The Eucharistic Gift

Fr. Alexander Schmemann always had a way with words. In the following passage Fr. Schmemann is trying to show the reader that in our modern western (America) society we have forgotten our Eucharistic vocation and in losing this vocation we have turned the Eucharist to a Sunday practice. By divorcing the Eucharist from our day to day lives we have forgotten what it means to live a life in Christ. Christ is present in all places and fills all things showing us what it means to be a human being. Fr. Schmemann warns us that if we continue to separate the Eucharist and the life in the world then we have lost the meaning of living a Eucharistic life. I recommend this book as Fr. Schmemann shows us the meaning of Lent through understanding what it means to live a Eucharistic life.

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It is useful to note here that the Orthodox liturgical tradition, different in this from the Latin practice, has no adoration of the Eucharistic Gifts outside Communion. But the preservation of Gifts as reserved sacrament, used for Communion for the sick and other emergency situations, is a self-evident tradition which has never been questioned in the Orthodox Church. We mentioned already that in the early Church there even existed a practice of private "self- communion” at home. We have thus the permanent presence of the Gifts and the absence of their adoration. By maintaining simultaneously these two attitudes, the Orthodox Church has avoided the dangerous sacramental rationalism of the West. Moved by the desire to affirm—against the Protestants—the objectivity of Christ’s "real presence” in the Eucharistic Gifts, the Latins have, in fact, separated adoration from Communion. By doing this, they have opened the door to a dangerous spiritual deviation from the real purpose of the Eucharist and indeed of the Church herself. For the purpose of the Church and of her sacraments is not to "sacralize” portions and elements of matter and by making them sacred or holy to oppose them to the profane ones. Instead her purpose is to make man’s life communion with God, knowledge of God, ascension toward God’s Kingdom; the Eucharistic Gifts are the means of that communion, the food of that new life, but they are not an end in themselves. For the Kingdom of God is "not food and drink but joy and peace in the Holy Spirit.” Just as in this world food fulfills its function only when it is consumed and thus transformed into life, the new life of the world to come is given to us through the partaking of the "food of immortality.” The Orthodox Church consistently avoids all adoration of the sacrament outside Communion because the only true adoration is that having partaken of Christ’s Body and Blood, we "act in this world as He did.” As to the Protestants, in their fear of any "magical” connotation, they tend to "spiritualize” the sacrament to such an extent that they deny the presence of the Body and Blood of Christ outside the act of Communion. Here again the Orthodox Church, by the practice of reserving the Holy Gifts, restores the true balance. The gifts are given for Communion but the reality of Communion depends on the reality of the Gifts. The Church does not speculate on the mode of Christ’s presence in the Gifts. She forbids the use of them for any act other than Communion. She does not reveal, so to speak, their presence outside Communion, but she firmly believes that just as the Kingdom which is yet to come is "already in the midst of us,” just as Christ ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of the Father yet is also with us until the end of the world, the means of Communion with Christ and with His Kingdom, the food of immortality, is always present in the Church.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent. Pages 59-60!