The aim [of every Liturgical Gathering] is that the faithful gathered together in the Church should find themselves again in their Father’s House, that the world should change through repentance and prayer, and that the ancient Home should be reconstituted in the Church.
Above all the second person of the Holy Trinity is actively present with an effectiveness which we should call natural, since the created portion of the world which he assumed and rendered infinite by making it His body is the Church, within which our time and space find new dimensions, those dimensions which allow us to celebrate acts of worship. The assembly of the faithful takes place literally in the body of Christ, Christ being our House.
But the incarnate Logos, the Lord Jesus, is present with an immediate, existential effectiveness. He is the loving redeemer, the crucified Bridegroom, who wounds the hearts of the faithful with His love and calls them to a mystical and erotic union.
Next it is the Mother of God who is present in a similarly effective way. Her own body is the body of the God-man, the body which is the Church. Mary is the Theogennitria, she who gave birth to God. Within her the great marvel was realized that one of the Trinity should become that which we are. She is the Gate and the Ladder which unites earth with heaven, which causes a saving breach to be made in the boundary enclosing our time and space, and even now brings into the world things which transcend it.
We find it difficult today to understand the deeply rational nature of ecclesiastical acts and practices- mysteries, services, festal cycles, prayer, ascesis, repentance- because we are hindered by a mono-dimensional, pedestrian concept of space and time. But within the Church another cosmology holds sway. This different conception of space-time is expressed by Byzantine architecture and iconography and is also presupposed by Byzantine hymnography. The architectonic whole, the icons, the hymns- “Today He hangs upon the cross… Come let us be crucified together with Him”- are not parables or verbal patterns, the creation of a well endowed imagination, but express a reality in precisely the same way that the new birth which is granted in baptism, and the communion of the body and blood of Christ which takes place in the Divine Eucharist, are not metaphors but realities. Unless we take seriously the different cosmological and anthropological settings within which the Church lives and moves, it is impossible for us to understand Byzantine art or biblical, patristic and liturgical texts, and it is equally impossible to understand the rationality and reality underlying the specific manner in which the Church’s life is constructed as an active, decisive, salvific reorganization and refashioning of the limited dimensions and functions of the created world and the created being of man.
Source- Part Three of the book Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person
No comments:
Post a Comment