Eucharistic Devotion

If you are new to this mini-series, you can find part one here. 

The Liturgy of Holy Communion is the sacramental place where the Spirit makes present for us the Eucharist of Jesus Christ before His Father and leads us into it. It is a sacred time and place: the overlapping of heaven and earth. It is to step into the Kingdom of God and leave behind the world of anti-eucharist and its ingratitude. The time of the Liturgy is Christ’s own life; the shape of the Liturgy is the pattern of Christ’s work of perfect Eucharist. Within it, the Spirit conforms our thoughts, words, and deeds to His such that by participating in the Liturgy we are participating in Christ’s Eucharist with Him. This participation is the work of the Kingdom of God; it is the foundation of all other Christian activity.

The Eucharist is also the foundation of the fellowship of God’s people. We each offer ourselves to the common words and actions of the Liturgy as the means of offering ourselves to Christ and His work. We are thus each conformed to Him. The more we are conformed to Him, the more we become what can be meaningfully called a Body, a unity of different members sharing a common life: Jesus’ life. As Fr. Alexander Schmemann notes in For the Life of the World, “[Jesus Christ] ordained the Eucharist as the means by which we put ourselves into His possession, and, in return, enter into possession of him.” Again, he notes, “The individual benefits because he loses himself in that which Christ has ordained to be the corporate worship of all. Eucharistic worship is not a matter of personal edification but of self-forgetfulness. You go to Mass not to get but to give, for you can in this instance ‘get’ only by ‘giving.’ This echoes the words of St. Augustine when he says: ‘The price of love is thyself.’” What a contrasting attitude with how we often approach Church or anything else! If we were to adopt this orientation toward life, it would immediately challenge the consumeristic impulses we take for granted. Yet, we would also immediately begin to measure life by what we can offer rather than what we can possess–we would be much freer to experience joy.

As we experience the Liturgy, it can be helpful if we note its movements and see the actions through the lens of Christ’s own pattern of offering thanks as recorded in the Gospels. This pattern has received much attention in Dom Gregory Dix’s book The Shape of the Liturgy, and it is worthy of consideration, even if it perhaps overextends this interpretive lens at times. Some have taken to scrutinizing it too heavily, in my opinion. We need not, however, dispense with all of his insights simply because we cannot assent to his whole thesis. By meditating on the Mass in this way, we can see opportunities in the particular actions to which we are called as participants in the Liturgy, by which we are enabled to give ourselves to the Lord who makes Himself present in them. There are four main movements to the Liturgy, viewed in this way: He took, He blessed, He broke, He gave.

When Christ took the Bread and took the Cup, He took the elements made ready by a collaboration of the fruits of Nature and the fruits of human labor. As bread and wine do not grow from the ground, but signal a partnership of humanity and the world, so these elements in the Liturgy represent a gathering of the natural world and the creativity and artistry that shapes and guides it. Christ, as the one in whom, through whom, and by whom all things hold together, does this with perfect completion in the oblation or offering He makes of Himself. We do this by making an offering of representative elements of our lives: bread and wine, but also a tithe of our produce. We also offer our prayers, which embody the gratitude and brokenness we bring with our oblation of ourselves into Christ’s oblation of Himself. But as is often said of the Mass, “the gift should bring the giver with it.” As we participate in this offertory, we should see it as an opportunity to offer ourselves entirely to God, both in our glory and in our pain.

When Christ blessed the Bread and the Cup, he consecrated it to God with thanksgiving. This is the great lifting up of the elements to become the place of Eucharist. In His Passion, Christ was lifted up as a sacrifice to God, and lifted up in the glory of Resurrection and Ascension. The lifting up of the elements makes the power of the Passion and the Resurrection present to us because it makes us present to them. This is the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is the place where Christ is--we kneel before the Lamb of God and the King of Creation. As Christ consecrates the life of the world in Himself as a perfect Eucharist on the Cross, it at once casts into shadow the world of anti-eucharist and condemns it to continue as such forever. Only where Christ is will Eucharist be, and only where Eucharist is will the Kingdom be open. As we enter into this work of Christ, let us receive the consecration of our lives with open minds and hearts and invite the transformation of our lives as they are made the members of Christ’s Body.

When Christ broke the bread, He parted its life from any other purpose than to be what He would make it. Sacrifice dispenses with the ambiguous vision of endless potential and declares something to have a definite, focused end. Consequently, sacrifice alone can reveal the glory of a thing, its reason for being made manifest. The bread was to be His Body, that was the meaning of its life and the author of life had revealed it. But the breaking of the Bread also manifested the truth that it was through the Passion alone that the Resurrection must come. Eucharist cannot be divided from sacrifice and brokenness, but Eucharist means that these are not the end. As we participate in the fraction of the Bread, we join the brokenness of the world and our experience of it to the Passion of Christ that it might receive the blessing of His Resurrection power. In this way, we participate in the Lord’s redemptive work. For as Christ lifted up draws all people to Himself, so as we lift up the fruits of our lives and this world it acts to draw the rest of our lives with it. 

When Christ gave us His Body and Blood, He gave back to mankind the life of Eden long-lost and the life of the Kingdom at hand and the Kingdom yet to come. Having been restored as those who stand in Christ to offer the oblation of the world in the giving of thanks, we receive the peace and life and blessing of God. We are thus transformed in the presence of Christ’s glory in the Spirit, and as we turn away again that glory goes with us. The giving and receiving with thanksgiving is the place where the blessing of eternal life lives. Having stood at the foot of the Cross and stood at the empty Tomb, having been covered in the Blood and Water from His Side and having received His blessing, we become like Him, His life becomes our life. The Kingdom and its King come among us. He took, He blessed, He broke, He gave. This is Eucharist. This is the work of the Lord. This is to become the shape of our work as His disciples. 

I want to stress that our participation in the Eucharist is not contingent upon our understanding of what is happening around us. This would be to make the grace of the Sacrament the function of a kind of intellectual pelagianism. It is the better impulse of Christian thought that we should seek greater understanding of our union with God in prayer only so that we may enter it more fully. We must not become those who study dancing and forget to dance. Love, moreover, which is the life to which we are conformed by participating in the Eucharist, obliges us to know the Beloved and to receive with our heart and soul and mind the meaning of His work undertaken for us. He never settles for a generic understanding of us as the members of His Body; genuine love urges us not to take for granted any detail we might be given so as to know Him better. My goal here in this piece has been to provide a few avenues by which to approach the Eucharist with minds and hearts more keenly attuned to the occasion and to perceive a bit more clearly the Lord of the Liturgy. If that is the case, then this essay has performed its task.