People who offer ‘your own from your own, in all things and for all
things’ serve God truly and pleasingly. That is, people who recognize
that whatever they have is a gift from God. They believe that they’ve
got nothing of their own to offer. Everything’s from God and they take
from that and offer it to God, together with themselves, their world and
their relations with the world. They keep nothing selfishly for
themselves. They offer themselves without reservation. They give
everything in order to receive everything. They die in order to live.
And they offer everything in Christ and for Christ. In all things
(always) and for all things (for all God’s gifts).
So the whole of people’s lives (even
after the Divine Liturgy and outside the church) becomes service,
offering, relationship, sacrifice, communion and thanksgiving. The whole
of life is transformed into a theanthropic life.
The two hour Sunday Liturgy becomes a
twenty-four hour, daily Liturgy. As Orthodox, when we speak about a
liturgical life, we don’t mean our short liturgical offering in the
church, but the whole of our life, which, starting with the liturgical
actions in the church, becomes one of liturgy and worship.
Orthodox Christians aren’t
schizophrenic. They don’t live a liturgical life inside the church and
an unliturgized life outside. They spend as much time as they can in
church (Liturgy and services) so that they’ll be able to live outside
the church in a manner as close as possible to the spirit, the climate
and the ethos of the Divine Liturgy.
Through worship in the church, the
theanthropic life becomes ingrained in them and is then capable of
transforming all the facets of their everyday lives.
So Christians permeated by the Liturgy
live in the unity of faith and life, the divine and the human, the
created and the uncreated, the living with the departed, the present age
with the future, their own person with others.
This unity was also experienced by the
Greek, Orthodox people when, and as long as they had an ecclesiastical
life. There are still, in Greece, traditional, Orthodox people and
communities who live in this unity. The centre of the whole life of
traditional Orthodox settlements (villages and neighbourhoods) was the
parish church, as the katholiko is in monasteries. In villages on Evia [Euboea], the parish church to this day is called the katholiki. (i.e. katholiki ekklisia).
Birth, death, baptism, marriage, school,
work, social relations, joys, and sorrows, all the expressions of
social life were linked to the Liturgy and the Church. In the end, they
became the Church. So the everyday functions of life found their unity
and order of precedence within the Divine Liturgy.
The further the Greek people distance
themselves from their Orthodox roots, from their life-giving,
theanthropic tradition, the less the various functions of life are
organically linked to the Divine Liturgy, which is why they stop working
properly, which is to say they fail to unite people or help them to
live as images of God.
The various functions outside the Divine
Liturgy deconstruct the human person. This is clear from the basic
function of life, procreation. Within the Divine Liturgy and the Church,
this fundamental function is transformed, is blessed with grace, and
contributes towards the rounding out of the human person. Outside, it’s
the slave of egotism, it undoes personalities and is a torment. People
today have bitter experience of this situation.
Orthodox coenobitic monasteries are models of how people and their communities should function. The centre is the main church (katholiko).
Buildings and obediences are all organized around the main church. The
starting-point of the common life is the daily celebration of the Divine
Liturgy. The purpose is the worship of God and the offering of the
whole of life to Christ. This is how life can be common, faith and love
universal, death can be vanquished and everything made new and given a
different role in a strange and most fitting adjustment.
When the liturgical spirit of the
coenobium- which is the liturgical spirit of Orthodoxy- becomes
ingrained in the Orthodox, they’re preserved from the powerful and
vitiating trend towards secularism. In essence, secularism is an attempt
to organize life outside the Liturgy and the Church.
Orthodox Christians can’t be Orthodox
unless they live liturgically. Unless the Divine Liturgy and worship are
not merely ‘opportunities’ or part of their timetable, but are,
instead, the life-giving shoot grafted on to their lives and
transforming them, the centre, the basis, the beginning and the end.
It’s only through the ‘your own from your own’ in the Divine Liturgy
that people truly become themselves, that is images of God.
Source: The late, former Abbot
Yeoryios (George) of the Holy Monastery of Blessed Gregoriou, from the
periodical «Ο Όσιος Γρηγόριος», § Ο άνθρωπος ον λειτουργικό, περίοδος β΄, vol. 4, pp. 31-5, published by the Holy Monastery of Blessed Grigoriou, the Holy Mountain, 1979.
Source-Pemptousia.com
