Beyond Sunday
Man is a hungry being. But he is hungry for God. Behind all the hunger of our life is God. All desire is finally a desire for Him.- Fr Alexander Schmemann
Secularism is above all a negation of worship. I stress:—not of God’s existence, not of some kind of transcendence and therefore of some kind of religion. If secularism in theological terms is a heresy, it is primarily a heresy about man. It is the negation of man as a worshipping being, as homo adorans (worshiping man): the one for whom worship is the essential act which both ‘posits’ his humanity and fulfils it. - Fr Alexander Schmemann
How far is this spirit from the way in which we often proclaim, or to use a more modern term, “sell” Christianity today! Is it not usually presented as a comfort, help, release from tensions, a reasonable investment of time, energy and money? One has only to read—be it but once—the topics of the Sunday sermons announced in the Saturday newspapers, or the various syndicated “religious columns,” to get the impression that “religion” is almost invariably presented as salvation from something—fear, frustration, anxiety—but never as the salvation of man and the world. How could we then speak of “fight” when the very set-up of our churches must, by definition, convey the idea of softness, comfort, peace? How can the Church use again the military language, which was its own in the first days, when it still thought of itself as militia Christi? One does not see very well where and how “fight” would fit into the weekly bulletin of a suburban parish, among all kinds of counseling sessions, bake sales, and “young adult” get-togethers. And yet it is, indeed, the necessary condition of the next and decisive step.- Fr Alexander Schmemann
The center, the day, that gives meaning to all days and therefore to all time, is that yearly commemoration of Christ’s Resurrection at Easter. This is always the end and the beginning. We are always living after Easter, and we are always going toward Easter. Easter is the earliest Christian feast. The whole tone and meaning of the liturgical life of the Church is contained in Easter, together with the subsequent fifty-day period, which culminates in the feast of the Pentecost, the coming down of Holy Spirit upon the Apostles. Christianity is, first of all, the proclamation in this world of Christ’s Resurrection. Orthodox spirituality is paschal in its inner content, and the real content of the Church life is joy. We speak of feasts; the feast is the expression of joyfulness of Christianity.- Fr Alexander Schmemann
The rhythm of the Church, the rhythm of the Eucharist which comes and is always to come, fills everything with meaning, puts all things to their real place. Christians do not remain passive between one celebration and the next one, their “temporal” life is not empty, is not “diminished” by eschatology (the age to come). For it is precisely the liturgical “eschaton” that ascribes real value to every moment of our life, in which everything is now judged, evaluated and understood in the light of the Kingdom of God, the ultimate end and the meaning of all that exists. - Fr Alexander Schmemann
After the Easter night comes the morning, and then another night and another new day. Time begins again, but it is now filled from “inside” with that unique and truly “eschatological” experience of joy. A ray of sun on a gloomy factory wall, the smile on a human face, each rainy morning, the fatigue of each evening—all is now referred to this joy and not only points beyond itself, but can also be a sign, a mark, a secret “presence” of that joy.- Fr Alexander Schmemann
To understand the true nature—and “function”—of feasts we must remember that Christianity was born and preached at first in cultures in which feasts and celebrations were an organic and essential part of the whole world view and way of life. For the man of the past a feast was not something accidental and “additional”: it was his way of putting meaning into his life, of liberating it from the animal rhythm of work and rest. A feast was not a simple “break” in the otherwise meaningless and hard life of work, but a justification of that work, its fruit, its—so to speak—sacramental transformation into joy and, therefore, into freedom. A feast was thus always deeply and organically related to time, to the natural cycles of time, to the whole framework of man’s life in the world. And, whether we want it or not, whether we like it or not, Christianity accepted and made its own this fundamentally human phenomenon of feast, as it accepted and made its own the whole man and all his needs. But, as in everything else, Christians accepted the feast not only by giving it a new meaning, by transforming its “content,” but by taking it, along with the whole of “natural” man, through death and resurrection.- Fr Alexander Schmemann
My conclusions are simple. No, we do not need any new worship that would somehow be more adequate to our new secular world. What we need is a rediscovery of the true meaning and power of worship, and this means of its cosmic, ecclesiological, and eschatological dimensions and content. This, to be sure, implies much work, much “cleaning up.” It implies study, education and effort. It implies giving up much of that dead wood which we carry with us, seeing in it much too often the very essence of our “traditions” and “customs.” But once we discover the true lex orandi (what is prayed), the genuine meaning and power of our leitourgia, once it becomes again the source of an all-embracing world view and the power of living up to it—then and only then the unique antidote to “secularism” shall be found. And there is nothing more urgent today than this rediscovery, and this return—not to the past—but to the light and life, to the truth and grace that are eternally fulfilled by the Church when she becomes—in her leitourgia—that which she is.- Fr Alexander Schmemann
Every stage in Christ’s redemptive work had to it a peculiar power. But the important point is to move from the mere news of an event to its actual life. The Nativity as news, for example, is a pleasant story. We tell it to the kids and build little manger scenes and perform plays and have a jolly time. But what then? We have our parties and give out sweets and celebrate Santa Claus, and that’s the end of it. The living power of Christmas remains absent: it’s just news. This is what grieves Christ and His Church, that we live only on the news of redemption. But we should be experiencing the actual power of Christmas entering our lives, and feeling Christmas to be a real gift brought down from heaven; and similarly regarding the rest of the Lord’s life. As mere story, the Gospel events are interesting to the hearer only to the extent that the speaker is talented in storytelling. But the living experience of a redemptive event provides the believer with lasting satisfaction.- Fr Matthew the Poor
When a man lives deeply in these transcendent truths, they nourish and satisfy his soul and cause him to live beyond the normal bounds of his existence. He becomes aware of an Existence above all other existent things—beyond the sun, the moon, the earth; beyond life and death itself. This is the apex of spirituality: that a person enter a state of being beyond his mere temporal life. - Fr Matthew the Poor
We are Christ’s own Body! If you want to verify my words, read St. Paul’s words in the fifth chapter of Ephesians. Joseph, as I said, is the guardian of the Virgin Birth, and Mary, the pure saint, is Mother; but you and I are His own flesh and bones! We comprise His entire Body. Therefore, I say, we are meeting with Christ in Bethlehem today, but it is an incredible and marvelous rendezvous; and it requires us to constantly and repeatedly review ourselves as well as the Nativity story.
I think you all now understand the terrible weightiness of this issue, and that it deserves the long introduction I gave, where I urged you to enter the Nativity outside the bounds of mere story and not to treat it as something confined to Matthew 1 and Luke 2. But we will enter it on an exceedingly lofty plane, one that is unbounded by the limits of history and time. I, the reader, am not an outside observer; I am not a mere interpreter; I am not a mere beneficiary of Christmas—rather, I am flesh of His flesh and bone of His bones. You and I take up a central place in Bethlehem. This One who is born, the wonderful Child, this magnificent gift from heaven, contains me as a vital part. - Fr Matthew the Poor
It’s important to understand that these seasons and holidays (holy-days) are not just remembrances of the past. When you celebrate a secular holiday like President’s Day or the Fourth of July, what you’re mainly doing is remembering some event that happened a long time ago. But all times are present in the liturgy. So while the Church might technically be remembering a past event—such as the life of St. Patrick or the Birth of Jesus—sacramentally what we’re doing is participating in it directly, in the present. On Easter or Christmas, we don’t say “Christ was risen” or “Christ was born.” That would be the normal thing to say if all we were doing was remembering the past. Instead we say “Christ is risen” and “Christ is born,” because we aren’t just holding memorials of these events; we’re participating in them now through the eternal present of the liturgy.- Journey to Reality by Zachary Procu