains from Vespers or Matins of
one of the Marian feasts of our tradition and reflect prayerfully on the teaching
they express, and ask Gods Mother and ours to pray that God may mold our lives
according to the model she has set for us as the living of icon of what it means to
be Christian and Church.
115
See R.F. Taft, Praying to or for the Saints? A Note on the Sanctoral Intercessions
Commemorations in the Anaphora: History and Theology, in M. Schneider, W. Berschin
(eds), Ab Oriente et Occidente (Mt 8,11). Kirche aus Ost und West. Gedenkschrift fr
Wilhelm Nyssen (St. Ottilien 1996) 439-455; id., The Veneration of the Saints in the
Byzantine Liturgical Tradition, in J. Getcha and A. Lossky (eds.), Thysia aineseos. Mlanges
liturgiques offerts la mmoire de lArchevque Georges Wagner (1930-1993) (Paris 2005)
353-368. id., The Precommunion Rites 234-39.
APPENDIX
Contemporary Catholic Magisterial Texts on Marian Devotion
[Lumen gentium, 66] 1. Mary, as the Mother of God, placed by grace next to her
Son above all the angels and saints, has shared in the mysteries of Christ and is justly
honored by a special veneration in the Church. 2. From earliest times she has been honored
under the title of Mother of God, under whose protection the faithful take refuge in all their
perils and needs. 3 Hence from the Council of Ephesus onward the devotion of the people of
God toward Mary wonderfully increased in veneration and love, in invocation and imitation,
according to her own prophetic words: All generations shall call me blessed, because he
that is mighty hath done great things for me (Lk 1:48-49). 4. Devotion to Mary as it has
always existed in the Church, even though it is altogether special, is essentially distinct
from the worship of adoration paid equally to the Word incarnate, the Father, and the Holy
Spirit. 5. Honoring Mary contributes to that adoration. For the various forms of Marian
devotion sanctioned by the Church, within the limits of sound orthodoxy and suited to
circumstances of time and place as well as to the character and culture of peoples, have the
effect that as we honor the Mother we also truly know the Son and give love, glory, and
obedience to him...
[67] 6. It is the express intent of this Council to profess this Catholic teaching and at
the same time to counsel all the Churchs children to foster wholeheartedly the cultus
especially the liturgical cultusof the Blessed Virgin... 7. The Council also strongly urges
theologians and preachers of Gods word as they treat of the unique dignity of the Mother of
God to refrain alike from exaggerating and from minimizing. 116 8. Devoted under the
guidance of the magisterium to the study of sacred Scripture, of the Fathers and doctors,
and of the liturgies of the Church, they should explain soundly the offices and privileges of
the Blessed Virgin in their inseparable relationship to Christ, the source of all truth, holiness,
and devotion. 9. They are to guard conscientiously against anything in word or act that
might lead Christians separated from us or anyone else to a mistaken idea of what precisely
the Church teaches on Mary. 10. For their part, the faithful must be mindful that true
devotion does not consist in sheer, passing feeling, or mindless credulity, but that it issues
from an authentic faith that leads us to acknowledge the exaltedness of the Mother of God
and inspire us to a filial love for her as our Mother and to an imitation of her virtues.
[Sacrosanctum Concilium, 103] 11. In celebrating this annual cycle of the Christs
mysteries, holy Church honors with special love the Blessed Mary, Mother of God, who is
joined by an inseparable bond to the saving work of her Son. 12. In her the Church holds up
and admires the most excellent fruit of the redemption, 13. and joyfully contemplates as in
a faultless model, that which she herself wholly desires and hopes to be.
116
See also Pius XIIs Radio Message, Oct. 24, 1954, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 46 (1954) 679;
and his Encyclical Ad Caeli Reginam, Oct. 11, 1954, ibid. 637.
10: Great Lent, Icon of Our Prayer 69
Reflection 10: Great Lent, Icon of Our Prayer
I. Why Lent?
Like every aspect of our liturgical life, the practice of Lent is also a model
for our private prayer. As a preparation not only for Easter but for baptism or its
renewal, Lent is directed not merely at life (resurrection), but at the death which
preceded it: the cross, life as baptismal death in Christ, lived out in death to self. In
scriptural terms, Lent is a time of desert. In the Middle Eastern milieu of the
Scriptures, the struggle for life is a struggle for water, and the desert is the place
of malediction par excellence. Habitable only by wild beasts, the desert is hostile
to humans; there the Evil One roams freely, unafraid and unchallenged. But it is
also there that the power of Yahweh is most manifest, for in the desert there is no
salvation but in God: it is there that Yahweh is the God who saves. Gods great
gift to Israel was to lead them out of Egypt through the desert and across the
Jordans waters into the Promised Land. God leads us, too, out of the desert of our
barren lives. For in the symbolism of Scripture, it was not to flee the world that God
led his people, John the Baptist, Jesus, and later the anchorites and hermits into
the desert, but rather that they might manifest there, where the battle is most
difficult, his victory and his rights. If Christ retired to the desert after his miracles,
it was not to escape but to encounter the power of God (Mk 1:35; Lk 4:42, 5:16).
This is the purpose of the desert of our Lent. Salvation history began in a
garden and was vitiated by food; the Good News opens in the desert and is
accompanied by fasting. This is the antinomy of salvation history posed
symbolically by Lent. Only by prayer and fasting are some devils cast out (Mk
9:29). Hence the desert is the perfect type of the world in the New Testament
sense. It is the kingdom of Satan, hostile to God. The world of the Christian
standing in vigil before God is just as real as any real, and those who have
never experienced it are the ones stuck in an irrelevant and unreal ghetto.
Recall the pattern of our salvation history in the Bible, and the meaning of
Lent becomes clear. What Israel did prefigured Christ. And what Christ is and did,
the Church represents in the daily liturgical theophany of his saving action so that
it can touch our lives. But what the Church actualizes in us radically through its
sacramental life must be lived out by us in the exodus of our own pilgrimage.
Israel crossed the desert into Israel, and so must I. Of course we do not physically
withdraw to a desert. For us the desert of Lent, like all liturgy, is a spiritual stance:
a reposturing of the heart by the asceticism of withdrawal not from life, but from
attention to our petty selves, and from the mass of irrelevancies with which we
surround ourselves. So Lent exists not to escape life, but to begin to live by
escaping the many drugs with which we dull our spiritual sensibilities.
Just as the desert balances the lush oriental Garden of Eden, so too the
forbidden fruit has its antithesis in the fast. I think that for an understanding of
what fasting should image forth for us, we must recall the extraordinarily large role
that food and eating play in the Bible. Revelation is immersed in the simplest
routines of life. Did you ever reflect on how often Christ eats or talks of eating in
the New Testament?117 This is intimately connected with the Old Testament
tradition of the messianic meal: to sit down at table and feast with the Messiah is
one of the signs of the kingdom: As my Father appointed a kingdom for me, so do
I appoint for you, that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom. 118
These meals of Jesus show the difference between the period of John the
Baptist (fasting in expectation of the kingdom) and the coming of Christ (a period
of joy and banqueting). Jesus and the apostles do not fast, because, as Jesus
117
Cf. Mt 9:11; 14:15-21; 15:32-38; 22:1ff; 25:10; 26:20ff; Mk 8:19; 14:3-25; 16:14; Lk 5:29-
35; 7:33-34; 9:13-17; 10:40; 11:37ff; 13:29; 14:1-24; 22:16ff, 29-30; 24:28-35, 41; Jn 2:1-
11; 6; 7:33-50; 13ff; 21:9-13; Rev 19:9, 17.
118
Lk 22:29-30; cf. 13:29; Mt 22:1ff.
himself says, one does not fast when the bridegroom is with us. 119 But the note
struck by Christ at the end of his life, in the vow of abstinence, 120 introduces the
theme of fasting into Christian life between the ascension and the parousia, until
the fullness of the kingdom comes: And the woman fled into the wilderness,
where she has a place prepared by God, in which to be nourished for one thousand
two hundred and sixty days (Rev 12:6).
Of course the bridegroom is always with us. Did he not say I am with you
always (Mt 28:20)? But another of the innumerable antinomies in the dialectic of
Christian life is that he also said he must go to the Father (A little while and you
will see me no more: Jn 16:16). We are in this little while period of vigil before
the parousia, both in the presence while awaiting it.
In the New Testament, then, there is an intimate connection between
eschatology and fasting and waiting, and the presence of the Lord is manifested in
feasting, the breaking of the long fast of waiting which was the Old Testament (cf.
Is 25:6). This is why Jesus ate so often, especially with sinners; this is why at
Emmaus he was known only in the breaking of the bread. But it is also why we
have at the end of the New Testament the eschatological Maranatha: He who
testifies to these things says, Surely I am coming soon. Come, Lord Jesus! (Rev
22:20). For the parousia of Christ is only inchoative, not yet perfected in salvation
history. Hence the New Testament also tells us to watch and pray for we know
not when the Master will come, like the bridegroom and his friends, like the thief in
the night.121
Lent and keeping vigil, then, present the polarity of wait and arrival, history
and eschatology, and this is seen in our liturgical fasting and waiting in hope. First,
there is what Alexander Schmemann calls the fast of the Church, for the Eucharist
is the way in which the Church daily resolves its wait for the Messiah: his banquet
shows the kingdom as having already come, and hence in some eastern traditions
like ours, the eucharist is incompatible with the Lenten fast. For the Eucharist is
the Church in festival, the feast of the presence of its Lord. This is the meaning of
all eucharistic fasting. It has nothing to do with asceticism: it is a vigil before the
sacramental parousia, and consists not only in fasting, in just not eating; there is
also the vigil before Sundays and feasts, which primitively, with Saturday, were the
only days on which the full eucharist was celebrated.
But fasting is demanded not only by the nature of the Church, but also by
human nature. This is the ascetic fast, fast in the Church. Christ fasted in
preparation for his ministry (Mt 4:2) and it is only by fasting, he tells us, that
certain devils are mastered (Mt 17:21). It is by food that Satan seduced Adam and
Eve. Hence ascetic fasting is the radical symbol of our Lenten stance before God. It
is the renunciation, the exorcising of Satan by accepting the paradox that those
who do not eat die, but that only those who lose their life shall find it, for it is not
by bread alone that one lives. By its very radicalness, at least in symbolic
intention, fasting leads to freedom because it is true mortification, that is, death to
self by the abandonment of what is considered necessary for life. The refusal of
submission to necessity is freedom, which is of the essence of all true life in Christ.
Thus there is nothing unnatural or demeaning about asceticism when put in
the context of tradition. There is no denial of human values here for the Christians
who in faith know what they are. In the words of Origen, the Christ-life is a
participation in the mystery of the Church, and the mystery of the Church is a
nuptial mystery, a mystery of total fidelity through uniting love. But the only
ultimate proof is final fidelity throughout time, and this means death to self, to
egotism; and it means patience; and it means pain. We cant all be martyrs, but
we can and must all give witness to our enduring love.
So the Church began to assimilate to the martyrs and call saint those who
through askesis had died to self in order to live for Christ, for the total Christ which
is every man and woman. In this we see the deep human value of asceticism:
openness to others is the beginning of growth, and death to self is the condition of
119
Mt 9:15; Mk 2:18-20; Lk 5:3335; 7:33-34.
120
Mt 26:29, Mk 14:25; Lk 22:16.
121
Mt 24:42-51; 25:1-13; Mk 13:33-37; Lk 12:35-40, 46; 2 Pt 3:10; Rev 3:3.
that openness. For in opening ourselves to the Christ in others we discover who we
are in the deepest sense of the word, far more deeply than by the superficial path
of self-affirmation that comes from the insecurity of an undetermined self-image.
Lent, therefore, like the paschal baptism for which it once prepared, should
bring us face to face with the mystery of death, and therefore with self, for death
is the one thing we must all do alone. Just as it is an error to think of any aspect of
Christian life as a static event, so too death. Death is not a door through which we
shall once pass, but a passage we enter physically at birth, and mystically in Christ
at baptism: It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, as Paul writes in
Gal 2:20.
So in periods of vigil and fast the liturgy of the Church teaches a prayer of
healing (salus, salvation), a spiritual diet of restoration to spiritual health, a sort
of ecology through which we seek to rid our spiritual environment of its pollution.
Let us enter into this desert of our hearts where, removed from side issues, we can
face what we are, and in compunction, penthos, over that reality, let us do
penancethat is, metanoiadying to self so that we may live for others, as we
make vigil before the coming of the Lord.
Is this a grim picture inconsistent with the spirit of paschal joy that
permeates our tradition? Nicholas Arseniev has written that the joy of the
resurrection is the fundamental trait of the Orthodox world-view. But St. Pimen said
to Abbot Arsenius a long time before anyone heard of his namesake Arseniev:
Blessed are you for having wept over yourself in this lower world. The
contradiction is only apparent. The joy of Tabor is at the summit of a spiritual
mountainor ladder, if you prefer Climacusand all the Fathers concur that it is a
rough climb. Perhaps Symeon the New Theologian summed up the fusion of both
elements when he spoke of a chant mingled with tears. The chant is the chant of
the resurrection, and the tears are not the forbidden sadness of the unsavedno
Christian can be sadbut the penthos or compunction of which the Fathers
speak.122
In entering willingly, then, the desert of Lent and our other liturgical vigils,
fasting, penance, we know that the resurrection of Christ, symbolized for us in the
trisvetshchnik or triple paschal candle burns already, going before us like the pillar
of fire that led the Jews through the desert to the Promised Land. It is that which
gives meaning to it all.
II. The Liturgy a Celebration of Our Life in Christ
Liturgy, then, is a sanctification of life by turning to God whenever one is
able, to do what all liturgy always doesto celebrate and manifest in ritual
moments like Lent what is and must be the constant stance of our every moment:
our unceasing priestly offering, in Christ, of self, to the praise and glory of the
Father in thanks for his saving gift in Christ.
For Christian ritual is distinguished not only by its eschatological fulfillment
and its sacramental realism; it is also distinct in that it is but the external
expression of what is present within us. As the beautiful teaching of one of the
oldest documents of Early Christian spirituality, the late 4th c. Syriac Liber
Graduum or Book of Steps I, 12, puts it, there is a liturgy of heaven and a liturgy of
earth. But they are meaningless without the liturgy of the heart.123
Hence in the liturgy there is a constant dialectic between the celebration of
Christian life and the living of it. For if we do not live what we celebrate, our liturgy
is a meaningless expression of what we are not. In the present dispensation there
is of course only one acceptable sacrifice, that of Christ. But his offering needs to
be filled up. We must fill up what is wanting in the sacrifice of Christ (see Col 1:24).
This does not mean that Christs salvific work was defective. Rather, it remains
incomplete until all men and women have freely entered into Christs offering,
making their lives, too, a Christian oblation. This offering is pleasing in the sight of
God only because Christ has made us his Body, so that our offering is joined to his
122
See I. Hausherr, Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East (CSS 53,
Kalamazoo 1982).
123
The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life. Introduced and translated by
Sebastian Brock (CSS 101, Kalamazoo 1987) 45-53 passim.
and transformed by it.

III. Conclusion
In short, liturgy is not so much didactic as theosis, divinization, according to
the teaching of the Greek Fathers: the liturgy is formative in that through it, Christ
forms himself in us, thereby making us holyi.e., saints.
In the popular modern conception of things, sanctity is something a select
few achieve via martyrdom or a life of holiness, asceticism, penance, prayer...
Apart from being rank Pelagianism, such a view has nothing to do with the
Christian concept of sanctity at its origins. And it certainly is not the concept of
sainthood in the earliest mention of saints in the Byzantine liturgical tradition, the
ancient liturgical summons to Holy Communion in the Greek, Slavonic, and Latin
traditions: Ta hagia tois hagiois!Svjataja svjatym!Sancta sanctis!The holy
things for the saints!where the saints are the hagioi, the holy ones to whom
the hagia, the holy things, are reserved. 124 In early Christian Greek, these holy
ones were the baptized faithful. This usage is encountered frequently in the New
Testament, where the earliest texts call Christians the saints without further
ado.125 But the peoples equally peremptory response to this invitation in its
original Christological redactionOne [is] holy, one Lord, Jesus Christ, to the glory
of God the father! Amen!126means that only the holy can communicate. But
that holiness is a divinizing grace of God, not a human achievement. One must
freely accept the giftbut one does not earn it.
IV. Our Prayer
For our prayer, let us reflect on the eschatological dimension of our life in
Christ, how our life is always a vigil, a waiting in faith and hope for the coming of
the Lord. Are we ready? Will we be ready when he comes for us?
124
On the whole question, see Taft, The Precommunion Rites 230-48. Also of interest in this
context are the essays in A.M. Triacca, A. Pistoia (eds.), Saints et saintet dans la liturgie.
Confrences Saint-Serge, XXXIe Semaine dtudes liturgiques, Paris, 22-26 juin 1986
(Bibliotheca Ephemerides Liturgicae, Subsidia 40, Rome 1987), esp. C. Andronikof,
Sancta sanctis!: sacrements et saintet (pp. 17-32), and A. Rose, Le sens de hagios et
de hosios dans les Psaumes selon la tradition chrtienne (pp. 305-323).
125
E.g., Acts 9:13, 32; Rom 1:7, 8:27, 12:13, 15:25; 1 Cor 1:2, 6:1, 7:14; 2 Cor 1:1; Eph 3:8;
Phil 4:22; Col 1:2, 22, 26; 1 Pet 1:15-16. Further references and discussion in any standard
NT commentarye.g., J.L. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible (Milwaukee 1965) 366-67. Cf.
G. Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London 1945) 134-35: Having broken the Bread, the
bishop, in the fourth century and after, held it aloft and invited the church to communicate
with the words holy things unto the holy. It is not quite easy to represent the full meaning
of this in English. The Greek hagios and the Latin sanctus mean not so much what is in
itself good (which is the connotation of the English holy) as what belongs to God. It is,
for instance, in this sense that S. Paul speaks of and to his Corinthian converts as chosen
saints (hagioi) in spite of their disorders and quarrels. Perhaps the bishops invitation can
be most adequately rendered as The things of God for the people of God. This places the
whole emphasis where the early church placed it, on their membership in the Body of
Christ and His redemption of them, and not on any sanctity of their own.
126
See Taft, The Precommunion Rites 230-48.
11: Fidelity to the Icon of Our Liturgy 73
Reflection 11: Fidelity to the Icon of Our Liturgy
I. What Liturgy Expresses

It is an axiom of anthropology that human beings are distinguished by
common behavior shaped through shared meanings. And human societies are
distinguished from one another by meanings shared by one group but not by
another. One such shared meaning has always been religious belief, and one
such common behavior has been to express this belief in ritual. So liturgy is a
Churchs chief way of saying what it is. The Latin adage attributed to Prosper of
Aquitaine (d. ca. 463), ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandilet the rule of
prayer set the rule of belief, summarizes the relationship between a communitys
worship and its beliefs: as you pray, so do you believe.
Gerhard Delling puts this in sociological terms:
Worship is the self-portrayal of religion. In worship the sources by which religion
lives are made visible, its expectations and hopes are expressed, and the forces
which sustain it are made known. In many respects the essence of a religion is more
directly intelligible in its worship than in statements of its basic principles or even in
descriptions of its sentiments. 127
II. A Distinct Liturgy Expresses a Distinct Identity
So even when the basic religious belief is the same, as among Eastern and
Western Catholic Christians, that common faith receives specific coloration from
the particular lived experience of that faith within distinct historico-cultural
settings. To put it another way, to express a distinct identity one must have a
distinct identity, and therein lies our problem.
For our distinct liturgy is the most perfect and official expression of our
identity, of the soul that animates our tradition. It is by no means the only
component of a particular tradition, however. For a cultural expression is
meaningless unless prior to it there is something cultural to express! And so our
Catholic Churchs Eastern rites include all the other elements one would expect to
find in a Catholic culture: schools of theology with their Fathers and Doctors,
canonical discipline, spirituality, devotions, monasticism, art, architecture, hymns,
music andand this must be stressedthe peculiar spirit that created this
tradition, that in turn is fed by this tradition and that is essential to the identity of
this tradition.
In his 1944 encyclical Orientalis Ecclesiae Pius XII indicated clearly that our
Eastern Catholic traditions include much more than liturgy:
It is...important to hold in due esteem all that constitutes for the Oriental peoples
their own special patrimony, as it were, handed down to them by their forefathers;
and this whether it regards the sacred liturgy and the hierarchical orders, or the
other essentials of Christian life...
III. What an Ecclesial Identity Comprises
So an Eastern Rite is not just a different way of saying Mass. It is a
special patrimony. It has feasts and fastsbut not the same feasts and fasts as
others. It has saints and shrinesbut not the same saints and shrines. It has
veneration of the Mother of Godbut not the same devotional practices
expressing that veneration. It has a hierarchical structure and Canon Lawbut not
the same hierarchical structure or Canon Law. And what is most important, as Pius
XII wrote, it is another genius and temperament, an Oriental ethos from which
these ritual and devotional differences flow.
We are so accustomed to certain manifestations of the distinct Western
Catholic identity that the culturally limited nature of their specificity tends to
escape us. Let me give a banal example familiar to all of us, the Marian
appearances at Lourdes. Surely, one would think, such an epiphany of grace was a
universal Catholic religious phenomenon exceeding the bounds of any cultural
limitation! But was it? How did Mary appear? Alone, i.e., not holding her Divine Son
in her armsperfectly Western, but inconceivable in the Byzantine-rite cultural
context, in which Mary is Theotokos/Bogoroditsa, the God-bearer whose total
merit is that she brings us her Divine Son. To depict her without him is to take her
127
Worship in the New Testament (London 1961) xi.
outside of the only Salvation-History context in which her true mission and purpose
are clearly manifest: Mary, like everyone else, has no meaning theologically apart
from her Son. How was she dressed? With a rosary was hanging from her girdlea
purely Latin Marian devotion. What did St. Bernadette say Mary called herself?
Que soy era immaculada concepciouThat she was the Immaculate Conception,
an exclusively Western theological formulation of the doctrine of the sinlessness
ab initio of the Mother of God (and let us note in passing that she said it in her
patois, not in Old Slavonic or Armenian...). What devotional practices did she
recommend? The Akafist? The Paraklisis? The Jesus Prayer? The Canon of St.
Andrew of Crete?
IV. The Liturgical Expression of an Ecclesial Identity
is Integral and Indivisible
I wish to stress that everything I have been talking about in these
reflections is an integral part of the heritage we know as our rite. To try to
imagine the Byzantine rite without Basil the Greats theology of the Holy Spirit and
the definitions of the First Council of Constantinople in 381, without the victory
over Iconoclasm in 843, without Theodore Studites; is like trying to understand
Italian without Dante or English without Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and
the Book of Common Prayer.
As with language, so with a liturgy, individuals do not create them; peoples
and their cultures do; individuals just learn them. As the great Anglican liturgist
Dom Gregory Dix wrote, Liturgy is the vital act of the Churchs life, in the end it
will mould the ideas of those who live that life. 128 In other words, we do not create
our liturgyour liturgy creates us. The depth and breadth and allusiveness of the
classical rites comes just from this, that their real author is always the worshiping
Church, not any individual however holy and gifted, any committee however
representative, or any legislator however wise... The good liturgies were not
written: they grew.129 One can no more invent a living liturgy than one can
invent a living language. One does not create ones mother-tongue: one learns it
as an essential part of ones cultural heritage that exists prior to and independent
of our will or desires, whether we like it or not.
So ones rite or liturgical tradition, comprises the essential expression of a
particular Churchs identity, and as such must be preserved in its integrity. Any
liturgical tradition, like a language, comprises an integral whole that is greater
than the sum of its parts. It is the totality, the complete synthesis that is the
reality, in the face of which comparison with what is or is not done, what is or is
not the custom in another tradition, has no more validity than it does in spoken
and written languages. This does not mean that there can be no change or
liturgical reform. But liturgical reform deals not with liturgy. It deals but with a
particular liturgy, which, like a particular language, has certain native shapes and
structures that any change or development must respect if that reality is to retain
its identity intact.
V. Why Bother?
As this point one might wearily wish to ask, but do we really need all this?
The answer is of course nonot any more than we needed the Incarnation, since
God could have saved us by snapping his fingers if he wanted to; and not any
more than Italian had to have a definite article. But the question is misplaced, for
what we are dealing with is not what could have been, but what is. English does
have a definite and indefinite article, Ukrainian does not; the Byzantine rite has
the zeon or teplota, other rites do not. And to remain what we are, to preserve our
identity, it must remain intact: we cannot play games with our heritage.
Why should our identity remain intact? Because that is the nature of things.
For the English language to be English, it must remain English, and for the
Byzantine liturgy to be the Byzantine liturgy, it has to remain just that. Not all
languages have articles, but English does: it has a definite and an indefinite
article. And one cannot speak and write literate English without them. The fact
128
G. Dix, The Theology of Confirmation in Relation to Baptism, cited in S. Bailey, A
Tactful God (Leominster 1995) 177.
129
G. Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London 1945) 718-19.
that Latin and Russian do not have articles cannot be used to argue that English
can do without them, and the same is true of liturgy. One cannot just introduce
into a particular liturgy whatever one sees in another tradition that looks good
without taking into account the integral structure and genius of each rite. And
vice-versa, the fact that one rite does not have this or that ritual or devotion or
prayer or vestment or piece of furniture does not mean another rite can drop it,
any more than modern Bulgarian can drop its enclitic definite article just because
Ukrainian doesnt have one! Of course one cannot maintain the integrity of ones
cultural heritage unless one knows and understands the nature of ones ecclesial
tradition, and this is the real problem: ignorance, which of course is why the Holy
See and the Oriental Congregations 1996 Instruction on liturgy insist so much on
proper liturgical formation.
VI. Opposition to Renewal
Ironically, however, the Eastern Catholic liturgical renewal so strenuously
fostered by the Holy See since Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) has been opposed every
step of the way by those who should have welcomed it on bended knee as a grace
of God: I mean, of course, the Eastern Catholic hierarchy, with a few notable
exceptions like Andryj Sheptytskyj (1865-1944), Archbishop of Lviv, Metropolitan of
Halych, and primate of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church.
Various reasons are given for this opposition, but as usual in such matters,
the real roots go much deeper. The real issue is not ritual practice at all. Many of
the rubrical niceties that divide the clergythe size and shape of a veil or diskos,
the cut and length of a vestment, the amplitude of ones ryasa sleeves, where to
put the antimensionare of little or no significance in themselves. But these have
become symbols of religious identity, much as was true of the Ritualist Movement
in late 19th c. Anglicanism. At issue were not mere differences of rubric, but
symbolic affirmations of the High-Church conviction that Anglicanism was not
Protestant but Catholic.
At bottom, then, what we face is two different interpretations of a
communitys past, two different historical visions. This is possible because history
is not just a shared past, but ones view of that past seen through the lens of
present concerns. This vision is not a passive view of the past as an objective
reality, but a pattern formed through a process of selection determined by ones
present outlook.
Some Eastern Catholic clergy see their history as a progress from schism
and spiritual stagnation to a life of discipline, renewal, and restored religious
practice in the Catholic communion. For this group, the adoption of certain Latin
they would say Catholicdevotions and liturgical uses is a sign of this new
identity. Such attitudes reflect an interior erosion of the Eastern Christian
consciousness, a latinization of the heart resulting from a formation insensitive
to the true nature of the variety of traditions within the Catholic Church.
Others, like myself, while not at all denying their commitment to the
Catholic communion nor underestimating the obvious spiritual benefits it has
brought their Churches, see themselves as Orthodox in communion with Rome,
distinguished from their Orthodox Sister Churches in nothing but the fact of that
communion and its doctrinal and ecclesial consequences. They see the
latinizations that have crept into their tradition as a loss of identity, an erosion of
their heritage in favor of foreign customs with which they can in no wise identify
themselves. So for some, latinization is a sign of their identity, for others its
negation, and both are right because they perceive themselves differently.
Underlying these issues, of course, is the more serious question of Romes
credibility: is the Holy See to be believed in what it says about restoring the
Eastern Catholic heritage? The morale of some of the younger Eastern Catholic
clergy has of late been deeply affected by this cul-de-sac: they feel mandated to
do one thing by the Holy Seeand then are criticized or even disciplined by their
bishop if they try to obey.
The problem, as usual, is one of leadership, without which the hesitant or
reluctant have no one to follow. What is needed is not just discipline and
obedience, but also a clergy education loyal to the clear policy of the Church on
this question, and prudent pastoral preparation. This is the only way out of the
vicious circle that has been created: the proposed reforms are resisted because
the clergy and people are not prepared to accept themyet some church leaders
do little or nothing to prepare the clergy and people for a renewal that the leaders
themselves neither understand nor accept.
I cannot pretend to read minds, but I think there are two main reason
behind this deep-rooted reluctance to welcome the clear and unambiguous policy
of Rome in its program of liturgical restoration of the Eastern traditions: [1] its
opponents consider the restoration a pointless archaism; [2] they are convinced in
their hearts that some of the practices proposed are not really Catholic, and
hence not right. That this directly contradicts the explicit teaching of the Holy
See is an irony that does not seem to dawn on them.
The first objection is easily dispensed with. The orientation of Catholic
liturgical renewal is never toward the past but toward present pastoral needs. Of
course the liturgical scholar studies the past, but the purpose of such historical
research is not to discover the past, much less to imitate it, but to recover the
integrity of the pristine tradition that the past may well have obscured. The aim is
not to restore the past but to overcome it. For history is not the past, but a genetic
vision of the present, a present seen in continuity with its roots. It is precisely
those who do not know their past that are incapable of true, organic change. They
remain victims of the latest clich, prisoners of present usage because they have
no objective standard against which to measure it.
The proposed restoration then, is not a blind imitation of a dead past, but
an attempt, precisely, to free Eastern Catholics from a past in which, severed from
the roots of their own tradition, they were deprived of any organic development
and could conceive of growth only as sterile servility to their Latin 76fellow
Catholics. Can one seriously propose this as a program to be preserved in our day?
Hence the irony of those critics of the Eastern Catholic liturgical restoration
who accuse its promoters of fostering a return to the Middle Ages. It is precisely in
the Middle Ages that age-old practices like infant communion in the Roman rite are
first called into question for typically medieval motives that no one with any sense
would heed today. So it is not the proponents of restoration but its opponents that
are behind the times, stuck in a medieval rut out of which the major Catholic
scholarly voices in this field have been leading the Church in this century.
A short list of the issues where renewal of the Eastern-Catholic heritage has
met most resistance would include dropping the Filioque from the Creed, the
consecratory Epiclesis after the Words of Institution, the unmixed chalice of the
Armenian tradition, the Byzantine zeon or teplota rite in which boiling water is
added to the chalice just before communion, infant communion, and, in the Syro-
Malabar tradition, proleptic language, eucharist facing East, and the restoration of
the bema and the so-called Anaphoras of Nestorius and Theodore. On each of
these points, the Holy Sees efforts at restoration have met with massive
resistance, either active or passive, from some circles. And I know what I am
talking about as one who has been a protagonist of these battles as Consultor for
Liturgy of the Oriental Congregation in Rome for over twenty-five years.
VII. Maintaining the Integral Tradition:
An Example
Permit me to give an example of what I mean by the integrity of a tradition,
and how it must be respected. I will take my example from a completely neutral
area, the Church Year. It is well known that Latin Catholics have developed
devotion to Mary during the month of May, considered the month of Mary par
excellence. And so, inevitably, some Eastern Catholic Churches have imitated this
practice, as if they did not already have their own and far more liturgically suitable
liturgical season of Mary, thereby manifesting their complete ignorance of the
dynamics of the liturgical Year as celebrated in their own traditions. Because of
Marys inseparable link with the mystery of the Incarnation, in the most ancient
theological and liturgical traditions of the East the cult of the Mother of God is an
integral part of the Nativity-Epiphany cycle. The roots of Advent in the oldest
festive celebration in preparation for Christmas was a commemoration of the
Annunciation, originally just before Christmas. Still today in the Syrian traditionss,
SubbaraAnnunciation, is the name for Advent.
This forms the backdrop for the latest new Catholic liturgical dispositions
regarding the liturgical cult of Mary in the Roman rite. The January 1 feast of The
Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God (Sollemnitas sanctae Dei Genetricis Mariae)
was reinstituted in the new General Roman Calendar by the reform decree Anni
liturgici ordinatione of March 21, 1969 (35). This reform not only restored ancient
Roman-rite usage but also brought Western liturgy into line with the most ancient
theological and liturgical traditions of the East. The restoration of this most ancient
of Marian mysteries, the divine maternity, to the Western Nativity cycle, can only
be welcomed as a recovery of a traditional and organic liturgical sensibility
common to East and West.
VIII. The Recovery of Authenticity
These are not personal opinions I am expressing. That our liturgical
traditions must be preserved in their integrity and restored when that integrity has
been diminished or diluted or lost, has been endlessly repeated in the
authoritative magisterial teaching of the Catholic Church by all the popes over the
past century and a half, by the new Roman editions of the Eastern Catholic
liturgical books and the accompanying 1944 Ordo celebrationis Vesperarum,
Matutini et Divinae Liturgiae iuxta Recensionem Ruthenorum, by the Vatican II
decrees Orientalium Ecclesiarum (esp. 1, 2, 6 and passim), Sacrosanctum
Concilium (10), Lumen Gentium (23), and Unitatis Redintegratio (17, 23); by
the new Code of Canons of the Oriental Churches (canons. 28, 199, 350 3, 621,
etc.); by Pope John Paul IIs discourses of the 1987-88 Marian Year, his Encyclical
Orientale Lumen, etc.; and by the Oriental Congregations 1996 Instruction for the
Application of the Liturgical Norms of the Code of Canons of the Oriental Churches
(esp. 11-12, 23 and passim). The 1964 Vatican II decree Orientalium Ecclesiarum
On the Catholic Eastern Churches reaffirms this unambiguously (6, 12):
6. All members of the Eastern Churches should be firmly convinced that
they can and ought always preserve their own legitimate liturgical rites and ways of
life, and that changes are to be introduced only to forward their own organic
development. They themselves are to carry out all these prescriptions with the
greatest fidelity. They are to aim always at a more perfect knowledge and practice
of their rites, and if they have fallen away due to circumstances of time or persons,
they are to strive to return to their ancestral tradition.
12. The holy ecumenical council confirms and approves the ancient
discipline concerning the sacraments which exist in the Eastern Churches, and also
the ritual observed in their celebration and administration, and wishes this to be
restored where such a case arises.
Let us be perfectly clear: the reason for the existence of Eastern Catholic
Churches as Ecclesiae Particulares sui juris is their distinct ecclesial patrimony
i.e., their rite in the full sense of that term. Our rite is not just an essential part of
our identity. It is our identity. If the only thing that distinguishes our rite from that
of our Orthodox Sister Churches is our communion with and obedience to the Holy
See of Rome, then one can legitimately ask what kind of Eastern Catholic
ecclesiology could ignore such clear and repeated instructions of the Holy See in
this regard? The answer is of course perfectly obvious to anyone capable of
thought.
How then is it still possible to find Ukrainian Catholic churches and chapels
without an iconostasis, when sixty-four years ago the 1944 Ordo Celebrationis
The Order for the Celebration of Vespers, Matins and the Divine Liturgy According
to the Ruthenian Recension promulgated by the Oriental Congregation in Rome
decreed that altars are not considered truly apt for celebrating the liturgical office
as long as they lack their own inconostasis (6)? How is it that one still sees pre-
cut particles commonly used in the Prothesis rite of preparation of the gifts when
the same Ordo decrees that all the ceremonies of the Prothesis (Proskomidia) are
performed over it [the prosphora] or part of it by cutting the bread and extracting
the Lamb and the particles as prescribed (98)?
I am tempted to ask why, if an outsider like myself has dedicated his life to
knowing, loving, and spreading knowledge and love of this wonderful tradition he
has adoptedwhy those born into it cannot do the same? Am I wasting my time,
or are you some day going to wake up and be what the Church of God not only
wants you to be, but commands you to be?
Priests in the Russian and some other Byzantine-Slavonic traditions wear a
pectoral cross inscribed on the back with an inscription that begins Obraz budi
You be the image! That is my wish and prayer for you today: that you in your
ministry be the icon for others of what the Church wants you to be, by knowing,
loving, and living your authentic tradition as the Church wishes it to be.
IX. For Our Prayer
For our prayer, let us reflect with hardheaded frankness and seriousness of
purpose about where we stand with regard to our obedience to the crystal clear
and constantly repeated instructions and exhortations of the highest hierarchical
and magisterial authorities of our Catholic Church communion regarding fidelity to
our eastern tradition, and ask ourselves if we are found wanting, and if so, in the
words of John the Baptist, metanoietechange your way of thinking! (Mt 3:2).
For that is what your Church says God wants of you.

Robert F. Taft SJ - Liturgy: Model of Prayer, Icon of Life

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LiturgyModel of Prayer, Icon of Life 1

Archimandrite Robert F. Taft, S.J.

Eastern Christian Publications

PRINCIPAL WORKS OF THE AUTHOR

Occidente. Le origini dellUfficio divino e il suo significato oggi, 2a edizione

Reflection 1: Lord, teach us to pray (Lk 11:1)

prayer anywhere is perfectly eastern and traditional: as St. John Chrysostom

Reflection 2: Liturgical Prayer, Icon of Our Life in Christ

I. Christian Life is Liturgy Personalized

proclamation and preaching he communicates to us his life; in rite and song he

one of St. Pauls ways of underscoring the necessity of personal participation in

from the obscure christian multitudes through the centuries is in itself an

VIII. For Our Prayer

Reflection 3: Liturgical Prayer, Icon of Our Prayer Life

Jesus proclamation of the New Law in the Beatitudes of Mt 5, states that we

If Christian life in essence is a configuration to the death and resurrection of

For Our Prayer

Reflection 4: The Earthly Temple, Icon of Our Redeemed World

I. The Byzantine Vision

When they arrived home, the ambassadors reported to Vladimir. The

This Byzantine world-view is not fantasy: it is based on the mystery of

Eastern Christians chanting the liturgy in this atmosphere, as clouds of

The appointments and spatial disposition of the Byzantine church reflect

In the present dispensation it is only in this way, in symbo1, that we are

V. The Heavenly Liturgy

The several dimensions of the iconographic programs all belong to the

VI. The Theotokos

Reflection 5: The Divine Liturgy, Icon of Our Prayer (I)

I. The Byzantine Liturgical Synthesis

In Theodore of Mopsuestias Catechetical Homilies, written around 388-392,

above. What is new is his systematic interpretation of the liturgical historia as a

Reflection 6: The Divine Liturgy, Icon of Our Prayer (II)

XI. The Major Introit or Great Entrance

Reflection 7: The Divine Liturgy, Icon of Our Prayer (III)

participation in His divinity and immortality. In this symbolic sequence of

The dismissal command Let us depart in peace! follows immediately, and

Kingdom inchoatively present to us now in the ecclesial communion of saints,

Reflection 8: The Divine Office, Icon of Our Prayer

II. God is Light (1 Jn 1:15)

Christians were quick to apply this symbolism to Christ: it is a constant

But perhaps the most pregnantly beautiful passage is the description in

St. Basils Longer Rules 37:3, Chrysostom in his Commentary on Ps 140

Everything has been enlightened by your Resurrection, O Lord, and Paradise

It is incorrect, then, to view praying the Divine Office as a sanctification

Reflection 9: Mary-Theotokos, Icon of Our Prayer

II. How the Byzantine Tradition Celebrates Mary-Theotokos

Reflection 10: Great Lent, Icon of Our Prayer

and transformed by it.

Reflection 11: Fidelity to the Icon of Our Liturgy

I. What Liturgy Expresses

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