Living A Eucharistic Life Is Living With Gratitude
My beloved in the Lord:
The Holy Eucharist or Divine Liturgy is the central mystery (sacrament) of the Church. It is at once the source and summit of her life. In it the Church is continuously changed from a human community to the body of Christ, the temple of the Holy Spirit and the holy people of God. The Eucharist, according to Saint Nicholas Kabasilas, is the final and greatest of the mysteries “since it is not possible to go beyond it or add anything to it. After the Eucharist there is nowhere further to go. There all must stand and try to examine the means by which we may preserve the treasure to the end. For in it we obtain God Himself, and God is united with us in the most perfect union.”
Every sacred mystery makes its partakers into members of Christ. However, the Eucharist effects this perfectly. To quote Saint Nicholas Kabasilas again: “By dispensation of His grace, Christ disseminates Himself in every believer through that flesh whose substance comes from bread and wine, blending Himself with the bodies of believers, to secure by this union with the immortal that man, too, may be a sharer in incorruption. He gives these gifts by virtue of the benediction through which He transelements the natural quality of these visible things to that immortal thing.”
Through the Eucharist divine life flows into us and penetrates the fabric of our humanity. The future life is infused into the present one and is blended with it, so that our fallen humanity may be transformed into the glorified humanity of the new Adam, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. According to Saint Ignatios, the Eucharist is our “medicine of immortality and the antidote against death, enabling us to live forever in Jesus Christ.”
Ultimately, the Divine Liturgy summarizes the life we are called to live in communion with God and is, among other things, a school for Orthodox Christian living. Within the Liturgy we come to know God, the world and ourselves through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit because the Liturgy communicates the meaning and purpose of life and helps us to understand and internalize both the tragedy of the human condition as well as the limitless expanse and potential of the new life in Christ offered freely to everyone.
Living in a Eucharistic way has everything to do with seeing life as a gift, a gift for which we are forever grateful. It is, after all, not happy people who are grateful, but grateful people who are happy. There should never be a Liturgy that we attend in which we do not come away with this insight of living. There should never be a time that we attend Liturgy when there is not a movement of our heart: from a hardened heart to a grateful heart, from a heart of stone to a heart of flesh, from a heart often filled with resentment or anger or self-righteousness to a heart fill with gratitude, compassion, faith, hope and love.
Our Communion with the Lord in the Liturgy means becoming like Him. When, after the Liturgy, we leave the Church we must live what we have just celebrated as long and as fully as we can. Seeing that the Lord is holy, just, forgiving, merciful and loving; Orthodox Christians are called to participate in His holiness and express His love, forgiveness and justice in their everyday lives.
Praying that the abundant grace and rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ dwell in your hearts and minds, directing your steps to every good deed that is well pleasing to God, I humbly remain,
With love and blessings in the Lord,
+Fr. Panagiotis
