Excerpts from St. Vladimir's Seminary Quarterly, 1964, Vol. 8, #4
And the means of this sanctification of life and the world is precisely the liturgy. For in liturgical worship we are not only put "in contact" with God, but are given the vision of the Kingdom of God, as fulfillment in Him of all that exists, of all that He has created for Himself, and also we are made partakers of that new Reality. And having seen and tasted of the "heaven and earth as full of His glory" we are then to relate all life, all activity, all time to this vision and experience, to judge and to transform our life by it. Thus the very "other-worldliness" of the liturgy makes it a real power of transformation in "this world." This has always been the liturgical experience within Orthodoxy . . . Not that this experience has always and automatically led to positive results and really transformed human existence—there were probably as many sins and deficiencies in the "Orthodox" societies as in any other society—but, as I wrote elsewhere: "... self-satisfaction was not one of them. Toward the end of the Byzantine period, it was as if the whole Church were decked in black monastic garb and had taken the road of repentance and self-condemnation. The stronger the outward victory of the Church and the more solemn, rich and magnificent the outward forms of Christian Byzantinism became, the more strongly sounded this outcry of repentance, the entreaty for forgiveness: 'I have sinned, I have transgressed' · .. The surpassing beauty and splendor of St. Sophia; the holy rhythm, seeming to measure eternity, of the liturgical mystery that revealed heaven on earth and transformed the world again and again into its pristine cosmic beauty; the bitter sadness and reality of sin, the awareness of constant downfall—all this was the ultimate profundity of this world and the fruit of the Church within it. It means that, the whole life was at least seen and judged in the light of the Kingdom as manifested in the liturgy; it means also that there was within that world a hunger and thirst not only for the "right things" but for the total perfection announced by the Gospel, and last but not least, the certitude that if not for the weakness and sinfulness, that perfection is the only destiny worthy of man, the "image of God's ineffable glory."
The liturgical restoration must then begin at the very beginning: with the restoration of Baptism as the liturgical act concerning the whole Church, as the very source of all liturgical piety which, in the past, was first of all a baptismal piety, a constant reference of the whole life to this mystery of its renewal and regeneration through the baptismal death and resurrection. This means, first, the celebration of Baptism within the eucharistic gathering of the Church. It is enough simply to read the texts of baptism and chrismation to understand that they organically lead to the fulfillment of the sacrament of initiation in the sacrament of the Church, that they are the entrance into the eucharistic fulness and fulfillment of the Church. It means also the preparation of the whole community (and not only of the immediate relatives) for the baptism, a "baptismal preaching" in which the liturgy of baptism: exorcisms, blessing of water, anointment with the "oil of gladness," immersion, the white garment and chrismation would be revealed again in their "existential" meaning for the whole Church as the community of baptized men, would ~ referred to life. And this means, finally, the explanation in terms of baptism of repentance which is the fundamental dimension of the Christian life, its openness to Divine judgment, its ability to be transformed by grace.
The second area of liturgical restoration is certainly that of our eucharistic piety. Of the many important problems involved here, the most urgent one is that of the proper understanding of communion. From its reduction either to a "religious obligation" to be performed once a year, or to an individual act of piety, completely disconnected from the liturgy as a corporate act, we must return to its true liturgical nature, and, first of all, to its relation to the Eucharist as offering and thanksgiving. The present eucharistic piety can very well exist within a perfectly secularistic worldview because it is nowhere related to life as a whole. It is a contact with the "super-natural" that has nothing to say to, or about, the "nature." And only if we rediscover that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are, first of all, our very life, our "nature," our whole work and its whole matter .... offered to God in Christ, returned to God in order to become again what God meant it to be from the very beginning—communion with God, only if we thus relate our whole life to the Eucharistic offering, can we understand the act of communion as God entering our life in order to fill it with His transforming grace. To take the same example—when a "Church Committee" will understand that its meeting is a direct continuation of the Divine Liturgy, its fulfillment in life, and not a "business session" dealing with the "material" problems of the parish, radically distinct from the "spiritual" ones which were dealt within the service, our piety will begin to undermine secularism. But what an effort, what a real conversion of our whole liturgical consciousness is needed to achieve this!
Then, the whole liturgical experience of time, so obviously central in the structure of worship, in its rhythm of preparation and fulfillment, fast and feast, liturgical seasons, etc., must be "deciphered," i.e. understood and explained in their relation to the real time of our life, to all time, and not only to the "sacred" hours we spend in Church. I have said above that we are rapidly becoming a "Sunday" Church, but even if we succeed in adding to Sunday a few more "days of obligation," this by itself will not change the secularistic view and experience of time, its total autonomy from the days and hours of worship. For the liturgy is sanctification of time and not of certain moments of time. And it sanctifies time by referring it—by means of the liturgy of time—to that event, the Coming of Christ, which transformed time, made it a meaningful pilgrimage towards the Kingdom of God. The liturgy of time has always had a double rhythm: that of repentance, preparation, effort, expectation—and this in liturgical terms, is the function of fasts, eves, vigils; and that of fulfillment and joy—and this is the feast. They represent and convey to us the two fundamental dimensions or experiences of Christian life. It is rooted, first of all, in the joy of knowing Christ, of being with Him, of remembering Him. And it is rooted, also, in the "bright sadness" of repentance, in the experience of life as exile and effort. Both are extremely essential and to restore the liturgy of time is, therefore, to restore this basic rhythm. It is not true that people do not come to Church on holy days because they have no time. One always has time for what one enjoys. People do not come to Church because they quite literally do not enjoy it and they do not enjoy it because the very reality of joy is absent from our teaching and preaching, from the way we present the liturgy in terms of obligations, of musts and must-not. I mentioned before, that there is always something going on in the evening in the parish hall. Yet evenings have always been the basic liturgical "time" in the Church. And if, by a slow and patient effort, we could restore—in ourselves, first of all—the joy of this "liturgy of time," reveal and "put across" its heavenly beauty, be it the beauty of penitential services, the spiritual beauty of repentance, or the beauty of joy, as revealed in the feasts, not only will people "come back," but they will understand the importance of these services for their "secular" life as well.
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