To the Heart of the Eucharist
Love obliges us to know our beloved. For Christians who worship God in the manner He gave us in the institution of Holy Communion, love obliges us to seek our Beloved in the sacramental place in which He has promised to meet us. To seek Him in this way will reveal, over time, the heart of our Eucharistic liturgy.
Before we go there, however, we must consider what liturgy is. As Fr. Alexander Schmemann notes, we mistakenly think that liturgy is some subset of what the church does in addition to its charity and evangelism. Liturgy, though, is better described as what the Church is. At the heart of the meaning of Church is that beautiful Greek word, ekklesia, or communion, and liturgy is this very act of communing--a fruitful work we undertake together as a Body that makes us something we could not be elsewhere or elsewise. Just as liturgy is not a subset of what the Church does but is a way of speaking to what the Church is, so Eucharist is not a liturgy we “do”, but is the soul of the Liturgy that is the soul of the Church.
The word Eucharist means the giving of thanks, but even this definition will not help us unless we re-imagine thanksgiving as more than a forced expression of social etiquette, the thing we’re supposed to say to someone who gives us something. To reimagine this, we have to see our relationship to everyone and everything in a new way. Let’s start by acknowledging that when we think of gift-giving, we have a hard time seeing it outside of a question of rights. Fr. Stephen Freeman notes that we have a tendency to think about our relationships in terms of what we owe to each other, which balloons into a complex of rules governing what, how much, and what must be given in return.
I think if we consider our gift-giving, we may find to our surprise how rarely we give outside of a sense of “Well that’s just what we have to do because it’s (x) occasion like a birthday or anniversary.” But that is not how God acts as the Giver. The startling revelation of the Gospel is that the giver of the gift is a true giver; He gives not out of a sense of need or obligation, but out of a sense of delight. It is not out of lack but rather out of fullness that the gift of creation is given. To this givenness our proper response is gratitude and the free giving of thanks. This is not the stuff of polite obligation to thank someone for services rendered. To stand eucharistically as the people who give thanks is to manifest the truest thing about the humanity that God is redeeming.
Eucharist is a path from Eden to the Kingdom of God. Eucharist is the life of the grateful reception and humble offering of the gift of all things back to God and the bestowal of His blessing to all that is offered. Again, as Schmemann notes, the true heart of the Fall was in the fact that the fruit of the forbidden tree could not be received with thanksgiving and blessing -- because it was not a gift it was the one action that could not be performed Eucharistically. The Fall was humanity’s creation of an anti-eucharistic world, a world governed not by gift and thanksgiving but by obligation and restitution. And all around this tiny world is the Kingdom of God, the world of Eucharist.
It is into the hell of this anti-eucharist that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. As both the fullness of God the Giver, and the fullness of humanity the recipient, Christ, is where perfect Eucharist is always eternally observed. In the Passion of Christ on Calvary, we see the perfect offering of humanity with thanksgiving to God for all things. He perfects the communion of humanity with God and opens the gates once more to the Eucharistic kingdom which is life in the eucharistic Christ, where the fullness of life and peace and blessing and joy of God is known, what we call the Resurrection.
The Church as the Body of Christ, is where Christ’s Eucharist is to be found among the dying world of “thanklessness”. It is where we participate in the divinely-ordained work of communion that we become what we could not be elsewise or elsewhere. It is where Calvary, the place of the perfect Eucharist of the God-Man to God, is made uniquely present. And as we come to it, we become the place where the Eucharist of the Kingdom and of Christ the King is found. The action of Eucharist we make together in the Liturgy is the action of being conformed to Christ. Eucharist destroys anti-eucharist just as light dispels shadow. It is here that we begin to dwell in the Kingdom and it is here that the Kingdom and the King dwell in us.
What we come know in the Eucharist is the invitation to be converted to the life and liturgy of the eternal Eucharist of Christ, which is our conversion from the deathly world of anti-eucharist into the everlasting Kingdom made eternal by the life of God Himself in all things. Our liturgies today are facets of that eternal Liturgy. Let us by all means then direct our hearts and minds and bodies to pray, adore, and commune in love with Christ and with each other. In so doing we will be converted to the true pattern that is the foundation of all things. And so we are not here to deduce, to rationalize, to debate. We are here, as Eliot said, “to kneel where prayer has been valid,” to kneel where the Eucharist of Christ has been made manifest. The Life of the world comes among us; O come, let us worship Him together.