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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 3: The Divine Liturgy 146-155

This section of chapter three covers The Eucharistic Canon (Anaphora) of St. John Chrysostom of Constantinople. The major contents of this eucharistic canon includes thanksgiving, remembrance of the Last Supper with the “words of institution,” the invocation (epiclesis) of the Holy Spirit with the consecration of the holy gifts, and the commemoration of the saints, both the living and the departed. Religious sentiment of creatures is fully expressed in apophatic language, for example, “incomprehensible” and “invisible.” These terms are important in the Orthodox divine liturgy, and it differs much from western forms of worship. The anaphora prayers use the verbs “to hymn, to praise, to give thanks, to worship” – mostly have a dominant element of the oral and acoustic characteristics of human nature, not exclusively in the realm of vision and logic. Western culture has a highly developed – very useful – visual and cerebral approach to religion and life. However, the Orthodox liturgy teaches us that we cannot rely heavily on our comprehension and what is visible to us. In other words, the whole experience of the divine liturgy is a reality that happens at once with the mouth and the ear, the use of voices and hearing of words along with the iconography that all begins to live in the heart, not primarily the mind or the eye – the cognitive and visual parts of humanity. 

The anaphora prayers are directed to God the Father, given with the Son and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Prayer is united with all creation in the Trinitarian Creator. For example, the saints and angels are asked to attend our worship at the same time with us. The angels sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” that is from the Scriptures, in Isaiah’s prophecy and John’s Revelation. The animals are not only symbolic, but they are mentioned to be present. The eagle sings and shouts to the calf and the calf cries to the lion and the lion speaks to the man (Rev. 4:7-8) from the Gospel of John. So, we get the picture that all creation involves itself in salvation and submission to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit in the kingdom of heaven, experienced really in the divine liturgy. The angels conclude with “Hosanna in excelsis deo…” and the kingdom of the aeonian life begins then, now, and will be for many ages to come. Vision and logic require sequence and linearity, but sound and hearing in the context of poetic imagery through words happen all at once like the complete biography of a saint in a single painted panel while we sing her commemoration. All symbols fall away, teaches Metropolitan Hilarion, in the eschatological kingdom, except for one sign, the Cross of Christ. The necessary and beautiful visual imagery, sensations, chronological time, symbols will eventually be removed and renewed so that we can truly see who the real source of all life is. Our bodies will resurrect, and we will continue to create poetic compositions with a new physicality that will be given and sung back to God, which requires not a static existence that some Christians teach, but a dynamic existence of many, many ages to be lived out. What God can offer goes beyond what we can see at once. But we can hear it with a glimpse of it. Only God can be all-seeing, that is, all-knowing. God’s kingdom is like an “inexhaustible cup.” It is full. But it can be refilled again and again as much as we drink from it. 

The anaphora prayers also teach us the meaning of eternal life and offering. The priest prays, “We offer to him his own.” That means we creatures are meant to be poets, makers that take what is given and remake it and return it to God to deify it and unite to creation again. A very possible and starting definition of an age (aeon) is the completion of a created cycle like this. For example, the Holy Trinity gives, creates for us all, we receive it, we work it, we offer it back to God for all things and giving thanks – the essence of eucharistic worship. Since God is inexpressible, unknowable, we require ages and ages to learn and love who God is. We receive blessings in physical matter, the material for poetic compositions, we remake it, and God transforms it into Himself so that “all is in all” and that beauty of resurrected creation is completed, and a new created age will come, something greater than we can imagine than that first poetic, eucharistic common work. God will multiply, not merely add to his creation. Metropolitan Hilarion teaches that this created effort of humanity is “our destination.” Human nature is anaphoric and the anaphora prayers are linked to the ages of ages. Metropolitan Kallistos also explains the same process of salvation. The physical world, matter, is for our eternal survival; without it, we couldn’t offer sacrifices; to make holy is our nature, the nature of “rational” creatures. So, the definition of “rationality”  is to offer back – with a “bloodless” sacrifice – what we’ve been given to transform our work and energy into God’s life so that many of these non-linear happenings occur. The first image of man – the archetype is Christ – makes more images to be transfigured by the power of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Metropolitan Kallistos frames this aeonianlife and prayers with a broad scope, “we do not act alone,” when we offer in this earthly life as well as in the next. He also teaches that “we stand within nature, not above it” like the philosophers of reason and knowledge. Humans are by nature “the offerers rather than rulers.” The ruler is the King of all, Christ Jesus. This comes true in the Lamb offered in the Eucharistic Canon or Anaphora of St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil the Great, two of the major liturgies that are in use among local Orthodox churches. So, rational creatures find their ultimate meaning in the anaphora, a “bloodless” and creative, common work that is united to the Holy Trinity. The priest again prays, “we offer unto Thee this rational and bloodless worship …” Rational nature is anaphorical and offerings are purificatory “for the fulfillment of the kingdom of heaven.” The restoration of all things allows for continual offerings to be made like this – it’s possible. Attaining to this heavenly kingdom requires purification and this anaphora of Christ that we offer to Him. All theology of the Orthodox Church exists in the Eucharistic Canon, Metropolitan Hilarion teaches. The next section discusses The Eucharistic Canon in the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 3: The Divine Liturgy 129-145

This next part of chapter three covers these sections: The Beginning of the Liturgy of the Faithful: The Great Entrance, the Preparation for the Eucharistic Offering, and The Kiss of Peace and the Symbol of Faith. The great mystery of salvation is contained in the divine liturgy, and we are empowered by the Holy Spirit through the one sacrifice of Christ Jesus for ages and ages, since God is the creator of the ages, and this age will end with the revelation of His Cross to the faithful and the faithless, when all sin will be gone from the face of the earth. This coming heavenly kingdom, then, connects directly to the holy mysteries of the Orthodox Church. Christ is not only the King of saints, but even the King of sinners and unbelievers, as the New Testament teaches. The holy gifts, the Body and Blood of Christ, and our prayers help us to enter the kingdom of heaven to escape the coming chastisement of the Lover of Mankind. The Scriptures teach, unlike the grim gnostic fatalism of the afterlife, ultimate submission of all to Christ the King at the close of this age isn’t different in meaning than salvation. 

The ordering of the divine services comes from a book of rubrics called the Typikon, typika meaning “ordering” in Greek. It’s a rule of life too. In this service book, there is no mention of a discrete category called “laity,” since the Eucharist is a joint action between the universal priesthood, between the vested priests and the unvested priests. Holy ordination is a special kind of calling and higher service and life of sacrifice for the whole community that is accomplished through the Holy Spirit, in the laying on of hands in the Church. So, the people unvested offer prayers with the priest vested. There is a real distinction in roles here. But in the prayers of the priest and the laity we can read that there is “no worthy man” unless the Holy Spirit comes upon us and the gifts we offer. All celebrants and participants, all the faithful profess to be ‘’unprofitable servants” in the liturgy. There are no worthy esoteric priests or gnostic mystics like the paganism of the past, who did have special access to the strange gods unlike others. Christ is always the high priest who offers prayers for us every liturgy. Nearly of the liturgical prayers are offered to God the Father, explains Metropolitan Hilarion. It’s through Christ as the Priest and King, through his death and resurrection by the power of the Holy Spirit that we find mercy, comfort, and love in the God Father who is alone Good and Our Teacher. The power of the Spirit descends, and the sacrifice of praise ascends to Our Father. This cycle of thanksgiving is the life of the Holy Trinity that we can enter too. The priesthood shows us in the liturgy the unity of prayer of the Holy Spirit, sacrificial praise, union with God, healing, service, and salvation. There is “no personality” showing in the priest celebrating the liturgy because the community understands that Christ is the Priest leading us to the Father’s Holy Table. 

The preparation for the eucharistic offering teaches us that the sacrifice of Christ reflects our human nature to offer something back to God in a refashioned form like common bread and wine. For example, in the Old Testament the sacrifices of Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Aaron and Samuel foreshadow Christ’s sacrifice. However, the Old Testament prophets continually tell Israel that God never required or needs our sacrifices. If no one can offer sacrifice and God doesn’t even need them, it begs the question of why we offer it and what kind of faithfulness each type shared in the sacrificial examples of the Scriptures. Out of love, Christ came to the world and offered himself and was also at the same time the person who offers to God the Father by the Holy Spirit. Christ is both the offered and the one who offers in the hands of the priest and prayers of the faithful. Anything we receive is fully a gift, a loving reward for nothing that we can do humanly speaking. How to guard that gift and how we increase and reform that gift into something better is maybe the right question to ask about human offerings. That human or animal blood couldn’t take away sins according to the Hebrew prophets is a consistent message in the East. So, the prayer reads in St. Basil the Great’s Anaphora: [that] we may receive the reward of wise and faithful stewards on the awesome day of Thy just retribution.” Just as we had a stewardship over the garden, so now we must keep this grace that has been given to us through the mysteries in God’s kingdom, which lives in the heart – the nous. The parables focus on the kingdom of God speak about how to exchange this passing world for the greatest rewards in the next life. The goal isn’t to instill a fear of a never-ending hell, but how to love God and neighbor that will bring us into unity with God and humanity with most benefits bestowed on us in the resurrection. The divine liturgy unites the Old Testament and the New Testament, and the whole history of mankind and it shows the end toward which all things move. 

The kiss of peace is directly linked to the Holy Eucharist because it fuels love and peace and faithfulness. After the clergy exchange this peace, the holy gifts are placed on the altar. Affection and touch forms part of our nature too, and we receive grace when this affectionate exchange is done in the Spirit. We are also the temple of Christ so that we kiss the entrance, the porch, and the gates of the mouth, where we praise and partake of the Holy Eucharist. When we open the doors of our hearts, like the royal doors, we enter the heavenly kingdom and paradise of the ages and ages even while this age is coming to an end. To say that God’s kingly justice is one thing, but his love and mercy is another matter is called a heresy that actually divides God, according to the catechetical lessons of St. Cyril of Jerusalem. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 3: The Divine Liturgy 107-129

What we do during the week leads up to the Lord’s Day, Sunday, when the priest, hierarch, with the people pray and supplicate the Holy Trinity in the divine liturgy. This chapter is the largest in this volume and much attention is given to the broad and specific meaning and arrangement of phrases, terms, and groups of prayers. There are fifteen sections. A principle that helps to understand why the Orthodox worship liturgically and why we believe in the real presence of Christ Jesus bodily in the Holy Eucharist, also called holy communion, is guided by the revealed truth that humans are by nature sacrificial. People were created to make offerings, to give something back to God, not just giving the same thing back to God. The true Church will have the fruits of true offerings and life-changing practices and doctrines that can be clearly discerned by those who seek it out. This first part will group together several sections: The Proskomedia, The Beginning of the Liturgy of the Catechumens, The Little Entrance and the Thrice-Holy, and the Liturgy of the Word.

A major misconception from many other Christian groups is that priests separate the people from God and replace Christ in actuality rather than representatively like an icon. In Orthodoxy, the priests pray in such a way that reveals the true celebrant of the liturgy – Christ Himself. The liturgy continues the Mystical Supper, not merely remembers Christ as if it were a common person’s birthday. Some may say that our worship cannot be the same because places change, time changes, leadership changes. But the sacrifice that is offered is “bloodless” and “rational.” It is one and unified because Christ is the high priest of every liturgy so that our worship is one and unified — in fact, the same. Christ must be present mystically and truly for there to be unity, truth, authority, and purity of worship. Without that basic assumption and reality, there can be no Christian group who can rightly and logically claim to have the fully revealed way to salvation. Elder Joseph and his disciples experienced Christ’s light and love so intensely that they reported to have felt like dying if that grace-filled state continued any longer than a minute. The fact that we cannot discern Christ’s presence is not God’s fault, but our own sinfulness and rationality working backward. Or, out of love, we are not ready to see what is actually happening.

The prayers of the liturgy are spoken through the entire community. Priests and deacons, the whole clergy, are called by God Himself, not by any person’s choice or will, so that they might lead a higher life of service, even though we are all part of “the royal priesthood.” If we are all priests, some vested, some not vested, then our function as Christians is to offer right praise and sacrifice, the essence of worship in the liturgy. Offering or anaphora in Greek, is our common work. The hierarchs lead us to Christ, not away from or separate from Christ’s living words. The choir symbolizes the people, the deacons call the people to prayer, the priest speaks to the people, prays with us, and at times prays on behalf of us to Christ. In the middle of the popular trend of interfaith dialoguing, many Christians have forgotten that the liturgy is a dialogue between priest and participants and Christ Himself who leads us to the Father through the Holy Spirit. This hierarchy is based on love and service, the very example that Christ set up in the Old Testament priesthood and which is fulfilled in the New Testament with the new commandment: love one another. The resulting lack of this fruitful order among Christian groups is obvious. The Orthodox liturgy gives thanks for Christ’s sacrifice and offering, not just as if in the past, but also now and into the future kingdom of heaven. 

Prayer is iconic. Since we’re in the image of God, the clergy, elders, and eldresses represent an image of service in Christ and the bishops too have a self-sacrificial leading role in Christ. The people represent the priesthood too and the choir of angels. If prayers weren’t ordered in the ways outlined above, worship would be “dissonant” besides being unfruitful. The body of Christ is the body of our of joint prayers. Orthodox Christians have a single mind in prayer, not disparate and contradictory wills in prayer during the liturgy. 

Prayer is unified as one offering to the Holy Trinity, and prayer isn’t an individual action, whether in Sunday worship service or in our time alone or at home. Prayer is connected to all people since Christ too prays for all people, and all created things. The proskomedia begins the liturgy. Then, the liturgy of the catechumens who receive instruction and the liturgy of the faithful who receive the Holy Eucharist follows. There are three kinds of offerings. The proskomedia takes place in the sanctuary of the temple and the hierarch or priest reads prayers and names of people. The prosphora is the bread brought before the priest. This offering is traditionally made by the people. It’s used for blessed bread and the Holy Eucharist. Then, a rich series of prayers are offered up in praise, hymns, songs, and supplications for God’s mercy on us and to make us holy with incense. Our prayers rise and we ask the Holy Spirit to come upon us all and to transfigure the bread and wine into the Holy Body and Blood of Christ for our spiritual food. His presence is truly there and within us. Spirituality without a life-changing belief in physicality is not better than empty intellectualism, paganism, or the widespread kind of secularism that gives no place for physicality and spirituality to meet. In fact, the superabundant spiritual bread of Christ can be discerned in the Scriptures. In the garden, the first people saw what was pleasing to them, to their eyes, but God told them, “Don’t take and eat. You will die.” The allurement of sight and senses overpowered the ear and the message of the words. Now, Christ says, “Take and eat. You will live.” The reversal happens to us on the spiritual and physical level in Orthodoxy. The Serpent said then, “Eat. You won’t die.” But we did die. The Serpent says now about the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, “Don’t eat. Don’t touch that wood of the cross.” Satan today says, consume and touch and do everything in this world except don’t come to the Orthodox Church to eat from that tree. Satan says today, you can have everything. You can pursue life through licentious desires, money, power, success, and fame, but don’t accept any holy bread and wine, don’t accept any of His glory or grace from that cross. The Accuser says that we shouldn’t touch Christ lest we die from our sinfulness. Christ reverses this satanic promise and subtle threat. Christ promises us everything for giving up our passions, if we can take up a cross too. Some Christians doubt this holiness or think themselves unworthy to approach God’s holiness to make them holy. The natural development for all humanity is to restore this relationship.

The prosphora offering is in the shape of a circle called the Lamb with different parts designated for prayers to the Theotokos, the Mother of God, and then the saints, hierarchs, the living and departed, and ranks of angels. Those who have died in Christ are not lost. They are in the center of Christ, this offering of bread and wine brought onto the altar and transformed; now, Christ appears among us mystically. Commemorations of the departed teach us that prayer isn’t limited to this world. Naming and commemorating the dead also links to the biblical genealogies of the Old Testament. The lists of names were a sacred family tree that showed the “unbroken chain of faith” and “the inheritance.” The substance (hypostasis) of people are never lost, Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos teaches. The Church has its own genealogy that outlines who has received the rewards, since all will receive resurrection, but not all inherit the same blessings. 

Catechumen is a Greek word that means instruction by word of mouth, or learning by listening and hearing, since the root etymology gives it that force. Christianity was a very acoustic and oral faith. Alphabetic writing was a medium that accompanied and served this aural tradition, especially since the Eastern and Semitic cultures of the time were more of “an ear culture” that was able to unify the visual and auditory world via a non-alphabetic and non-abstracted perspective, to borrow a phrase and concept from the Roman Catholic writer in the 1960s and 1970s, Marshall McLuhan. Homilies also are a form of catechesis that help Christians understand the faith. Since many come into Orthodoxy already baptized from other traditions or left the Church as a youth, though not mentioned by Metropolitan Hilarion, do not need to be separated from hearing the liturgy of the faithful. The content of catechesis could be summarized in about eight lessons, taken from the section called The Beginning of the Liturgy of the Catechumens. Lesson one, “Blessed is the kingdom of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” begins the liturgy. It is trinitarian and announces a blessing to mankind. The kingdom is coming and is here now. Lesson two, the Forerunner preaches, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” The kingdom is from above and we should turn to it quickly; all resurrect, but not all receive a reward, which are great compared to the little we give up in this life. Lesson three, Christ’s teachings and parables focus on entering the eschatological (end of time) kingdom of heaven. Worldly kingdoms and systems aren’t the answer; they don’t offer blessedness or heaven, though many utopias are built on them. Lesson four, Christ came into conflict with the religious authorities of his time and nations because of His kingdom’s preaching and His commandments. Pilate and Herod are just a few examples. They crucified Christ according to man’s kingdom. Lesson five, Christ was crucified with the plaque: The king of the Jews.” Lesson six, Christ loves mankind. That is shown through his incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Lesson seven, Christ presides in love at this and every liturgy for us, awaiting our own resurrection through our death, our falling asleep in Christ and obeying his commandments. Lesson eight, the liturgy’s theme is the kingdom of heaven and the true offering we give back to God in this kingdom, where Christ is the ruler, the king, and we are the transfigured, offering creatures unto ages and ages. We bless and we proclaim Christ to be the King; we experience it now. Whatever kingdom we are coming from doesn’t have the answers, and it probably is going to conflict with the kingdom of heaven and the efforts to enter it with rewards and pure clothing. So, the kingdom of God is connected to the biblical genealogies, the commemorations, and the inheritance we seek. The Beatitudes are Christ’s moral teachings. It pronounces that weakness of spirit, physicality, or circumstances is strength. That unhappiness and sorrow is our joy. That humility, a meek attitude, and poverty in spirit helps us attain to inheriting the kingdom of heaven and its blessings and rewards. Christ’s life-giving Passion for our sinful passions is the only exchange between us and God that can be called a “ransom,” St. Maximus the Confessor teaches. That is what ransom means. Not a transaction between God and the Devil, or the Son and the Father due to assuaging wrath or slaking a thirst for justice. 

The little entrance and the thrice-holy give us a glimpse into the eternal kingdom of God. The Gospel is taken from the sanctuary into the nave. The liturgy of the word includes the prokeimenon before the Gospel reading and censing. It’s necessary here that prayers are offered to ask God to open our mind and understanding to the teachings of the Gospel. That is a key difference between the Orthodox understanding of Scripture and the Protestant and Roman Catholic one. The Scripture requires assistance, patience, and the help of elders and authorities, and ultimately the Holy Spirit Himself. Salvation is a mystery; that is, how we enter the kingdom of God. To enter and live in this heavenly kingdom, prayer and sacrifice must be right and unified through the power of the Holy Spirit. So, the holy mysteries connect directly to the entrance into the heavenly kingdom. 

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 2: Vespers, Compline, Midnight Office, Matins, the Hours

The meaning and creative structure for poetic compositions in the Church comes from its order. If the Holy Trinity created the universe that orders our earthly experience into morning, day, and night, likewise prayer is going to be ordered similarly.  Because of secularism, Christians tend to become skeptical of worship that doesn’t make much distinction between ordinary life and Sunday church attendance. In economics, business hours work on a financial cycle and the Romans used cycles to order provinces, indictions, and censuses. Order also helps Christians make a strong effort on earth, which we call asceticism or struggle. Metropolitan Hilarion explains that the meaning of Vespers can be found in its order of prayers. The Church chose which psalms and poetic compositions, and hymns will be used to create order of worship so that it can work on us in a certain way depending on the time of day, feast, or fast. The Church directs our attention and remembrance to certain parts of the Christian life. If it were not permissible to order worship, other kinds of ordering would fill its place. During Vespers, the priest reads the “prayers of light” that are tied to different psalms from the Bible. Themes of these prayers include creation, supplication, and how light exists even in the darkness of night. That informs how Christians live daily under whatever circumstances or time. A song called “O Gladsome Light” is sung during vespers, and its origin is likely from an early martyr Athenagoras (Athenogenes) who is said to have “held on the Spirit” at his death. It is a song sung during the lighting of the lamps that is a specific practice only really kept well by Orthodox Christians nowadays. This chapter also explains some common terms such as troparion, kathisma, prokeimenon, aposticha, litiya, and pericopes. Prayer helps us remember God, the Gentle Light, as the Greeks translate it, and it’s also a remembrance of our own evening that symbolizes our final day, our death.

The daily services of prayer have a compositional characteristic that can be adapted to other compositions. Prayers have a thematic and biblical content that hinges on Church tradition for its interpretation. Services are composed of heartfelt prayers that help us practice Christian virtue and disciplines, not simply serving as nice imagery for roundtable talks. Poetry is a language of the noetic human being. It’s an important medium of communication in the fullness of that word’s meaning and effects. Prayer also organizes our day as a year or year as a day. We begin to live in the heavens while we conduct ourselves on earth. We develop an aionian existence “of the ages and ages” with the Holy Trinity. 

Matins is the longest of the daily services at twilight. It begins with the prayer of thanksgiving to God “who has shown us the light.” The Six Psalms are sung with no lamp lit. Electricity and lightening have changed a lot of ways of operation. Ancient people would sleep around sundown and wake up at sunrise. Monks, however, reduced sleeping to increase times for prayer as a very developed form of asceticism. In the midnight office, Psalm 118 was chosen to be sung because of its Christological focus and the condensed teaching of the ascetical life. 

The mystical tradition of the Church produced the Holy Scriptures and the Psalter, which in turn produced Christian hymnography that continues Orthodox mystical tradition. Songs are part of human nature, and how God created people and our noetic tongue. Questions about personal identity, authority of interpretation, and the Bible’s meaning are answered within the Orthodox tradition of hymnography. The hymns of the Church explain to us many teachings, practices, and dogmas about light, love, mercy, time, death, life, ascesis, prayer, services, the commandments, and repentance. The Typikon, then, gives us examples of songs found in the Old Testament that are included in the service of matins called the Ten Biblical Canticles. Each has its own troparion at the end. Some of these canticles sing of Moses at the Red Sea, Hannah’s song, the Prophets Isaiah, Habbukuk, and Jonah’s song. The Three Holy Youths’ song, the song of the Most Holy Theotokos and Zacchariah’s song completes the ten canticles.The Bible is the Song. Personal identity is formed in the liturgical and daily services because our song is found through the scriptures, prayers, and hymns. Matins is also a monastic survival in current parishes. Metropolitan Hilarion points out that technology makes long monastic teachings unnecessary since the availability of texts is widespread now. 

The hours most likely developed out of matins (orthros). Three psalms, a daily troparion and kontakion, and the prayer “Lord have mercy” said forty times is the common structure of all the hours. The daily services lead up to the Lord’s Day, Sunday, when Orthodox Christians gather into one place to partake of the Eucharist, the Mystical Supper of our Lord, the end of time. When Christians begin to practice the liturgical life, the ideas of time, creation and humanity are stretched to new dimensions. The effect is a moral change and inner renewal that happens through the Eucharist, the source of all life.

Orthodox Christianity, Vol IV, Chp 1: Worship Services of the Daily Cycle

Part One covered the features of Orthodox worship and the connection between the primacy of the liturgical life and the theological flowering that blooms thereafter like the true vine. Part two now outlines the structure of daily worship cycles in the Church. Three chapters included are: Formation of the Daily Liturgical Cycle, the Hours, and the Divine Liturgy. As we discussed before, it’s human nature to sing and offer sacrifice to God. 

Chapter one begins with the Mystical Supper. Oral history and experience of the divine through the relationship of prayer preceded the written word in the Old Testament. Christians did not write down the form of worship first, then put into practice what they conceived. They did not use the Scriptures to discover what Christ meant by His words and actions. They first followed, listened, and ate and drank of the mystical and paschal meal; then later, for generations, they wrote down what they knew was the right practice. The Holy Scriptures are a type of written medium that relies on revealed practice. Tradition gives worship a structure and content that conforms not to man’s imaginations or “old world” cultural norms, but to the revelation of Christ in the Mystical Supper. There is a great cycle of traditional practices from the old Hebrew righteous, prophets, and the Holy Scriptures that link to the Gospels that link to other forms of Orthodox worship: the eucharist, the liturgy or anaphora, hymnography and other prayers dedicated to saints, to unbelievers, to the Theotokos, and to guardian angels. 

The Jewish tradition of keeping the Passover, in remembrance of the Exodus, was linked to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Remembrance begins in the heart and mind. The only time God gave his people a written form to be included in worship was Moses’ Ten Commandments. The New Commandment was given at the Mystical Supper, and nothing was written until much later in chronological order. When the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles, the gifts helped order, structure and form worship. Similarly, the Holy Spirit inspired the prophets and poets in the Old Testament, for example, King David and his Psalms. Love was the new commandment, which is best expressed through a poetical medium like the Psalter and the hymnography composed by the members of the Church instead of making conformity and philosophical consistency the highest regulation.  Love is the rule and structure of Orthodox tradition. 

There were common organizing elements among early Christian communities, even though there wasn’t a uniform worship service in the 1st and 2nd c. St. Justin the Philosopher notes that universally there were readings, a presider, prayers, thanksgiving, eucharist, and a gathering into one place among Christians. The wording and phrases, the duration, the number of prayers, the style and where they met were allowable variables. 

The major liturgical rites of the East, as well as some rites in the West not mentioned by Metropolitan Hilarion (Mozarabic, Gallican, Ambrosian) grew out of the Roman Empire in the East where St. Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom, and St. James the Apostle gave us liturgical worship. All of them have Anaphora (offering, liturgy) Prayers, but the exact wording and length of singing differ between them. Holy Tradition produced the New Testament and those writings produced more systematic and poetic hymns and songs to be incorporated into rules for how to follow them. For example, there was a liturgical enrichment during the 4th c. where public services and ceremony increased after persecutions became less common. There is a freedom to “incarnate the heavenly ideal” on earth during liturgical worship because the Mystical Supper set up a form of prayer that exists outside of time; it exists in aeonian time approaching the eschaton, all which rests on Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection from the dead. That enriching the prayers of the Church is tainted by the encroaching syncretism of pagan Greco-Roman ceremonies is a prejudice of late European Protestant revolution in the 1500s. Secularism would be the equivalent of syncretism in modern Western forms of worship services.

Two main parts of the liturgy exist. The liturgy of the catechumens and the liturgy of the faithful. This form of worship isn’t scholarly just because it has been organized by Byzantine and Syrian Christians during imperial history. But its prayers are full of a perspective that watches the world and the heavens with an eschaton-oriented view. Ancient and modern people have tried to track time by using solar, lunar, and other forms of lighting. For God a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day. Likewise, for Orthodox Christians, the cycle of services and the liturgy on Sunday is a condensed form of a day and in turn a day of prayers arranged orderly by the Church is like the whole span of created time. The Holy Trinity is described as The Light, both “all-consuming” and gently “gladsome,” many times in Orthodox services and in all the scriptures. St. Cyril of Jerusalem teaches that “for whatsoever the Holy Spirit has touched, is sanctified and changed.” That holy teaching from tradition explains almost all forms of Orthodox worship and the mysteries that make us so different from the kinds of services offered especially by Protestants and sometimes Roman Catholics. If the Holy Spirit has touched water, it is holy. If the Holy Spirit has touched a bishop, he is holy. If the Holy Spirit has touched a hymn for praise, it is holy and can be put into our services on Sunday or any day of the week. Theology doesn’t start with an abstracted understanding of beauty, truth, knowledge, or goodness. The Holy Spirit at Pentecost touched the disciples and began the transformation and procession of transfiguration of all through them. The liturgy isn’t considered daily worship because it symbolizes the end of the age and the age to come. Orthodox Christianity begins with Light. A mockery of that liturgy is the so-called Enlightenment, which has influenced nearly all traditions of Western Christian denominations.

The services that are not offering the eucharist have their own cycle that relate to the aeonian and eschatological time, the ages of ages. St. John Chrysostom teaches that “the light of [the Bible’s] teaching is burning on our tongue,” and he wasn’t speaking figuratively about that experience. The Scriptures can only be ‘’lighting the fire” through prayers, ceremonies, eucharist, readings, and composed hymns by saints because the Holy Spirit is fire, the Holy Trinity is the Light. From the scriptures and tradition, we find that there were certain times of the day with Christological and symbolic meaning. From this, Orthodox Christians developed praying at specific hours of the day and evening: 3rd hour, 6th hour, and 9th hour. For example, the third hour, about daybreak, is when the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples. Other divisions and hours were added later to make up seven discrete times to prayer so that the symbolic concept of completeness is followed. Praying the hours took different forms because monasticism and the laity led different lifestyles and had different circumstances. When the Byzantine Empire fell, most of the monastic practices survived while many parish rules fell out of use. The Typikon has preserved many of the monastic rules for prayer in parishes today. This chapter also explains the common terms troparion, kontakion, stichera, and canon. The Typikon underwent changes due to major historical events. The sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the Crusaders and then the sack of Constantinople in 1453 by the Turks halted further liturgical development. 

Christian hymnography grew out of these traditions. Historically, monasticism from the 4th to the 5th c. flourished in the writing of hymns and the arrangement of singing the psalms. Although the laity are more involved in the dealings of world, there wasn’t an idea that Christians had to live two separate lives, one at the job and the other on Sunday. Metropolitan Hilarion omits any distinction of this kind between unceasing prayer for laity and monastics since both are ascetic in their own ways. For example, St. Basil the Great teaches in Long Rules that “when the day’s work is ended, thanksgiving should be offered for what has been granted us or for what we have done rightly therein and confession of our omissions, willingly or unwillingly …” There doesn’t seem to be any concept of having other pursuits that would obstruct lay Christians from completing a full day of prayer. Although the Greek and Russian Church have adapted monastic practices to fit modern parish life, there isn’t any major discrepancy between filling up the day with prayer and working with our normal duties as much as our ability allows us.

Yet monasteries became places where it was conducive to write rich liturgical poetry and many compositions. St. Ephraim the Syrian lived in the Persian Empire in the 4th c. He influenced the Greeks in Constantinople, especially St. Romanos the Melodist, and the blending of Syriac and Greek hymnography began and lasted into our current compositions. St. Ephraim is unique because, unlike the Greeks as well as the tendency among the Latins, he didn’t rely on definitions to teach the faith, but he used the poetic medium. The American academic, Marshall McLuhan, famously wrote that “the medium is the message.” He concisely worded that to describe the consequences of using certain technologies, such as writing, TV, radio, but that could include poetry versus prose styles of texts. The use of a technology has a broader effect than the message. In this case, poetry broadens the effect of the theological message than if it were written plainly, legally, or philosophically. Plato understood this consequential effect. He wrote his philosophy by using dialogues that could be compared to that of St. Ephraim and others who used liturgical dialogues to explain and arouse in us an understanding, a desire for prayer, and an effort to seek the transformation of our souls. Poetry is the noetic language of mankind. It connects to mystical truths. It works on people differently than rhetoric or prose. The incarnation makes poetry possible to help us transform into Christ’s image. Orthodoxy structures how Christians spend our time, and it works toward repentance and asceticism in pursuit of The Light of day and evening.