Fr Mina Nematalla and his family as a layman, not long before his ordination, together with his uncle, Pope Kyrollos VI.
Tomorrow, July 1st, marks the the tenth anniversary of the passing of Fr Mina Nematalla, the pioneering Coptic Orthodox priest of Australia. In 1969 he became the first Coptic priest to settle in Australia and established the Coptic Orthodox Church on this continent. Today I would like to share a few personal thoughts to mark this occasion.
Upon my ordination back in 1991 I was assigned by HH Pope Shenouda III to serve at Archangel Michael and St Bishoy Church as an assistant to Fr Mina. At that time, Fr Mina was alone in the parish, and very, very sick. In fact, it was during my ordination and stay in Egypt that Fr Mina Continue reading “Remembering Fr Mina”
In all our Churches we keep a "Bible" in a metal cover on the altar. But in fact, the tradition is to keep just the four Gospels in that casing, not the whole Bible, or even the whole New Testament. Why only the Gospels? Most likely, this tradition began when manufacturing a whole Bible was simply impractical and people generally used "part-Bibles"; books with only one Gospel, or only the Letters of St Paul, or, as in this case, only the Four Gospels.
Santa Claus has a lot to answer for!
Now, I’m talking about the pudgy fellow with the flowing white beard and the red and white suit. I would not be surprised if this jolly old chap were responsible for more people losing their Christian faith over the years than anyone else in history.
It’s not really his fault, poor old fellow. It’s what people do with him. See, grownups will insist on pretending that this preposterous anachronism is real to their little children. The children gobble him up (sometimes literally, if he’s made of chocolate). They eagerly await his advent, full of delicious anticipation at the bounty he will bring them. They live their days in righteousness in fear of his wrath, lest he smite them with an onion in their stocking in the last days. They may even offer to him a sacrifice of milk and cookies. And then on the fateful day of his coming, they rise early to find the bounty he has graced upon them, and which has miraculously appeared over night beneath his twiggy altar. Grownups glow with fuzzy warmth at the sight and continue to feed the lie to their children.
Among the difficult questions in life is trust. We cannot survive without trust, but then again, we are constantly anxious about who, when and why to trust.
On the simplest of levels, you trust that the glass of water you drank this morning did not contain some deadly germ, and that the brake pedal in your car is actually going to stop the car when you need it to. (I once owned a car where this was not always true, by the way. We developed a very close relationship, that car and I. We came to know each other’s limits intimately; I knew the distance the car required to stop on the flat using only the manual downshifting of gears and the hand brake, while it came to know what I sounded like when I thought I was about smash into a tree.)
But it’s not usually the inanimate objects that give us grief with trust. Far more often, it’s the other humans. I think we are all born with an innate willingness to trust; an innocence if you like. You need only watch a three year old being tossed high into the air by her Daddy, see the huge grin and hear the cackling, to know that here is an example of absolute trust. Daddy drop me? The very thought is impossible!
But by the time we are adults, we find it hard to take people at their word or completely depend on someone. Between innocent childhood and suspicious adulthood something changes. Of course, the change occurs through bitter experience. Once someone lets you down, you find it hard to trust that person again. If it ever happened that a Daddy did actually drop his daughter (surely not!) that daughter would no doubt be quite wary of games with Daddy after that. And so it goes on through our early lives: promises broken, agreements dishonoured, honesty repaid with humiliation, secrets betrayed…
If it only happened once, perhaps we would have a fighting chance of maintaining our innocence. But when it happens many times, we naturally develop an instinct of wariness and caution that eventually comes to colour our personality and our whole approach to life. Shatter trust often enough and the person will withdraw into their own safe little world of lonely isolation where no one can hurt them anymore. How sad.
Life a lot nicer when you can trust. To live in constant doubt about others is to live without peace. If we are ever to share a sincere relationship with someone, we have to let them in to our inner thoughts and emotions, share with them the experiences that made us who we are. But to do so is to leave oneself incredibly vulnerable to the other. he might go and tell someone else, or criticise me, or not like me, or worse of all, laugh at me! It is so hard to trust another person with your real self, and yet, if we don’t, we are doomed to a sad life of loneliness.
As a parent, you learn how important trust is in the relationship with your child. You cannot be with them twenty four hours a day, so they have to learn how to keep safe, how to be sensible in their choices, how to resist temptation and how to be honourable and remain steadfastly true to their principles. That trust is not easy to achieve. It involves a lot of heartache, not knowing how things are going to turn out, sometimes even running the risk that the child may be hurt in some way, but it’s the only way to develop true trust.
And the trust has to work both ways. A child can only learn to be trustworthy if they have a living example of trustworthiness before them every day. The parent who takes the shortcut of telling a little fib to escape to buying those chocolates at the checkout today will find their child telling them fibs about anything and everything tomorrow. There are no shortcuts to trust, no discounted sales: it’s expensive, and part of the price is being utterly trustworthy yourself.
God trusts us.
He shows us His trust in the incredible degree of freedom He gives us. Yes, if I choose foolishly to eat unhealthily or to blow myself and others up as a suicide bomber, he doesn’t forcefully stop me. God grants every one of us genuine freedom of action, even knowing the consequences of a bad choice. Why does He do that? Why doesn’t He make the world such that no one can hurt anyone else? Perhaps He could enclose every human being in a sort of force field that is impervious to evil actions! Every time you tried to hurt someone, you couldn’t pierce the shield around you. Wouldn’t that be a much nicer world to live in?
Or would it? I know many parents who would love to get their hands on an invention like that, and would love even more to get their children shackled inside one! But then, where is the freedom? Where is the chance to learn real lessons? Where is the trust? No, God does not deal with us like that. Instead He chooses to unleash us on the world and leave us to make our own choices, choices with real consequences not just for us, but for others also. Only in this way can we become the kind of creatures He wants us to be, or develop the kind of relationship He wants with us.
Can you trust God?
As life goes on, everyone goes through experiences that shake their trust in God, and in some cases, destroy it completely. “How could God have let such a thing happen?” is not an uncommon question. How can we trust God when things go so wrong in this world? How do we know He’s not going to drop us?
Bu there’s the beauty of it. He never does! Oh sure, there are times when it really feels like He has. We see the ground screaming crazily towards us and we get that sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that this time, everything is not going to be alright. But then, it is. Maybe not when we want it to be, maybe not how we want it to be, but wait long enough and sure enough, there it is: the safe hands that reach out at the very last moment when all seems lost and gently hold us and draw us back into that powerful safe embrace.
Those who have been up and down often enough learn to trust those powerful hands. They know that it simply cannot happen that He should ever drop one of His children.
“Can a woman forget her nursing child, and not have compassion on the son of her womb?
Surely they may forget, yet I will not forget you.”
Much like God, a GPS satellite floats around our world offering guidance to anyone who asks ... and who uses the right equipment to decode its signal.
Have you had your daily fix today?
No, I am not turning into a drug addict. The English language, like most language, has a wealth of words with double meanings. There are even some with three or more possible meaning, and there is one word that holds the record for having the most meanings: 50! But today, I’m thinking about just a few of the meanings of that little word: “fix”.
For a drug users, a fix is a dose of the drug. It makes them feel better by alleviating the discomfort caused by withdrawal symptoms. If you have had any exposure to modern western culture, you almost certainly have a vivid image in your mind of a sweating, dishevelled person with bulging bloodshot eyes, nervously manipulating a needle into an arm vein with shaking fingers, then falling back in relief as the drug begins to kick in.
Drugs of addiction control a person not just through their chemical effects, but also through their psychological effects. An addict can become free of the chemical need for the drug in a relatively short time. Depending on the drug, it might take anything from a few days to a few weeks. During that time, withdrawal symptoms can be horribly uncomfortable, but at the end, the body is freed of the need for the drug. The reason an addict will relapse into their addiction after they have been physically freed, is that the psychological need that led to the addiction has not yet been dealt with. A smoker who can go for seven days without a cigarette is free of the physical nicotine addiction. But there still remain the sense of security a cigarette can give, the way it occupies the fingers and the mouth, and the easy escape it promises from stress. All of these are in the mind, not the body.
Interestingly, for some people prayer can become something of an addiction. Not everyone who prays, prays for the right reasons or in the right manner. The act of praying can degenerate into nothing more than a security blanket, a tick in the box of the conscience that says, “you’ve done your duty, you’ve paid God His dues”. If you miss a prayer, you feel guilty; not because you actually miss being in God’s company, but because you feel that you’ve spoiled your record. And when you do pray, you feel a sense of relief that God is not going to punish you now for being negligent. Thus, prayer loses its positive effects upon you and becomes a thing that does nothing more than alleviate your ‘withdrawal symptoms’.
I think prayer SHOULD be a fix; but in a different sense. Prayer is something by which you get a fix on things. A person who is lost uses a compass and a map to get a fix on where he is in the world. Nowadays, we don’t even have to do the geometry – your GPS will do it for you! Prayer should be a spiritual GPS (God’s Positioning System?). It allows you to step back from the maelstrom of life and see the bigger picture, to get your bearings, to see things through God’s eyes as it were. Suddenly, problems are put into perspective. Wrong turns are retraced and you are set back on the right track again. By being in God’s presence, you see more clearly where you really are and who you really are, and you can proceed from that point in your life accordingly, with a different approach.
Prayer is also a time not only to get a fix, but to fixate. A fixate is where you firmly fix your attention and your thought exclusively upon one object, and one object only. In prayer, draw your attention away from the many clamouring distractions of daily living and focus it, fixate it on One alone. How lovely are the words in the Monday Psalia:
Gather within me All my senses In order to praise and to glorify My Lord Jesus
As a young new priest, I came to be well known for the size of my pockets. They bulged and overflowed with mysterious contents that were often the subject of idle speculation. Yes, I was ready for anything!
This morning, I went through that time-honoured ritual of the Coptic priest: “the changing of the cassock”. Perhaps not as glamorous as Buckingham Palace’s changing of the guard, it is an exercise that is no less important, nor, as it turned out, instructive.
For I realised that this morning as I transferred things from the old cassock to the new that the contents of my pockets are but a pale shadow of their former selves. I bulge no more…
And I could trace the reasons why. As a young priest I wanted to be sure that I had the keys to everything. I didn’t want to ever be stuck outside a door at Church unable to get in. Today, it doesn’t seem to matter that much anymore. If I can’t get in to that room, I just find somewhere else … and life goes on.
As a young priest I carried in my pockets a Bible, an Agbia, a diary for appointments, a bulky mobile phone, a bulky book of addresses and telephone numbers and a notebook to scribble in. Plus two very hefty bunches of assorted keys. It helped me feel I was equipped for anything that might come my way. Today, all those things (except the keys), together with a dictionary, a thesaurus, an encyclopaedia, innumerable newspapers, a street directory, the White Pages and the Yellow Pages, an audio player, a video machine, a camera, a photo album, a full set of the Katameros for every season (daily liturgical readings), a Synaxarium (daily stories of saints) and much more besides all sit in my pocket in just one compact device, on my tiny little iphone.
My world has changed. And I have changed.
Gadgets like an iphone make our world that much more convenient. It is a seismic shift that I suspect will not only make our lives more convenient, but change the very way we think and deal with our world. Gone are many of the little obstacles in life that sometimes infuriated us, but often taught us patience and perspective, and forced us to be resourceful. So many of the opportunities for genuinely original thinking that those frustrations represented have all but disappeared from our lives. A good thing, or a bad thing? Who knows, but our world has changed.
And I have changed with the years. I have become a much less stressed out individual. Through repeated experience, I finally appear to be learning that God is indeed in control, and that there is nothing the world can throw at you that you and God can’t handle. Another lesson from experience is just how much time and effort we waste on inconsequential matters. Today, I hope that I am targeting my time and energy on things that make more of a difference (but you can never be sure). I have learned not to worry or be disappointed when things don’t go your way. They will go God’s way, in the end. There is no longer any doubt in my mind on that.
And so, the slow evacuation of my pockets in a way mirrors another emptying; the emptying of my ego. There is no longer a need for many of those “I” statements that human beings are so addicted to. “I failed / I succeeded”; “I can’t do this”, “I am disappointed”, “I don’t like this”: these and many more, like the many items in my pockets of old, have outlived their usefulness and been replaced with something much smaller, much better, and much lighter to carry. Instead of all the many “I”s, now I mostly carry just one “Thy”: “Thy will be done”. And I’m learning to carry it with a smile.
Where will all this end? I look forward to the day when my pockets can be completely empty, when I can carry around all that I need within the compact little device called “me”. Because in the end, what DO I really, really need to get through life? All those material items are helpful, but none are truly essential. One thing only is essential:
The presence of Christ: not in my pocket, but in my heart.
The gospel of the Samaritan Woman gives us some beautiful insights into the use of water in the rite of the liturgy.
The Samaritan Woman met Jesus at the well, as we also meet Him at the Church. He asks us to draw water for Him as He asked her, but what is the water we draw?
It begins with the washing of the hands by the priest. The deacon, representing the congregation (for he is their servant) takes the jug of water which he has previously filled and pours it out on the hands of the priest at the beginning of the Offertory. The fact that he has previously filled the jug indicates that he has come to Church prepared to meet Christ and to serve Him.
The deacon’s act of pouring the water assists the priest in his preparation for offering the Body and Blood. Thus, the deacon, like the Samaritan Woman, is the conduit by which many come to meet with Christ. This is symbolic of the role that each Christian should play in the world. The Christian can do little by himself, but by doing small acts of service, he can help open the way for Christ to enter people’s hearts.
There is a small bottle of water placed on the altar, together with the bottle of wine. These two are mixed in the cup by the priest as he prays the Prayer of Thanksgiving. Water is simple while wine is chemically complex. Perhaps this mixing can also remind us that our simple thoughts and ideas and efforts, when mixed with the work of Christ, can become an important part of the process of our salvation, and even that of others.
We see ourselves in the Samaritan Woman:
Like her, we interact with Jesus through the discussion about drawing water.
Like her, we get to know Him, and discover just how well He knows us.
Like her, our lives are changed through this dialogue.
And like her, we share this amazing Person with our relatives and friends.
These acts occur early in the liturgy. Sadly, the Church is usually relatively empty at that time as people drift in late. What a pity that they miss this important experience! Those who do come early get to have this personal meeting with Christ; a great foundation for fully experiencing the prayers that follow.
Following on from the interest shown in learning more about the meaning of the liturgy, I’ve dug out a little passage from my own little personal book of contemplations. It refers to the part at the end of the liturgy where the priest has finished dividing the Body into smaller pieces and lifts the paten high twice before he takes it away from the altar to give Communion to the congregation:
From facing the altar, the priest turns around and raises the paten twice towards the congregation, saying “The Holies for the holy”, and the people respond, “Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord”.
This is an announcement to all that this is indeed the Holy Body of Christ. We are reminded, as we were during the last part of the prayers, that those who wish to partake of the Holy Body and Blood must themselves be holy. As the priest holds the Holy Body high, our eyes are drawn upward in longing and desire to be made worthy to share in this Heavenly Feast. But we know that we can never make ourselves worthy of such a privilege, so our upward gaze is also a prayer, a request, a supplication:
Unto You I lift up my eyes, O You who dwell in the heavens.
Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their masters,
As the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress,
So our eyes look to the LORD our God, Until He has mercy on us.
Psalm 123
But it is also a reminder of the Second Coming, hence the two raisings of the paten. Christ is raised high in the air, since He shall come back “as the lightning flashes from the East to the west”. At His first coming, many refused to say, “Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord”, but we now affirm that we are ready to receive Him by saying those very words. Then we are all gathered to Him as we approach for Holy Communion, as all peoples will be gathered to Him on the last day. We then receive Him so He dwells in us and we in Him. Thus do we taste the Kingdom of Heaven while we are yet on earth.
But let all those who approach Communion make sure they are prepared, for the unprepared wedding guest was cast out, and there will be those on the last day who will approach Him, only to find themselves thrust to His left hand side.
I will try to share a few more of these contemplations over the coming months, and I would love to hear your own contemplations on your favourite bits of the liturgy.
Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that the Liturgy is one of my favourite topics. That’s probably because the liturgy is actually one of my favourite things in life. I hope you won’t feel offended, but during most of the liturgy I do my level best to pretend you’re not there. The most profoundly moving experiences I have had during a liturgy all happened when I had forgotten that there was anyone else in the Church apart from me and the crucified Lord of the universe on the altar.
What a feeling!
The heart and soul are laid bare before the all-piercing gaze of the Creator Incarnate. There is no hiding, neither from Him, nor from myself. My carefully constructed facades crumble away and all those comfortable little lies with which I’ve been salving my conscience evaporate into the air, an air reverberating with the awful words of what He did for me. Who could resist being touched to the depths of their soul?
And yet, I do remember a time in my youth when the liturgy was anything BUT engrossing. I recall liturgies (mostly in Arabic) as a teenager where the main focus of my contemplation was the pain in my feet and back, and whether some old ‘ummo would get me in trouble if I sat down just now. One of the first things I memorised about the liturgy was exactly when we got to bow down; eagerly anticipated moments!
It took a long time to get into the Coptic Liturgy. It also took a degree of effort on my part: asking questions and reading books. One book that was a turning point for me in my experience of the liturgy was Christ in the Eucharist by Fr Tadros Yacoub Malaty (you can download this book from www.coepa.org). I consider this book one of the true classics of modern Coptic literature and one that will withstand the test of time. In it, Fr Tadros traces the symbolism and Biblical references of the words and the rites and rubrics of the liturgy. Abounding in ancient quotes from the Fathers of the Church, he explains this divinely inspired rite from a surprisingly personal perspective that serves to help open the flood gates of individual prayer in response to the ancient text and tunes of the liturgy.
I have never looked back since reading that book. My love for the liturgy certainly took on a new dimension when I was ordained a priest, but those earlier quiet, private spiritual epiphanies are forever engraved upon my memory. Which leads me mourn the fact that there still remain people in our congregation for whom the liturgy is a chore or duty, or even merely an act of mere habit.
I enjoyed reading the comments people posted to my last blog. There is always a variety of views on the liturgy, and how it could be ‘done’ better. No doubt we can do it better, and I agree that participation by the congregation is the key. The fact remains that in the liturgy book, it says: “CONGREGATION:” All too often the deacons hijack a hymn or response all for themselves, instead of simply leading the congregation. The ideal situation is where the voices of the congregation drown out, or rather, unite harmoniously with, those of the deacons’ choir, so that the two are no longer distinguishable. Those are the moments when one feels the roof of the Church is about to be blasted away by this angelic praising, opening a conduit to unite heaven and earth! OK, I’m waxing a bit lyrical here, but such moments do genuinely make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
Perhaps more lessons are needed to teach EVERYONE the complex Coptic tunes? Nowadays of course, we are blessed to have sites like www.tasbeha.org where one can find audio of virtually any Coptic tune that ever existed. I believe there are Coptic churches in America now, who have choirs of females singing antiphonically with the deacons, complete with their own ‘tunias’. When I put that suggestion to some of the young ladies to at our Church, they thought it was a horrible idea, but I wonder if that will change with the years?
I’d be interested in reading your thoughts on how we can get people to participate more fully in the liturgy. Not saying I’ll agree with all of them, but if you come up with something that is likely to work, we might just go ahead and try it!
“Who dwells in the highest and beholds the lowly” – Anaphora of the Liturgy of St Basil
How incredible to stand before the altar of God (which is His symbolic throne here on earth) and contemplate His true Heavenly Throne. He dwells in the highest of places, His existence is the highest existence, His glory, the highest of glories, and so on. Yet this Being of unimaginable height still cares for a lowly sinner such as I!
One can imagine Zacchaeus the tax collector as he sat perched in the branches of the sycamore tree, trying to glimpse Jesus through the crowd that milled around Him and hid Him from view. Then suddenly, in an instant, a chance configuration of the crowd opens a direct line of sight between him and Jesus. Imagine Zacchaeus’ surprise as he realises that Jesus is looking directly at him! Not only looking, but speaking, taking note of him, acknowledging his existence! Not only that, but actually promising to come and stay in his own house!
“Why me?” you can almost hear him thinking. “Who am I that the Master should choose my house to stay in? I am not important, or popular or rich. I am not a religious leader or even a righteous man. Everyone despises and hates me, and stays away from me. But He wants to stay at my house!”
We too would feel like that if we truly acknowledged our lowliness before God. Every liturgy, the crowd parts, and Jesus is looking directly at YOU. He asks you also, saying, “Today, I would like to stay at your house”. Will you let Him in? Will you free yourself from other commitments? Will you greet Him as Zacchaeus did, with humility and repentance, or will you greet Him as the Pharisee did, with snobbishness and judgment?
It comes back to one thing: do you see yourself as lowly and humble, or as an exalted good and righteous and deserving person? “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (James 4). If you wish to have Jesus relieve you of your heavy burden, then you must learn from Him, for He is “humble and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29). Until I too humble myself before Him and admit my lowliness, I shall never truly experience the full presence and the indescribable glory of the Lord.
The Coptic of this phrase is: Fi-etshop khen ni-etchpsi; owoh etgousht ejen ni-et-theviout. It is one of those phrases in the liturgy where any translation into English fails to do the original meaning full justice.
The word “shop” means to ‘be’, but in a very special way. It mainly means to abide, to be somewhere or simply to be, but it also implies ‘existence’. When used of God in this way, it indicates the theological concept that God IS existence – He is the source of all that exists, and it is He alone who is self-existent; He exists because that is His nature, and not because anyone or anything else causes Him to exist.
The same Coptic word is used in John 8:58: “before Abraham was, I AM [shopi anok pe]”. The “I AM” is usually written in capitals because it was a very clear reference to one of the names of God in the Old Testament. When Moses at the burning bush asked for a name of God to give to the Israelites in Egypt, God told him, “’I AM WHO I AM.’ And He said, ‘Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, “I AM has sent me to you”’” (Exodus 3:14).
Equally beautiful is the word here used for us: ni-et-theviout. The Coptic construction of the word implies far more than is relayed by the English translation, “the lowly”. thevioutis an adjectival root that means ‘humble’. But when etcomes before it, it comes to mean not that we are humble, but that we have been humbled: it turns the adjective into something that has happened to us or been done to us. Thus, a more accurate translation of this nuance in meaning might be “He that IS, in the highest; and looks upon those who have been humiliated”.
What a beautiful and concise summary of our true state! God is the self-existent Creator who needs nothing. He is not interested in us because we are capable or worthy or strong. He is interested in us most when we are at our weakest, when we are brought low, when we are broken. And this state is one that almost always comes upon us against our own will, for who enjoys being humiliated? Who goes out to seek humiliation on purpose? And yet, it is when we are at our lowest that we are most likely to experience the loving care of God and to feel His presence; to sense that all-encompassing gaze of compassion and care surrounding us and blanketing us with healing and warmth.
And the tune of the Coptic melody brings out this stark contrast of our neediness to God’s powerful compassion beautifully. The melody rises suddenly and dramatically with chosi– ‘highest’; and then it descends rapidly, as if with God’s gaze looking down upon us, to peter out into our lowly humiliation; the last part of theviout.
One imagines a beggar standing at night in a field, looking up at the startling multitude of sparkling gems strewn across the dark velvet backdrop of space and being pierced by its majesty and beauty, and then lowering his gaze once more to behold himself: bedraggled, dirty, torn and bruised from the harsh buffeting of those who despise him.
Sure it’s long, but is there any other experience like a Coptic liturgy in this whole world? OK, I’m a bit biased: I admit that. But the more I pray our beautiful liturgy the more does it steal away my heart.
Here’s a little exercise you might like to try to see a little of what I mean:
Imagine what it might have been like to have been an Alexandrian Christian in the First Century AD. Most likely, you would not have attended the liturgy in a purpose built church building. It would have been at someone’s house, or in a cave or underground tomb in times of severe persecution. No electricity or microphones – only candles and lamps and the human voices emanating from human hearts and minds; sharing together with their voices he experience of the presence of God among them…
Before the liturgy, the gathered people would ask someone to read out the beautiful message in the copy of one of the apostolic letters that had reached Alexandria. One of the deacons respectfully pulls out a parchment and excitedly announces that he has gotten hold of a copy of a new letter from Saul of Tarsus, now known as Paul. The gathering murmurs with anticipation – he has quite a reputation, this Paul!
After absorbing the exhortations of the apostle, the call is made to bring out the group’s chief treasure: a complete parchment of the Gospel left behind by the Apostle Mark, so recently and horribly martyred. A hush falls upon the little gathering as the elder slowly reads out words uttered only a few decades ago from the mouth of God incarnate. At the end of the reading, someone asks a question, and the elder takes a little time to explain, drawing upon all that he eagerly absorbed as he sat at the feet of Mark … in happier times. Then the Eucharist begins.
Those who have offerings bring them out now, mostly offerings of money or clothing for the poor, or food for the Aghape feast that will follow the Eucharist. The designated deacons collect everything and carefully store it away, but two offerings they place on a special table: bread and wine. The elder prays, blessing the offerings and entreating God to accept them from the humble group. Then he turns to the people and exhorts them to lift up their hearts now to God, in prayer and contemplation. He re-enacts that fateful Supper, uttering the very words spoken by the Lamb of God on His way to being sacrificed for the sins of the world, repeating His very actions in blessing the bread and wine and breaking the bread. He winces as the fibres of bread split apart, thinking of how the fibres of Christ’s muscles tore apart as He was brutally stretched out upon that cross. Mark had been there…
And now, the re-enactment is finished. They pray for their daily needs from God who gives all good things, and they remember not only the needs of the living, but also the souls of the dead who have departed in the hope of the resurrection. Finally, the elder turns to the people and invite them to come forward one by one to receive this most precious gift of God. They sing a hymn of joy, a hymn of victory, even though they are but a small and persecuted sector of Egyptian society. But they leave behind their worldly troubles and cares as for a few hours they are transported, first back to Palestine in the last hours of the life of the Christ, and then to heaven itself as the Kings of Kings comes to unite with them and to dwell within their bodies and souls.
This joy they keep within them as they share the Love meal when the prayers are over. It is a joy that sustains them through the harsh reality of their lives, and brings them together as one community, one family, one body. With this joy in their hearts, they say their goodbyes to each other and disperse in little groups and knots to return to their daily lives.
Can you recognise our liturgy in that little story above? That is exactly what the liturgy is, with a few embellishments and additions. How beautiful the experience becomes when one looks at it through the eyes of the first Church…
