From Fr. Angelo
The Mystery of Mysteries–Holy Eucharist
Sunday October 13 and the 20thI will once again be conducting a Teaching Liturgy where I will stop at key points during the Divine Liturgy to explain what is happening at these points and a bit of history. See the flyer in this edition. So, I wanted to start off with an article that speaks to the central event of the Divine Liturgy which is the Eucharist. (Holy Communion)
Next to prayer, the celebration of the Holy Eucharist is the oldest communal sacramental experience of Christian worship as well as the most distinctive. Eucharist comes from the Greek word which means thanksgiving. In a particular sense, the word describes the most important form of the Church’s attitude toward all of life. As has been mentioned, the origin of the Eucharist is traced to the Last Supper at which Christ instructed His disciples to take and eat in His memory. The Eucharist is the most distinctive event of Orthodox worship because in it the Church gathers to remember and celebrate the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Christ and, thereby, to participate in the mystery of Salvation through the receipt of the Word of Truth (the Gospels) and His Body and Blood (Holy Communion).
For the first thousand years of Christian history, when the Early Church was visibly one and undivided Holy catholic and apostolic Church (as we state in the Nicene Creed), the sacraments have always been a means of transferring Grace, either through the bishop or the priest. How this occurred the Church confessed was a mystery. To this day in the Orthodox Church sacraments are referred to as Μυστερια (Mysteries) to acknowledge the inadequacy of human language to contain or express divine concepts. The sacrament of the Eucharist or Holy Communion is considered by both the Orthodox and Catholics Church to be the Tο Μυστήριο των Μυστηρίων,The Mystery of All Mysteries…