What is  liturgy?

The starting point I

When Saint Paul says that in the “fullness of time, God sent His Son (Gal 4,4)and that in Jesus Christ ”the revelation of the mystery was kept secret for eternal centuries” (Rom 16,5), he teaches us that there are more precious times than others that throw light of the remaining ones. When the Gospel of John speaks of bread and of the “true bread” (See: John 6, 32), he suggests that there are different levels of reality. In the old Church, they knew this immediately; consequently they were able to establish connections, links among times, historical events and things. If everything was created through the Word (See: John 1, 3), creation carries written in itself the sign of the Logos: the world is a sacrament of God and a great Christological symbol.  The visible world and its history are linked with the invisible world by an ensemble of threads, of links, which express themselves in symbols. In other words, God has filled creation with his traces, inadequate yet valid indicators pointing at Him; he has given man a mind and the faculty of the word, which can appreciate these indicators, can express and follow them in the light of the gift of faith. Modern man has no longer the taste for this kind of knowledge, yet the symbol is a permanent form of God’s knowledge. The symbol is a manifestation, a kind of presence of the invisible in the visible. Some aspects of God’s reality are revealed through symbols, yet its richness and unreachable reality get never exhausted.

For the Fathers, a double kind of symbols existed: the symbols of nature and the symbols of Scripture. The symbols of nature are the divine manifestation through the sensitive world: oil, pearl, light, fire, tree, conception, birth, paternity and maternity, everything becomes the “clothing of names” through which God reveals himself to men passing though images from the ordinary human experience. However, God reveals himself not only in the nature of things, but also in the historical events of Sacred History: the election of Abraham, the exodus from Egypt, entering the holy land, the priesthood of Aaron and the kingship of David.

.Thus, the Biblical symbol is created and we see a correspondence among the different moments of salvation history. The Fathers indicated this correspondence with the term typology , with reference to two passages  of the New Testament in which we read that Adam is the figure (typos) of Christ (See: Rom. 5,14) and of Baptism, which is the antitype (antitypos) of deluge  (See: 1 Pt 3,18). This typology has its foundation in the unity of God’s plan and in the perfect conjunction of creation, Old and New Testament. Nature and Scripture are ordained to the Incarnation. However, things and historical events never end to reveal God even after the Incarnation, which fulfils all the symbols: they continue to have their role of knowledge and revelation in the sacraments of the Church, thanks to which our relation with God is not limited by the order of knowledge, but we do participate to what is revealed.

This typology has its foundation in the unity of God’s plan, in the perfect conjunction of creation. The types and the symbols, which announce the spiritual realities, are not suppressed with the realisation of the signified reality, but are assumed by it and form its integral part. The symbolic force of the typology is progressive; the time of the Church is the fulfilment or the reality in relation to the types of the Old Testament, but the Church herself is only the type of the eschatological kingdom. This progressive typology suggests a journey. Efrem outlines it in one of his poems: it is about the journey established by God “from the tree (of life) to the cross: from the wood to the wood and from Eden to Sion, from Sion to the holy Church and from the Church to the kingdom” (HCHaer 26,4).

The possession of this mentality is a good presupposition to enter the liturgy and the mystery it communicates to us.

Liturgy: celebration of God’s love

Mystery is in the very heart of liturgy. What do we want to say with this? Everything is an effusion of God’s love; it is a love that is poured into creation and wants to dwell among men. However, it has to be welcomed by his own” (See: John 1,11), because love never imposes itself. We recognise the gift of God only if we welcome it.  The desire God has of man needs to encounter the desire the man-God has for God. Then, there is the time of the promises: the entire time before Christ has the essential meaning of a preparation for Him. Then there is the fullness of time, when in Christ, the man-God, humanity, is finally capable of welcoming the gift of the Father and of responding to it, when the synergy, “co-action” divine-human realises in an eminent way, for which every flesh is co-penetrated by God.

The reception of God’s gift on behalf of the Son involves also the body of his/our humanity and the love of the Father raises it from the dead. Christ, one with the Father, radiates the glory of God with his body. Being one with the source, he gives life. Fully consecrated to the Father until death, his human life, circumscribed in space and time, enters eternity. The linear, chronological and historical time tears off and we enter a different dimension, where everything can be touched and concentrated. In our created experience, time ad space are like many dots, one near the other, separated by intervals destined to be filled in by love. Until they are left outside love, in selfishness, they are not penetrable and are made up of a before and an after, a here and a there. Once they enter love, everything is co-penetrated, everything becomes co-present and matters stops repelling (after the resurrection, Christ passes through closed doors).The resurrection of Christ, which happened in precise historical time and space, pours its saving power over all historical epochs and geographic spaces. This is one of the meanings of the Risen Christ’s descent into the depth. His saving work has an effect also on the past, because at the time of mystery, of the sacred there is no more a “before” and an “after”.  

Therefore, the resurrection is the source of liturgy. The love God poured into the world can finally be celebrated, namely, -according to etymological meaning of the word-, it can be brought to fulfilment, because, after welcoming the gift, the communication of and the gratitude for the gift go back to Him, in a rotation of life and love of which God is the source and the end.

The New testament practically has no cultural terms unless they are referred to Christ, just to indicate that liturgy is this. Priesthood, offering, cult and victim are terms indicating the voluntary death of Christ, with which the Lord enters, once for ever, the heavenly sanctuary (See: Hebrews 9,11) in the presence of the Father.

Ascending to the right hand of the Father, where he took also our humanity assumed by Him, Christ attracts our humanity, which now can give a response to God in Him, praising his Name, associating all men, angels and archangels to this activity and all living beings. This is the eternal liturgy.

If there is the time of the promises and the fullness of time, the time after Christ, from the Ascension until the glorious return of the Lord in the Parusia, has the meaning of realising in all men who are born in the world, until the end of time, the participation in and the assimilation of the divine realities in Christ, which Christ communicates to us by attracting us to his mystery, to the fullness of divine life, which is super-abundant in Him. The time between the Ascension and the Parusia has the scope of reproducing the mystery of Christ in the single persons, to let them enter this mystery, in order to be absorbed, transformed and saved through His real presence in us

The celebration of the eternal liturgy is nothing but this always new flux and re-flux  of the Trinitarian communion in which the whole creation of angels and all times living beings are made to participate (See: Ap 4,4-11). It is finally the matter of leitourgía, “common work”, in both senses of God and of man together, work of synergy, as well as, consequently, a divine-human work, not of the single individual, but of the entire humanity, a work of communion

Liturgy and liturgical celebrations

The mystery of the Ascension teaches us that Christ is at the right hand of the Father and simultaneously present on earth in a new way. The privileged place of His presence is the Church, while the privileged moment par excellence is the liturgical life of the community, which incorporates us with Christ and makes us one with His heavenly offering. Therefore, the Liturgy is the living and mysterious bridge between heaven and earth, a bridge that is unceasingly used. Christ, who sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven, dwells physically also on earth, on the altars. The tearing off of time at the resurrection is repeated in every moment that participates in the same saving content. This explains also the tension existing between our experience of Baptism, of the Eucharist and Sacraments in general in our life and their full realisation at the end of times. They are like holes, like cracks through which we can fetch from the mystery, the eschaton, the kingdom, eternal life (the many ways by which we call this reality) and experience them at various degrees in our historical time.

Thus, the Christian cult places us afresh in the great movement of the prayer of the High Priest, Jesus, of his heavenly and earthly intercession. They are moments of fullness and of grace that must release their fullness in the time, with the characteristics of gestation and tension signed also by tribulation and misery.

. While our existence with fatigue allows itself to be penetrated by the life of  the Risen Lord –with so much fatigue as sometimes we are unable to see the penetration- the liturgical celebration makes us to fetch from the fullness of the last times, from the fullness of life, from the eternal and incorruptible life into which the whole humanity and each of us have not yet passed. It is not by chance that the Byzantine Eucharistic liturgy opens with a blessing of the kingdom: in fact, the liturgy transfers us to the kingdom, where our life is hidden in God with Christ” (Col 3, 3).

Our celebrations are a tearing off of the time in which we fetch from salvation, from the hope of glory, from the true image of the Church and of me in the eyes of God, so that we may be able to live all this in our ordinary life. Thus, instead of being a movement from the past towards the present, time and history become a movement from the future towards the present. Our personal life, together with history, comes to us from the future, from the last day, from te final resurrection, when all things will have been made new.

This dynamic between life and liturgy clarifies another typical aspect of liturgy, without which we can understand it with difficulty: it is its double rhythm of preparation and fulfilment, a rhythm that reveals and fulfils the double nature and the double function of the Church herself.

On one side the Church is preparation because she prepares us for eternal life and her function is that of transforming the whole of our life into preparation. Therefore she is always there to remind us that the ultimate reality to give direction and meaning to our lives must be hoped, waited for and invoked. Consequently, liturgy also is always and above all a preparation. It constantly looks beyond itself, beyond the present, and its function is that of transforming our life into the view of its fulfilment in the kingdom of God.

On the other side, the Church is also an essentially fulfilment. The elements that gave birth to it and that constitute the source of its faith and life have already come true. Christ has come and man has already been divinised in Him and has ascended to heaven, while the Holy Spirit has come to inaugurate the kingdom of God.

Now, it is just through the liturgy that this double nature of the Church s revealed and communicated to us. It is the specific function of the Liturgy to make of the Church a preparation and to reveal herself as a fulfilment. For this reason every day, every moment, this double reality is transformed and made a correlation between the “already” and the “not yet”. We could not be ready for the kingdom that “is not yet”, if somehow this kingdom had not yet already been given to us, if we did not experience its beginnings, if we did not experience its taste. If liturgy were not a “fulfilment”, our life could never be a “preparation”. Vice versa, if the liturgy were not a “preparation”, we could never live its “fulfilment” in the kingdom. This double rhythm of preparation and fulfilment is not accidental. It is the very essence of the liturgical life of the Church. Without seeing it, we would reduce liturgy to a cult, to a ceremony. However, the cult is not an end to itself: we celebrate the cult for the surpassing of the cult, for te liturgy of our bodies, for the spiritual cult St. Paul speaks of (See Rom 12,11).

Besides giving and communicating this immersion into the new life, the liturgy, in communicating it, educates us to it, it moulds our life according to its own rhythm, its own modality. The liturgy is something like anthropology in action, that of the transfiguration of Christ, in which his body (namely we, the Church) participates when it gathers to celebrate it. The religious education, therefore, must be nothing else but disclosing what happens to the person when it is born anew through the water and the Spirit, thus made member of the Church. However, since it is not only the simple communication of a “religious knowledge” of how to form a good person, but the edification of a member of the body of Christ, a member of the “chosen people”, of the “holy nation” (1 Peter 2, 9), whose mysterious life in the world started on the day of Baptism, the rhythms and the characteristics of the liturgy tell us something on the content and on the way of this religious education.  .

A liturgy that moulds life

We could say many things about religious education starting from the liturgy. I limit myself to some of them, which, without being exhaustive, will suffice to overcome some hint, some inspiration.

The background: in the actual liturgy

The liturgy is a great reality today. We have seen how we enter the mystery of Christ, in whom everything is co-present, through the liturgy. Therefore, a feast is an entering and a communion with the eternal meaning of a past event according to the historical time, but from where now we can fetch through the liturgy. The natural memory, more than anything else, is a “presence of the absent”, so that the more the person we remember is present, the more the suffering for his absence is acute. In Christ, however, memory becomes again the faculty of re-composing the torn off time of sin and death, of hatred and oblivion. It is this new memory, as power on time and its being torn off, that is at the heart of the liturgical celebration, of the liturgical today. True, at this moment the Mother of God does not give birth to anybody and nobody is before Pilate. As data these events belong to the past, but today we can celebrate their memory and liturgy as the gift and the power of this memory, which changes the events of the past into contemporary events, offering us the possibility of entering the said events

This is the big scenario that the liturgy prepares for us with its articulation among the seven days and the eighth day, among the forty days in Lent –the time of this world, the daily time with its fatigue, struggle and ascents- the fifty days, Pentecost, as figure of the future world. For this reason te sacramental celebration of the day starts from Vesper: when the light of the physical world sets down towards darkness, the light of the Risen Lord shines. Two constellations gravitate around the Paschal Mystery: the constellation of the mobile cycle and the fixed cycle of the feasts. The mobile cycle refers to Easter in its numeric symbolism: the eighth day which allows the Sabbath of the mortal time to pass into the eternal day of resurrection; the fixed cycle is that of the feasts of the Lord, of the Mother of God and the saints. They are fixed feasts because they happened in history, but now are in the glory of God

Together with the sacramental time of liturgy, there is likewise a sacramental space. At the first Pentecost, the disciples had gathered in “the same place”. The expression (épi to auto), which is fundamental in ecclesiology, has a local and spiritual meaning at the same time (See: Acts, 2,1): the unity of space means the unity of hearts. In the liturgy we dwell in the body of the total Christ, one with all those who belong to Christ in all times and places, from the “right Abel” untill the last baby to be born.

Every spiritual effort is finalised to our participation in the today’s and in this place of the resurrection of Christ.

«From there up to here”

This leads us to the first conclusion: the movement starting from the liturgical cycle does not begin from the days, the weeks to sanctify them with prayers. On the contrary, it starts from “the day without sunset of resurrection”, where it takes us, to free and to transfigure the hours, the days, the months of time, which are not yet vivified by Christ and by his Spirit. This picture, this vision, this background motivate our asceticism when we participate in this reality, when we see the winning post and want to reach it; when I move towards this direction.. I must make an effort, I must renounce something, I must change certain habits, thus my whole life becomes an exercise. Each thing acquires a meaning, everything is sanctified, because each thing is a step of the long journey that leads us to the day of resurrection.

The realism is that of liturgy

In the liturgy, where I fetch from the life of the kingdom, where my life is hidden with Christ in God, I learn the right vision of things related to our daily life, if the true anthropology is that of the new man. I do not understand the maternity of the Mother of God starting from our own experience of motherhood, but I learn what it means to be mother in celebrating and meditating year after year the Christmas cycle, the feast of the Virgin, peeping through the cracks of the liturgical year, all I succeed to see in the Mother of God. I do not understand God as Person starting from my experience of persons. Rather, if the person is a being in relation, then “person” is the proper name of God. God alone is a person, because he is in relation with all men and women. I do not project the experience I have had with my father (which could be even disastrous) on the paternity of God, but I do understand that the true experience is that one, that Father is a “proper noun” only for God, and humanity puts on this name appropriately in the measure in which it reveals something of Him. The same thing we can say of the relation between bride and bridegroom

There is a very beautiful homily by James of Sarug in which, this poet-theologian says that Moses saw Christ and called him “man”, saw the Church and called her “woman” and spoke of man and woman in Genesis. But they needed to wait for Christ and His Church for this mystery to be revealed and to shine forth its light on the relation between man and woman. The realism is that of the liturgy. The world has its roots in the wisdom of God, but is fatally wounded by sin and experiences his healing only in the New Adam and in all those who are engrafted in Him, and through this engrafting they contribute to free him from the slavery of corruption. Sin, thus, will disappear; it will be sucked back by the abyss of nothing, of the nothingness onto which creation was thrown. Therefore we cannot project this nothingness on what exists. We cannot understand what exists starting from nothingness.

A  Pedagogy

Starting from this perspective, from the liturgy we learn also the pedagogy based on its declination, on its internal rhythm.

– the week and the eighth day: There is the ordinary, the daily and the breaking out of the feast. During a time without any difference between the ferial day and the feast, we should learn afresh to appreciate the tiny gestures and attentions, which help to be aware of all this

– the cycle of the year, with its fasts and feasts. The feast is not to be understood as distraction, a relaxing, according to an animal rhythm of resting from work, but as justification and fruit of this work and, so to say, for its sacramental transformation into joy, therefore, into freedom. It is difficult to celebrate a feast if we amuse ourselves as all others do.  

To celebrate the feast we need to fast. We have either forgotten or misunderstood the meaning of fast in this world of diets and of search for well-being. According to the Fathers, in Paradise Adam received the order to fast, because by fasting he had to control his desire to the end of completing and of growing in the awareness of his relation with the creator, as well as to look at the world not as at a prey but as a Eucharist. The original deviation, the eating of the forbidden fruit is seen as a predatory attitude: to consume the world, rather than to transfigure it. The whole tradition –the solov’ev not being the last- has written very beautiful things on fasting from food, which has a sense only if it accompanies a spiritual fasting from the will of power, of vanity, of intelligence up to the fasting of mercy. What does it mean to actualise it, by living it?   

-   the offering and the epiclesis. The whole liturgy is based on the double movement of man’s offering and of the Spirit who descends on this offering to transform it. The epiclesis is the invocation (klésis) that goes up to the Father beseeching Him to send down His Spirit on (epi) what we offer Him (bread, wine, the assembly, whatever we put before his mercy). Personal prayer also has a liturgical dimension: the altar of the heart (where the gift of the Spirit corresponds to the poorest offering of him who renounces his will by entrusting it to the hands of the Father), to turn into the sharing banquet. Thus, prayer becomes an interior offering, an epiclesis of the whole being to which the descent of Pentecost finishes by giving an answer. As the bread, which we offer, changes into his body, similarly our prayer to Jesus becomes the prayer of Jesus, namely, enters the ceaseless prayer of Jesus, the eternal liturgy celebrated before the face of the Father who joins us with all men and women

–                     the matter and the symbol. In a secularised, technocratic, consumerist world, where, besides the reduction of man to the world, to history and nature, but also history and nature itself are reduced just to what can be usable for man, we learn to look at things as they have come from the hands of God on the first day of creation, with eyes freed from the opacity of fault. This helps us to value things, to give importance and corporeity to the gestures

–                     I and we. Liturgy is the “we” in which sometimes an “I” surfaces (“I believe”, “my fault”), because whatever is my responsibility, my task, my sin cannot get drowned into an impersonal “we”.

            However, liturgy means, first of all, “I-we”. Leitourgía literally means “common work”, both in the sense of God and man together, synergetic work, since after the incarnation the “natural humanity” exists no more, but the ”divine-humanity” exists, the Body of Christ, and, consequently, as divine-human work, it cannot be attributed to a single individual, but to all those who are in Christ, as work of communion. En Christô, in Christ, recurs 164 times in the writings of St. Paul. The life en Christô implies not only the presence of the other who is Christ, but also of the others who are his members. In this perspective, even what is personally ours, our responsibility, vanishes, widens... An immeasurable chapter opens here, on what it means “to think the community”, community life, starting not only from a psychological vision, but from the ontology of relations, which liturgy allows us to fetch from…   1 

Maria Campatelli
Centre Aletti – Via Paolina, 25
00184 Rome