Foundations of Liturgy

1- Just as the root of the vine ministers and distributes to the branches the enjoyment of its own natural and inherent qualities, so the Only-begotten Word of God imparts to the Saints, as it were, an affinity to His own nature which is that of God the Father, by giving them the Spirit...

And the Saviour Himself says: He that eats My Flesh and drinks My Blood, abides in Me, and I in him. For here it is especially to be observed that Christ says that He shall be in us, not by a certain relation only, as entertained through the affections, but also by a natural participation. For as, if one entwines wax with other wax and melts them by fire there results of both one, so through the participation of the Body of Christ and of His precious Blood, He in us, and we again in Him, are co-united. -St Cyril of Alexandria

2- If the poison of pride is swelling up in you, turn to the Eucharist; and that Bread, Which is your God humbling and disguising Himself, will teach you humility. If the fever of selfish greed rages in you, feed on this Bread; and you will learn generosity. If the cold wind of coveting withers you, hasten to the Bread of Angels; and charity will come to blossom in your heart. If you feel the itch of intemperance, nourish yourself with the Flesh and Blood of Christ, Who practiced heroic self-control during His earthly life; and you will become temperate. If you are lazy and sluggish about spiritual things, strengthen yourself with this heavenly Food; and you will grow fervent. Lastly, if you feel scorched by the fever of impurity, go to the banquet of the Angels; and the spotless Flesh of Christ will make you pure and chaste.- St Cyril of Alexandria

3- The Liturgy begins then as a real separation from the world. In our attempt to make Christianity appeal to the man on the street, we have often minimized, or even completely forgotten, this necessary separation. We always want to make Christianity “understandable” and “acceptable” to this mythical “modern” man on the street. And we forget that the Christ of whom we speak is “not of this world” and that after his resurrection he was not recognized even by his own disciples.- Fr Alexander Schemmann

4- This, then, is the aim of the Liturgy: that we should return to the world with the doors of our perceptions cleansed. We should return to the world after the Liturgy, seeing Christ in every human person, especially in those who suffer. In the words of Father Alexander Schmemann, the Christian is the one who wherever he or she looks, everywhere sees Christ and rejoices in him. We are to go out, then, from the Liturgy and see Christ everywhere.- Metropolitan Kallistos Ware

5- When the Christian begins to perceive the true dimensions of the Sacrament, he is filled with the desire to approach it more and more closely. Thus, the life of the faithful Christian goes from Liturgy to Liturgy. His chief concern is how to offer a more acceptable presentation before God every time; how to conform his own presentation to that of Christ before the Heavenly Father; how to attain to a greater fulness of divine love, how to become a worthy disciple of the Lord.- Elder Zacharias

6- “If you want to experience the Kingdom of Heaven in the Liturgy, preserve the sanctity and respect of the place”- Bishop Epiphanius, Bishop of the Monastery of St Macarius the Great

7- And yet, from its very beginning Christianity has been the proclamation of joy, of the only possible joy on earth. It rendered impossible all joy we usually think of as possible. But within this impossibility, at the very bottom of this darkness, it announced and conveyed a new all-embracing joy, and with this joy it transformed the End into a Beginning. Without the proclamation of this joy Christianity is incomprehensible. It is only as joy that the Church was victorious in the world, and it lost the world when it lost that joy, and ceased to be a credible witness to it. Of all accusations against Christians, the most terrible one was uttered by Nietzsche when he said that Christians had no joy.

Joy, however, is not something one can define or analyze. One enters into joy. “Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord” (Mt. 25:21). And we have no other means of entering into that joy, no way of understanding it, except through the one action which from the beginning has been for the Church both the source and the fulfillment of joy, the very sacrament of joy, the Eucharist. - Fr Alexander Schmemann